That’s go-go dancer Judith McConnell talking to herself after hearing a news report about girls being kidnapped and possibly sold into slavery in Manila. Seconds later, she gets her answer when a pair of creeps in monk’s outfits grabs her and stewardess Jennifer Billingsley and drags them through a jungle hideaway. Only it’s not their bodies that the kidnappers want – it’s their blood. See, they’ve been abducted by a cult of immortals living in a lost jungle city who need a constant supply of neck juice to stay rosy and fit after 500 years. If you were an enterprising exploitation film director, why, you might call this clan The Thirsty Dead.

Made in the Philippines by veteran TV character actor Terry Becker, The Thirsty Dead is a harmless and enjoyable camp chiller that’s closer to the jungle adventure-fantasy movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s than the gory horror of the ‘70s. All the earmarks are there – the cruel high priestess (Tani Guthrie), the wise adviser (John Considine) who succumbs to love, the elaborate rituals and gobbledygook prayers – heck, there’s even a slave revolt and a chase through the jungle for the finale. Some of the performances are straight out of a WWII serial as well – Billingsley and Considine do what they can (though he has to wear a huge baby-blue Funkadelic collar and short shorts), but Guthrie goes for broke as the high priestess, especially during her primitive dance/Vegas showgirl routine, which she performs for her husband, the cult’s spiritual leader, who’s just a head encased in what appears to be a block of cherry Jell-o, and McConnell takes huge bites out the scenery as the hard-bitten stripper chick.

So if you dig that sort of retro vibe and don’t mind the lack of skin (though Billingsley and McConnell look mighty nice in their leather cavegirl bikinis) or bloodshed, you’ll probably get a chuckle or two from The Thirsty Dead. Oh, and on a weird side note, McConnell, Guthrie and Considine all appeared together on the TV soap Santa Barbara in the mid-‘80s. Could it have been the curse of the Thirsty Dead? No, probably not.

Oh, boy… say howdy to Dr. Frosta (Ramiro Oliveros), whose theories about life and death have earned him a less-than-favored position among the scientific community. Dr. F. has it in his head that death is really just a transitional period, and that with the right combination of drugs and transfusions, the recently deceased can be brought back to life. So what if they become mute, shambling zombies? They’re alive, right? Well, no, says his scientific colleagues, who kick his nutty-as-a-Snickers ass out of the academic world. So Frosta gathers his test tubes, his chicken skeletons, and his collection of bottled fetuses, and retires to someplace a little less stuffy – like The Swamp of the Ravens (although the mucky craphole is populated more by buzzards than ravens, but Swamp of the Buzzards doesn’t really sound particularly creepy, does it?). There, with the help of a zombie henchman, the good doctor continues his work, which seems to revolve around mutilating beggars and kidnapping prostitutes, and then dumping their lifeless corpses in the swamp, where they bob like graying apples in the murk. All seems to be hunky-dory in Dr. Frosta’s life, until his girlfriend Simone (Marcia Bichette) decides to dump him and go back to her previous boyfriend, a pock-faced lounge singer whose act centers around singing to a mannequin. Weird, yes, but when your current bf is attempting to raise the dead, you’re not so picky anymore, are you?

Naturally, this doesn’t sit well with Dr. Frosta, who kidnaps Simone and apparently kills her… all the better to have his way with her corpse. Gad. Don’t worry, there’s a determined cop (spaghetti Western star Fernando Sancho) hot on his trail, but believe me, things get a lot worse at the Casa de Frosta before anyone comes close to saving the day.

Like The Thirsty Dead, Swamp of the Ravens borrows heavily from the movie past for its inspiration, specifically from other mad scientist features. But where Thirsty Dead seemed content to recycle serial-style thrills, screenwriter Santiago Moncada and director Manuel Caño (writer and producer on Mario Bava’s Hatchet for the Honeymoon – another movie about a less-than-healthy relationship) push the mad doctor story to its most gruesome limits—in a sense, showing in graphic detail what their predecessors could only hint at. This includes showing a real autopsy (with the actors present), lots of rotting corpses, leprous faces, and the coup de sick, Dr. Frosta climbing aboard his dead girlfriend for some hot gurney action. It’s a pretty big spoonful of slime to swallow in the name of a stupid horror movie; thankfully, there are a few unintentional moments of humor (mostly from the inappropriate pop-synth score, which lends a deliriously snappy vibe to the most awful scenes) and a handful of strikingly photographed scenes (the heads floating in the swamp is a memorable image) to help wash it down.