Sick Product of a Sick System

Absolutely the worst movie.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

I've seen this title lurking forever on my library and kept meaning to watch it. Well I finally found some time and a bottle of wine. This is an incredible journey not only into Arkansas but into the mockumentary art. It may seem a little cheesy at times but it opened doors to the future films and one of the best documentary directors I've seen in a long time small town monster productions.

Rather than pay actors to tell a story, a new art form was created with The Legend of Boggy Creek. I guess you could call it a Faux Documentary with real folks from the piney woods of southwest Arkansas telling of their story with a Bigfoot type creature.This film has become something of a cult item. It shows that folks with absolutely no talent at all can get in front of a camera and just simply be themselves. For that reason I can't really criticize those in the film. It's not bad acting, it's no acting at all.Some apparently found some entertainment value in the Boggy Creek saga. I did not.

I do not fit the mold of the classic skeptic. I admit that my mind is comfortably open to permit such pop oddities as UFO's, Ghosts, telepathy, ESP and in some late night pseudo-intellectual discussions, possibly the Loc Ness monster. Catch me a on a good night.Sasquatch is another matter.Not that I would give Bigfoot any less affirmation then Nessy but for me it all comes down to an issue of credibility. Judge for yourself but take note that the sort of people who claim to have seen Bigfoot 'Dun seed it wit'tay own two eyes!' There are just as many reasons, I suppose, to affirm the existence of Bigfoot as there are to deny it. The people of Fouke, Arkansas have been convinced for generations that a large, hairy, hulking beast walks among the heavy acres of trees (follow it around long enough and I bet you'll catch it stumbling out of the bar late at night). Looking at The Legend of Boggy Creek, it isn't difficult to understand where the legend was born. Fouke is densely populated and seems to be mostly made up of trees, swamp and eyewitness who were scared right out of their trailers.One of Fouke's residents is the film's director, Charles B. Pierce who set off a generation of hokey, jokey sort-of documentaries about the legendary creature with this 1973 turkey. A folksy narrator informs us that for several years the creature lived back in the woods and would occasionally how, steal chicken and pigs and would occasionally stumble upon a trailer and scare the pee-jingles out of some hapless resident.Those occurrences make up half of the film, as actual assaults are re-staged and we suffer half-cocked explanations from the actual eyewitnesses, one of whom informs us: "I reckon there's a lot of folks that won't believe nothing til they see it for theyselves, and if they're like me, they'll wish they hadn't seen what they did. You know, that thing is gonna up and kill someone one of these days, sure as the world".The rest of the movie is made up of long shots of thick clusters of trees which occasionally contains glimpses of a hairy behemoth stumbling through (actually it's a guy in a suit, the movie assures us in a pieces of text). The shots are so clumsy that you can almost see the wristwatch on the actor.What makes the movie a gem are the reenactments. Pierce doesn't spare a bit of detail and at one point, right before the creature drops in on a slumber party, we get such heart-tugging dialogue as 'I wonder where that thing is they talk about, oh well I'm gonna go get a coke, y'all want one?' This is followed by one of the girls heading off to use the bathroom. Pierce, ever the stickler for details, allows the camera to follow her in and we get a peeping tom view of her sitting on the can. When the creature comes banging on the window . . . well let's just say the kid is lucky to have been sitting on the toilet.These scenes are so bad that you wonder if this is a documentary with reenactments or Oh, Chuck Pierce you hard-working craftsman you. You didn't even spare us a theme song: Here, the sulfur river flows, rising when the storm cloud blows, this is where the creature goes, lurking in the land he knows. Perhaps, he dimly wonders why, is there no other such as I? To love, to touch before I die, To listen to my lonely cry.*sniff* nor did he resist the temptation to make a sequel, two unfortunately. The first Return to Boggy Creek, a fiction film feature a pre-felony Dana Plato and the other Boggy Creek: The Legend Continues where one half of the movie is documentary and the other is just half-baked.The Legend of Boggy Creek serves its purpose. It's not more or less believable than any other Bigfoot movie. Do you believe that a fur-bearing creature stumbles about the woods and swamps howling and screaming and scaring the locals. To me it all seems plausible because that's my uncle Ernie after a bender.

If I had to be the total opposite of objective – even more opposite than, say, subjective – I would be just prejudiced and grant impeccable ratings to ALL films directed by Charles B. Pierce. I adore this man and his lovable low-budgeted filming style. His films "The Town That Dreaded Sundown" and "The Evictors" rank highly amongst my favorite 70's flicks because they're extremely atmospheric and creepy. That's also why I was looking forward to "The Legend of Boggy Creek" so much! This is supposed to be a semi-documentary slash horror film with a slow brooding atmosphere and loads of beautiful environmental footage. Right up Mr. Pierce's alley, in other words. "The Legend of Boggy Creek" is also a sort of pioneer, as it single-handedly started a short but nevertheless vivid trend in exploitation/drive-in cinema, namely the bigfoot- sasquatch-abominable snowman hype! Since this movie was such an unexpectedly large success at the drive-in theaters (the 7th highest grossing film of 1972!), there suddenly came dozen of similar flicks with bloodthirsty swamp monsters. If it weren't for good old Boggy, there never would have been a "Creature from the Black Lake", "Snowbeast", "Shriek of the Mutilated", "Night of the Demon", "Sasquatch" and so on. The narrator is proud to welcome us to Fouke; a cozy small Arkansas town close to Louisiana and Texas. Fouke is a great place to live … until the sun goes down. The narrator is born and raised in Fouke, and he first heard the screams of the monster when he was seven years old. The nearby Boggy Creek is reputedly the turf of a big hairy monster that all the Fouke inhabitants know about. The documentary approach works reasonably effective, but gets dull rather fast. The narrator often emphasizes that the "the monster is lurking…" or that "the monster is always there…", but nothing actually happens. After a while, you subconsciously begin to finish the narrator's sentences like "… but it never moves a damn muscle!". Here's what "The Legend of Boggy Creek" has got plenty of: footage of trees, flying ducks, still lakes, relaxing country music, eagles, tortoises, boy scouts picnicking, pitiable old hermits murmuring about their connection with the swamps and detailed shots of a isolated tool shed in the woods. Once every twenty minutes or so, there's the occasional distant shot of a guy in a secondhand gorilla suit that may or not be the Fouke Monster. My money's on "may not be". The closest we get to witnessing a bigfoot attack is when some girl sees something through the window and instantaneously goes into shock. The next thing the narrator says is that the animal smashed some flowerpots before wandering off. He did what? Smashed flowerpots?!? Oh the horror, the awful awful horror! I still like Charles B. Pierce and his repertoire, but I do very much wonder how come this film could possibly have been so popular amongst the drive-in theater crowds? Absolutely nothing happens here? Perhaps it's just that. Nothing even remotely exciting happens during "The Legend of Boggy Creek", so they could fully focus on making out in the backseat.