This is actually the third film in the five Boggy Creek films, though it is the only other film done by the original’s director, Charles B. Pierce, which is why it is Boggy Creek II. It’s bad enough to have been successfully turned into an Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode during the Mike run, and while the film is awful, it’s considerably more watchable with Nielsen and the bots ripping into it on the Satellite of Love.
So what is Boggy Creek II about? A professor at the University of Arkansas who specializes in cryptozoology takes two of his students and their friend along on a trip to find and capture the strange creature around Boggy Creek after a local sheriff sees the critter and its child. Along the way, the professor regales the students with tales of other people who have seen the creature, including one guy who slipped into a coma and was never able to tell his story (don’t ask how the doc knew about that one, it was never explained). When they’re not lost in the flashback of a camera covered in Vaseline, the group sets up radar around their campsite and get really freaked out by the critter, despite it never really doing anything to them. Eventually they discover a hillbilly out in the woods has captured the creature’s wounded child, so the professor returns the cub during a storm and admonishes the hillbilly.
That’s pretty much it. It’s an hour and a half of people telling stories which sound like bullshit and wigging out whenever a stunt man in a monkey suit trips the radar around the campsite. Oh, and the one friend complains a lot, while the male student refuses to ever wear a shirt, and the professor dresses like a South American dictator. Viva Sasquatch! And then there’s Old Man Crenshaw, who is almost as hairy as the Boggy Creek critter and wears a torn up pair of overalls. You can practically smell him on the video.
Charles B. Pierce considered this his worst film, and it is pretty bad. I enjoyed his work in The Town That Dreaded Sundown and have been meaning to seek out the first Boggy Creek movie for some time, along with his other horror film, The Evictors. But this film is dull, with annoying, useless characters who come across as just plain gross at times. And with the narration, it’s like Pierce wanted to go for some level of action while keeping the docu-drama style that he used for the first Boggy Creek movie, only he doesn’t keep with it consistently. And there is no tension whatsoever. I don’t recommend it.
Movie Reviews by a Mook 