You’ve got monster!

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema. We’re headed to the wilderness of Arkansas this week. I’m going to review a sequel to a very popular cult hit from the early 70s, Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues. Both 1972’s The Legend of Boggy Creek and Boggy Creek II were directed by Charles B. Pierce. Pierce is an interesting character. He was born in Hammond, Indiana. Hammond is best known for being a sort of suburb of Chicago and the hometown of author Jean Shepherd who used it as the template for Hohman, Indiana in the holiday classic A Christmas Story.

Pierce based his movies on the legend of the Fouke Monster who is said to reside in the wooded area and the creek marshes around Fouke, Arkansas. The Fouke Monster is just the Texarkana version of Bigfoot or the Sasquatch. It supposedly attacked the home of a couple in May of 1971. Pierce, fascinated by the tales told about the monster from that story, made a docudrama about the event which was The Legend of Boggy Creek.

While the movie was a massive hit, Pierce has always admitted that he doesn’t necessarily believe in the legend of the creature, but is far more interested and fascinated by the folklore and tales the people told about the monster.

Later, with the movie’s popularity, more sightings were reported, but by the mid-70s, the popularity and interest in the creature waned. A “sequel” to Pierce’s film, Return to Boggy Creek, was released in 1977. It’s considered an unofficial sequel because it’s less of a docudrama and more of a straight thriller. Think of it as the Book of Shadows to The Blair Witch Project. Pierce had no involvement in Return to Boggy Creek.

Boggy Creek II not only brought back Pierce but also is the only official sequel. It also carries forward the docudrama themes and structure. Two more, direct-to-video unofficial sequels came in 2010 with Boggy Creek: The Legend is True and in 2011 with The Legacy of Boggy Creek. Far more in the spirit of how Pierce approached his two films, Seth Breedlove of Small Town Monsters released the documentary Boggy Creek Monster in 2016 which was co-produced by Lyle Blackburn. Blackburn is a folklorist and something of an expert on the Fouke Monster.

Pierce, on the other hand, had an interesting career in film. His background really was in set decoration until The Legend of Boggy Creek. After that movie, he went back to sets until 1974 when he made Bootleggers, and then eventually, in 1976, he made another film that would have a large following, The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Those three films all were set in Arkansas where Pierce moved as a child with his family. While he never really did anything big after The Town That Dreaded Sundown, that film, and his Boggy Creek films, have given Pierce a steady recognition among the horror community with both having some connection to local true stories and folklore.

Let’s go back to the opening sentence of this review. I believe I remember seeing The Legend of Boggy Creek somewhere along the way, probably on local TV some weekend. However, Boggy Creek II is among my favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, and have seen that many times over. One of my favorite jokes in the episode is when they are tracking the creature and they get a ping on a radar-like device and Crow lets out with, “You’ve got Monster!” Cracks me up every time.

The movie opens with peaceful shots of the Arkansas swamps. Charles B. Pierce, playing Dr. Brian Lockhart, narrates about the wilderness of the area and how the swamps give birth to rivers that feed lakes and other bodies of water throughout the southern United States. We then see a deer walking into the creek unaware that something is waiting to attack it. It’s soon dragged underwater where it is then decapitated and the rest of its carcass is taken by a large hairy beast.

We move from the peaceful Arkansas wilderness to the frantic Arkansas Razorbacks’ football stadium where Dr. Lockhart is taking in the Saturday afternoon game. One of his assistants, Tim (played by Chuck Pierce, son of Charles B. Pierce), answers a call in Lockhart’s office and the person on the other end says they need to speak to the doctor. Tim passes along the information which then gets passed to two more students, the lovely Leslie (Cindy Butler) and Tanya (Serene Hedin).

Lockhart tells the guy on the phone that he and his crew will be in Texarkana later in the day. Tim and Tanya are Lockhart’s best students in the field of Boggy Creek Bipedal Humanoid Studies. Leslie is a little bit of an outsider, but a friend to Tanya. When she arrives to be the fourth person on the team, she’s dressed in stylish (read: fancy) clothing. Lockhart isn’t so sure about her commitment to Sparklemotion as they will be in the muck of the swamps and in the woods for the entirety of the expedition.

They head out to Miller County where Lockhart got the call from the sheriff saying they had reports of the Boggy Creek Monster. Specifically, the creature attacked a deputy. Their first stop on the road is at a gas station/ammo shop. They load up on some shotgun shells. When asked if they are going camping, Lockhart says they are looking for the Boggy Creek Monster. The slack-jawed yokel tells Lockwood there ain’t no such thing. The locals keep giving them college kids grief over there bein’ a monster or not.

They even joke that maybe a couple of them will get in a monkey suit and jump out and give the city folk a start. Lockhart says that, yeah, he’s scared of the creature. In fact, he is so scared that he might just shoot a monkey that jumps out at him whether it is or isn’t the Boggy Creek Monster. That shuts up the locals.

They pull over at the site of one of the places they studied in the Anthropology class. As this story goes, a cattle rancher was bringing the herd in to put them in the stall at the end of the day. Later, the cows seemed to have gotten out of their stall. When he looked around, at first he didn’t see anything until he looked into the barn. That’s when the rancher claimed to see the creature.

The creature didn’t attack. Barely even seemed to notice the rancher. The rancher didn’t tell anyone for years. He was afraid that people would make fun of him. Later, when his brother said he saw something, that’s when the rancher told people about what he saw.

The foursome continues on the road. As they near their destination, they spot a dead animal on the road. Tim and Lockhart investigate. Like what we saw at the beginning of the movie, it’s a dead deer. It’s missing its head too. Lockhart believes a car hit it. Tim thinks that’s dubious because, well, it’s missing its fuckin’ head. The two guys move the deer and then go to the campsite where they set up a base of operations to seek out the creature.

Tim draws a picture of the creature. Lockhart says it’s pretty close to what he thinks it will look like. Leslie says it’s crazy to be hanging out in the middle of nowhere with a monster like that around. Tanya says she thinks it looks sexy. That’s why I like Tanya. She likes hairy monsters. I happen to be a hairy dude. She also wears short shorts.

The next morning, the group goes into the backroads to look around. They start looking at an abandoned house, but they are soon attacked by a rabid dog. They hole up in the house so Lockwood has to grab a gun and start dishing out some Magnum fuckin’ Force to rid themselves of this dog. This was a part that was not included in the MST3K episode. It’s kind of easy to see why. This part of the movie does not have anything to do with the Boggy Creek Monster. It’s just an action scene for the movie to have to mix into the tales of sightings of the creature. Plus… It’s watching a dog being shot and killed. Sure, it’s a rabid dog, but… there are a lot of shots of the dog lying bleeding and dying.

Lockhart discusses more about the creatures based on past reports. He says that the creatures are likely nocturnal. They emit a foul odor. Some people have even said they have seen more than one traveling together through the swamp area. The creatures have been reported to be docile. They don’t mess, nor want to mess, with people.

However, there is one tale that intrigues the doc. He tells the story of a guy coming home from grocery shopping one evening. He had a blowout and pulled over on a pretty quiet stretch of road. As he changed his tire, he heard something in the treeline. Something came out of the woods and attacked the poor guy. He never regained consciousness after two years in a coma. He had no missing money and his truck was not damaged aside from the blowout. There was no evidence of any foul play.

These are the types of serious mind-fucking, pants-shittin’ campfire spooky tales to tell that will definitely make people want to go camping with you next time you go Squatchin’.

Lockhart wants to set up a motion sensor to link to a computer to be able to keep an eye on the campsite. As they are running their test, they can see where Tanya and Tim are based on their weights and their positions relative to the base camp. However, something else pops up on the radar near Tanya. Whatever it is, it’s determined to be rather large based on the radar’s weight-tracking capabilities. Both students get back to the base safely. Lockhart picks up the stench.

This is a good scene. Honestly, I’d say it’s the crown jewel sequence in the whole production. This is a movie that is coming to the subject matter from a docudrama angle. It’s what Pierce did for the original film. As someone who finds some interest in cryptozoology from a folklore angle, I like the idea of telling stories of sightings and then reenacting the events. I mentioned Small Town Monsters earlier and Seth Breedlove’s productions. Those are EXCELLENT examples of interesting talking points about what people believe they saw, where some of these creatures or concepts originate from, and then the dramatized events. If you’re interested in the folklore angle to cryptids, they make great docs.

But here, in this movie, Pierce knows they can’t really tell a direct sequel to the original as that was a dramatized account of a famous sighting. You need another compelling sighting or know exactly where to take the original characters. In addition to that, as I mentioned above, Pierce himself doesn’t really believe in the monster. So how do you do a straight-faced sequel if you don’t really buy into the validity of a monster in the Texarkana swamp region?

What you do is mix the media a little bit. On one hand, you do reenactments of plausible sighting stories. On the other, you just make a monster movie. The reenactments are enough to naturally do some interesting shots to creep out the audience. The monster movie needs a rabid dog or, as I said, this really good scene. It starts off kind of sterile and clinical. He talks about how this radar/sonar system works to keep track of the base camp and the immediate area. Then… something else shows up on the screen. Not only that but it’s moving toward one of our characters. Tanya can’t see what might be closing in on her. She can’t hear it. Lockhart and Leslie know it’s there, so it does create a little bit of a creepy stalking moment in the movie. It’s a good, fairly intense, moment in a movie that is trying to present this material in two different ways and knows it has to come up with something that can create some thrills and chills.

Later that night, the creature appears again on the radar. They watch the readings on the radar and notice the creature circling the camp. As it continues to lap the base, the generator runs out of gas and it loses power. Lockhart and Tim now have to go outside and get the gasoline to refuel the generator to give them lights and power again. This is another really good, creepy scene. That creature knows the woods better than they do. They don’t really know where the creature is once they run out of power.

We finally get a pretty good money shot too. As the power comes back on, and the light shines into the woods, Tim stumbles back in terror and runs inside the camper. Lockhart shines his flashlight on the treeline and sees the creature watching. Lockhart is frozen in fear at first. When he feels threatened, he fires a tranquilizer dart but it has no effect on the creature. It eventually runs off.

I like this because there really isn’t an action hero here. Sure, Lockhart knows to have a shotgun and he does basically know what he needs to do to watch for the creature and then study it and so on. He fully admits to being scared of the creature. He is only barely more capable of holding it together than his students. He doesn’t try to macho anything. He’s not trying to conquer the monster. He just wants to study it as a professor. He’s not Indiana Jones. He looks and kind of acts and would seemingly be just as afraid as any normal person would, even if they have the drive to gain more knowledge about the monster.

I guess in some ways, that can hurt this movie because the two guys in this are a teacher and a super skinny guy who rarely wears a shirt. We’re used to guys in a monster movie being able to muscle their way to a conclusion if needed. They can wrestle the monster or have the perfect tool or weapon to use at the perfect time. Turns out, all our leads in this are kind of normal people. I think that gives this movie something of a more interesting angle compared to many of the movies coming out in the mid-80s.

To ease everyone’s nerves from the night before, Lockhart tells them a story that is much lighter in tone about a sighting of the monster. We get a typical hillbilly couple in this story. The guy wants to go take a dump in the outhouse and look at the ladies’ lingerie section of the Sears catalog. As he takes his dump, the monster tries busting in to grab him. He steps into the hole in the outhouse and has to have his wife spray the shit off his leg with the hose. It’s really the last of the supposedly historical recounts of Fouke Monster sightings, but it’s a nice little lighthearted scene.

Lockhart meets with the deputy who claims to have seen the monster. The deputy tells the tale of going fishing at the river. When he got back with what he caught, he headed to the shed to clean the fish when a tiny version of the creature jumped on his back and made him drop the fish. The little creature grabbed the fish off the ground and is lifted up by the larger creature and they walk off together with today’s meal. The deputy says no one believes him when he says what he saw. The deputy then suggests that Lockhart should go see Old Man Crenshaw. He’s lived in the area for years and calls in all the time saying he has seen something. He says the monster is incredibly fast and an exceptional swimmer.

While Lockhart and Tim go looking for any kind of sample from the creature, Leslie convinces Tanya to take the jeep out of the bottom to go into town for food and possibly even a hotel room. The girls get the jeep stuck in deep mud. They are out past the time it gets dark and try to use the wench to pull them out of the mud. As they use the wench to get out of the mud, they spot the creature in the tree line. They haul ass back to the camp. This is another scene that is conceived with the right idea, but it’s a little less effective than other scenes when our crew sees the monster. That’s because the bickering girls with the stuck jeep and the guys wanting to get back at the girls for leaving and not giving them any indication where they went is ultimately played so light that it undercuts the intensity of the girls possibly running into the monster.

The next day, they go to the river to take a boat down to Old Man Crenshaw’s place. There are some creature shenanigans at the water park on the river as the creature seems to be pretty good at holding its breath to stay underwater to drag deer down and cause kids hot roddin’ on Jet Skis to fall off into the water to scare them off. Lockhart muses about the beauty of the wilderness and how it should be left unspoiled. He also talks about the density of the bottoms around the river and the swamps could make it easy for the creature to hide and rarely be seen by the average person.

They arrive at Old Man Crenshaw’s. Crenshaw is exactly what you would expect to see living out of the way by himself in Arkansas. Also, he’s played by a guy named Jimmy Clem. That’s a name that just sounds about as Arkansas as you can possibly imagine. Clem appeared in several of Charles B. Pierce’s films. This would be his final film, but he continued to live until 2017 when he died at the age of 84.

Lockhart says they have come from the university and want to ask Crenshaw some questions. Crenshaw places his shotgun right in Lockhart’s face thinking they are actually IRS agents. Those get shot on sight at Old Man Crenshaw’s. Lockhart confirms he is indeed from the university and wants to ask about the Boggy Creek Monster. Crenshaw says he sees the monster all the time. He seems to be rather familiar with the creature’s habits.

Lockhart thinks Crenshaw is up to something. He’s been making a lot of fires and seems to have for a long time and longer than you normally would burn stuff for. Lockhart thinks Crenshaw is hiding something. Unfortunately, a storm is keeping them from being able to go back downriver and get back to the jeep and then onto their camp. So they are stuck with Crenshaw for the night.

Crenshaw thinks Lockhart is the kind of doctor who can patch up busted folks. Crenshaw tells Lockhart to come with him to have a conversation. Crenshaw tells Lockhart that he knows how to catch the creature. He shows Lockhart something he has in the pantry… the Boggy Creek Monster’s child. The child is hurt too. Crenshaw caught him in a trap and plans to make money off him. He needs Lockhart to patch him up, but the little creature is very weak and badly hurt. It’s likely dying.

Lockhart tells Crenshaw that his having the baby is what is causing the adult creature to act so crazy and aggressive the last few days. Crenshaw has been lighting fires around his property because the creature is scared of fire. However, Leslie spots that something is walking around outside. The storm is putting out the fires. Crenshaw plans to defend his place with his shotgun. Lockhart pulls his gun on Crenshaw to prevent him from making the creature any more aggressive.

The creature busts in through Crenshaw’s front door, but Lockhart brings the baby to the creature which appeases the creature. Reunited with his little one, the two creatures go off into the night and back to their normal business. The next morning, Crenshaw admits the creature needs to be left to roam free and untouched by people. It’s not a monster. It’s part of nature.

The movie is a bit of a mixed bag if I’m being honest. That said, there is something kind of pleasant about the movie. Look, maybe I’m being sentimental about the MST3K episode. Maybe there’s a bit of nostalgia for these types of regionally produced films that then ultimately show up on cable. Boggy Creek II feels like a movie from a different time and so totally something that is a love letter to the wilderness of Southern Arkansas, North Eastern Texas, and Northern Louisiana. There’s a slowness to it that isn’t about its pacing as a movie, but more about the way of life there. There’s a bit of a travelog feel to it. I’ll be damned if I didn’t see the shots of the river and think it would be nice to take a leisurely trip in a boat down that river.

Is Boggy Creek II a good movie? No. Not even close. That said, I like this movie. There’s a warm and fuzzy feeling I get from a movie like this. Like I said, it’s of a different time, but a time I was alive for. Maybe it’s my age and the soft longings I have for a simpler time. Not a simpler time like a lot of people lament about the present, but a simpler time of my youth. Maybe, to a certain degree, this movie is also kind of yearning for something simpler. Humans stay in their civilization and let nature be something to admire but not disturb. That doesn’t seem such a bad idea to me.

What is also not such a bad idea to me is closing the books on this week’s B-Movie Enema review. Next time, I’ve got another classic flick featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 that also fills me with a great deal of romantic sentimentality. Join me next week as I review 1979’s Parts: The Clonus Horror.