The Savage Shudder: The Legend of Boggy Creek
Since its been awhile since I got the chance to write one of these columns, I wanted to dive straight into something fun. For a week or so I wracked my brain trying to think of the right film, only for legendary trash connoisseur Joe Bob Briggs to drop that film right into my lap. Screened as part of Joe Bob's 24 Hour Last Drive-In event, The Legend of Boggy Creek is a hilariously strange docu-drama that manages to be both terrible and brilliant at the same time. A truly, truly unique film that as soon as I saw it I knew I had to bring it to the table and share it with you fellow rebels. So take my hand as we take this weeks Savage Shudder column to the crawling creeks of Faukes, Arkansas as we hunt for this legendary B-movie creature!
Shot with a crew of students in October 1971 and financed by a trailer-building company, Charles Pierce's bizarr-o 'true story' takes place in the barely-there town of Faukes, Arkansas. Told through the prism of a nature documentary, Pierce's film lays out a threadbare plot of a small town haunted by a mysterious, half-man, half-ape creature. Seemingly only coming out at night (which the narrator tells us, even though the first two encounters with the creature are filmed during the day), it's made out that the Bigfoot-type creature travels Arkansas creeks and feeds on livestock and the occasional pet cat. We're fed these facts on the creature by the locals of Faukes, who actually play themselves in the movie (Pierce, the director, also performed the narration). I have no idea if these people actually believe in the creature or whether the allure of a couple of bucks convinced them to spin a tall tale for the camera but either way, it kinda works. Pierce's cinematography can only be described as an amateur 70's version of Planet Earth, with long meandering shots of creeks, lakes and wildlife, cut between the occasional vignette. Each towns person essentially tells the same story; they were out wandering around, minding their business when they came upon the creature, its enormous size and hairy humanoid features terrifying them to the core. Of course, there's absolutely no evidence of the creature and later, when a kid claims to have shot it, Pierce notes that in the hysterical aftermath they completely forgot to take a sample of the creature's blood drops it left behind.
Of course they forgot.
Anyway, silly as the whole thing may be, Boggy Creek has an incredible sense of place and slowly works its small-town mysticism, so that by the end you're hooked. Sure, it all looks amateur and it's bullshit of the highest order, but it captures a sense of time and place, specifically Arkansas in the early 1970s, and it's wonderful simply to sit and watch these people and see how they lived. It's clear that the legend of the creature came from generations ago and there must have been some townsfolk who believed it, so in that sense Pierce's film works more as a study of folklore in an isolated community.
Plus, the whole thing absolutely stinks of mid-west American drive-in cinema, with its fuzzy Cannibal Holocaust style nature shots and it's sex-ed style voice over, so it's a winner based on this aesthetic alone.
If you're a fan of Bigfoot flicks, definitely check out The Legend of Boggy Creek. If you're simply in the mood for weird, time capsule cinema, I'd recommend it yet again, as Charles Pierce's film is about the most charming entry into the Why Does This Exist? chapter in movie history.