Boggy Creek (2011)

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Boggy CreekStarring Texas Battle, Melissa Carnell, Stephanie Honore, Damon Lipari, Shavon Kirksey

Directed by Brian T. Jaynes


Being the connoisseur of Sasquatchploitation cinema that I am, I have been eagerly anticipating Boggy Creek since it was first announced. When I found out it was already on DVD in Thailand, I couldn’t wait for its September US DVD release date and had a copy imported. A positive review or two I’ve come across online made me even more excited. Those positive reviews now have me wondering if the reviewers watched a different cut of the movie than the one released on DVD in Thailand because the Boggy Creek I watched was an absolute bore from start-to-finish. The Boggy Creek I watched was almost the total antithesis of what you look for in an entertaining killer Sasquatch flick. And I was so looking forward to it.

Jennifer is still an emotional mess when she and a small group of her friends head to the Boggy Creek, Texas cabin home of her recently deceased father. They will proceed to do very little other than take in the local scenery and engage in dialogue so dull and unnatural all of the actors end up sounding like they’re performing in a YouTube soap opera. Jennifer will frequently talk to us via voiceover and treat us to multiple flashbacks to her youth spent at the cabin with her wonderful father and awful mother. A handsome neighbor warns her of Bigfoot monsters in the swamp that abduct human women for breeding, such as his dead wife, who from that particular flashback looks to have been a dead ringer for Jennifer, a fact he never appears to notice. Locals in town scoff at any such monster talk. The black friend puts on a ski mask and pretends to break into the cabin as his idea of a good joke while another friend grows increasingly jealous at how attentive her boyfriend is to Jennifer’s mourning. They go boating several times.

That pretty much sums up the whole lot of nothing that comprises the first 65 minutes. The monsters barely make their presence known during any of it, and if the idea was to develop the characters while building up a sense of foreboding, it did not succeed on either front. Those 65 minutes feel like a first act that has been doubled with filler to an intolerable length. By the time of the climactic Sasquatchian mongoloid attack, I had long since zoned out mentally, and nothing I saw during those final 25 minutes did anything to win me back over. Not even the climactic shot lifted wholesale from a well known horror movie and its even more famous remake.

It’s apparent the first-time filmmakers behind Boggy Creek were not interested in embracing an obviously exploitive premise that boils down to Humanoids of the Deep with skunk apes. Their attempts to make a classier horror movie with some psychological subtext to it would be commendable if the results weren’t even shaggier than the Bigfoot costumes.

The Bigfoot costumes are perfectly fine practical suitmation, the likes of which we don’t get enough of in today’s modern monster movies. Though I would be remiss if I didn’t note my curiosity as to why I never saw any wet hair on these furry swamp dwellers.

Boggy Creek doesn’t work as drama, doesn’t deliver as horror, and is no fun at all to watch. Those looking for a Bigfoot movie with its fair share of blood and guts and T&A, you’ll get little of the former and none of the latter. Those looking for a scary Sasquatch movie more interested in atmosphere than exploitation are better off seeking out 2008’s The Wild Man of the Navidad, a far better Southern fried Sasquatch flick than this.

A tremendous disappointment.

1 out of 5

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