Then the mutated Egon begins stalking them, first by lurking in the swimming pool next to their dancing feet (how he’s not spotted is anyone’s guess), then by creeping up to a busty blonde while she takes a shower, because a bit of Hitchcock will surely class up this joint. (The teens also take time to insult the Beatles and it’s true, the Beatles never wrote anything like “The Jellyfish Song.”) The good times end when a boat ride sends the group into the water, where they’re attacked by some very fake-looking jellyfish. But in the meantime, we’re treated to Neil Sedaka tunes including “The Jellyfish Song,” which accompanies the teenagers’ pool party and much Beach Blanket Bingo-style dancing. Unbeknownst to them, in his spare time Egon heads out to a secret cavern lair outfitted with mad science equipment and transforms himself into a giant humanoid man o’war – the actor’s head still visible inside his balloon-like helmet – before taking revenge on those who would insult him. Egon is hyper-sensitive to any mockery over his looks, and also strangely insistent that jellyfish – the subject of their research – can grow to much larger sizes than previously known. A marine biologist (Jack Nagle), who has an extremely distracting black spot in the middle of his head (a recent injury, he tells us), welcomes his daughter’s friends to his island home, where they gather around a swimming pool and meet his hunky young researcher friend (Joe Morrison, of Grefé’s earlier films The Checkered Flag and Racing Fever), as well as the disfigured Egon (John Vella, The Wild Rebels). Sting of Death is the more purely enjoyable of the two films, a brisk and outlandish 80 minutes which begins with a bikini-clad sunbather killed by some kind of swamp thing, then dragged underwater through the opening credits. Teenagers getting ready for a pool party (and “The Jellyfish Song”).
(The director would later apply his skill at working with live animals on the sets of Live and Let Die.) When an actress splashes around while fleeing a jellyfish monster, you half expect her to emerge covered in leeches before Grefé calls “cut.”
Much of the pleasure in watching them now is Grefé’s insistence on using real predators and shooting the vast majority of footage in authentic locations. But taken together, they’re oddball triumphs of low-budget gung-ho filmmaking, as Grefé literally throws his actors into the deep end – and, after them, snakes, sharks, and alligators. The acting is amateurish, the editing crude, the spontaneous eruptions of teenage dancing downright hilarious. The second film is more unusual: deep in the Everglades, an Indian spirit turns into various animals to kill those who venture onto his land. The first film is a standard-template monster feature with outré value provided primarily by its choice of monster: a human who mutates into a Portuguese man o’war – a jellyfish – albeit one with groping hands and diver’s flippers for feet. Arrow Video’s new box set He Came from the Swamp: The William Grefé Collection, celebrating the career of the Floridian indie exploitation filmmaker behind such films as The Wild Rebels (1967), Willard knock-off Stanley (1972), and Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976), kicks off with a swampy splash with its first disc, Sting of Death and The Death Curse of Tartu, which were released as a double feature in 1966 to take a gator-chomp out of drive-ins across America.
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