If you like dancing horses and cowboys with your monsters, don't miss "Swamp of the Lost Monsters", a.k.a. "Swamp of the Lost Souls" (1957/1965). The film opens with suitably somber music as a funeral barge is poled across muddy water and into the graveyard in the swamp. When the body disappears, there's hysteria, dark foreboding references to terrible secrets, and the appearance of a monster that looks a lot like a giant red pollywog. Soon enough, however, we're introduced to Gaston Santos, his sidekick Squirrels-Eyes, and the incomparable equine Moonlight, who heroically arrive to unravel the Mystery of the Empty Coffin.

Titled El pantano de las animas in its original Mexican release in 1957, the film was dubbed into English and unleashed—I mean, re-released—on a grateful American public by K. Gordon Murray (a.k.a. Ken Smith). Murray's prolific cross-cultural projects include "The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy" (1957), which has been a UEN SciFi Friday feature, as well as a string of fairy tale films.