a_baron "Swamp Bait" is a rather pointless exercise in wanton brutality and sexual sadism, the latter being more intended than actual.Set in the Lousiana Bayou, it begins with a stunningly attractive, scantily dressed redhead caught poaching gators. She causes the death of one of her potential captors, albeit accidentally, and this leads to a manhunt - or perhaps that should be a girlhunt - the attempted gang-rape of her sister, which is halted only by one of the posse shooting her dead, and a trek through the forest.Naturally, the heroine outsmarts the posse, but what was it all for?Are these really exploitation films, or are they made simply to portray Southern folk, in particular white Southern males as moronic psychopaths?The film's only saving grace - of sorts - is a half-decent soundtrack.

trashgang It's strange that this flick never got a proper release because it's been hunted down by so many collectors. For me the flick itself still works, it survived time but still it isn't for everybody, it's a pure revenge flick but made in exploitation style. Of course the reason why it is collected by geeks is due Claudia Jennings.Claudia Jennings her flicks are really searched by collectors but most of her flicks are rare or OOP. The most notorious ones were The Unholy Rollers (1972), Gator Bait (1974) and Truck Stop Woman (1974). She was famous because she started as a receptionist at Playboy magazine. She was discovered by a photographer of Playboy while at work and the rest is history. She became Playmate in November 1969, and later as 1970 Playmate of the year. Jennings became the most perennially popular Playmate of the 1970s. Sadly she fell asleep while driving and died at the age of 29 in 1979.But of course there are other reasons to watch it, there are a few actors that made it further in Hollywood. Douglas Dirkson (Leroy Bracken) went further to Footloose (1984) as Burlington Cranston. Also worth mentioning is Janit Baldwin (Julie) who is the only one that went full frontal here went further in a few other horrors like Humongous (1982), her last flick and Ruby (1977). The acting was all rather good and the movie never really slows down. Naturally taking place in the south and in swamp area the language is rather dump.If you think that you will see a lot of red stuff then I must disappoint you. It isn't as sleazy as Deliverance (1972) and it is clearly based on it. But here it's a girl taking revenge on some rednecks for killing her sister.Beautifully filmed and with a typical southern sound it is still worth hunting down, only available on ex-rental NTSC VHS.

GrandpaBunche 'GATOR BAIT is a post-DELIVERANCE backwoods revenge pic that takes place deep in an unnamed bayou, a forbidding environment best avoided by those who don't know its ways, and utterly at home in this seemingly limitless swamp is Desiree Thibodeau (the unbelievably hot Jennings), a barefoot Cajun trapper — in the skimpiest of outfits, including a pair of Daisy Dukes that pretty much doesn't have a butt, and a potato sack blouse that allows occasional glimpses of her mouth-watering assets —who poaches the local wildlife to provide for herself and her younger brother and sister. Desiree's activities are illegal but overlooked by the local sheriff who doesn't care because her family has hunted the swamp for generations, so he figures she's got the right by virtue of ancestral territory. Unfortunately his moron of a son, apparently the town's only other cop, has other ideas, and along with a slow-witted hillbilly pal he lays in wait to catch Desiree in the act and offer her a choice of going to jail or having sex with him and his buddy. The would-be sexual extortion goes terribly wrong, however, as Desiree eludes her pursuers after lobbing a bag full of poisonous snakes onto their swamp boat; as the stupid cop shoots at the snakes, he blows holes into the boat's hull, and accidentally shoots his homeboy in the head. Panicking, he returns to town and claims Desiree killed his friend, so the sheriff rounds up the dead guy's outrageously inbred redneck relatives and sets off into the deep swamp to apprehend Desiree. Operating under the false impression that the poacher is a murderess, the rednecks can't wait to get their hands on her, both to hand out their own brand of justice and get a piece of her swamp-living self.That's the setup, and from there viewers are taken deep into a swamp virtually untouched by man and made witness to a game of cat and mouse so over-matched that it's like what would happen if a bunch of great white hunters had the incalculable stupidity to mess with Tarzan on his own turf. Desiree may not have the jungle lord's near-superhuman capabilities, but she's plenty smart and knows her way through the bayou like it was the back of her own bootyless shorty-shorts, so it's just a matter of time until she's done killing those gurk- gurks one by one.During the course of all of this we learn a lot about Desiree's antagonists and swiftly realize just how vile and sleazy they are. The patriarch of the redneck family has a love/hate relationship with his sons, all of whom are at least mildly retarded or just plain mentally ill, and even disciplines the perpetually-horniest of his brood with a bullwhip when he catches the lad attempting to nail his own very willing sister in the mud near where she was hanging the laundry. (Dad wasn't all that irritated about the boy wanting a piece of sis, but was seriously irked at the possibility of the voluptuous girl getting knocked up and squeezing out another dimwit.) The other redneck son holds a personal grudge against Desiree for having had the gall to cut off his manly equipment years earlier when he tried and failed to rape her, and now wanders about with his sawed-off double-barreled shotgun serving as an ever-rigid and potent surrogate penis. With all of this mess going on there's plenty of bad taste to go around, and once the hunt for Desiree gets underway things go from very bad to that much worse when, after searching for her home for days, the inbred posse locates the place just after our heroine has left on a three day hunting trip. The bad guys stage a home invasion that begins with them abusing Desiree's tongueless little brother, and her nubile jailbait sister ends up in the lusty hands of the sheriff's son and the two inbred brothers. What happens then doesn't go where you'd expect, and is in fact far worse; no joke, when that bit of business happened I actually exclaimed "Oh my God!!!" and I'm pretty hard to shock. It's not graphically depicted, but the idea alone really gets to you, so keep this in mind before sitting down to watch 'GATOR BAIT with your girlfriend.Which brings me to the oft-cited sentiment that 'GATOR BAIT is one of many exploitation flicks held to be a feminist statement. Lemme tell ya, buddy, the makers of this film simply set out make a movie about a scantily clad hottie who kicks ass on the people who messed with her and her family, but I strongly doubt that capital F feminism was intentionally involved in the creative process. Think about it: you have fine-as-hell Claudia Jennings, a woman for whom the wearing of clothing should have been a punishable by law, traipsing about the fen in gear that shows off her priapism-inducing assets for all they're worth, despite the fact that such gear is in no way conducive to the rigors of marshland hunting and trapping. Desiree is not so much a feminist role model as she is a fantasy wild woman/jungle girl updated and transplanted to a sweltering southern bayou, and as a lifelong fan of such characters I have no problem with that. But don't hand me that feminist over-analysis horse-hockey; Desiree's a forest spirit fantasy made flesh — hell, she even looks like an anthropomorphic fox — and to say otherwise is a more than a tad disingenuous.

Michael DeZubiria The cover of ‘Gator Bait makes it look like a ridiculous, mindless film with few redeeming qualities other than an abundance of inexplicable nudity. While there is nudity in the film (and unnecessary nudity, at that), it is a relatively low quantity of it, and there are even a few elements of the film that were well done – even if extremely few.The acting on all parts was just awful, but some performances were less idiotic than others. While it's true that the line `Boys will be boys' was uttered in response to an attempted rape, and one of the men attempting to capture Desiree actually SHOOK HIS FIST at her in one scene, it's not entirely the actors' faults that this movie was impossible to take seriously. Nope, even if ineffectively, all of the actors delivered honest performances – it's the SCREENWRITER that should be drug out into the street and shot. And the cinematographer was no genius either. The day-for-night photography was some of the worst I've ever seen – even worse than that seen in Dr. No, which was filmed 14 years earlier than ‘Gator Bait. Also, there is so much ridiculous dialogue in this movie that it becomes a form of comic relief in itself (`Leroy, you pick that boy up or I'm gonna blow yer head off!'). And I better not even get started on Desiree's laughable lines. It's no secret that ‘Gator Bait is cheese. Everything about the film is ugly – especially those damn actors. Some of these guys are so ugly that sometimes it's hard to believe that they're real people. But despite this, they make for an effective team of angry (and excessively horny) rednecks, and the way that they get picked off one by one by this country girl not only provides an ironic bit of an interesting story, but also illustrates the extent of their collective stupidity. In the final shot of the film, with Pa standing in the swamp, the camera tilts slowly down to his reflection on the water, providing an unexpected hint toward meaningful direction. But for the most part, this is garbage. You just can't take something like this seriously at all. Let me put it in the immortal words of the great Sam Gerard, `Who's the ugliest, dumbest, most inbred country son of a bitch out here?' Well, whoever that person is, he or she is sure to get a kick out of ‘Gator Bait.