Burl reviews Boggy Creek II ...and the Legend Continues! (1983)

Ha ha and hello true believers! Yes, we’re back among the Bigfeet today with an amuse-bouche from Arkansas’ own hitmeister, Charles B. Pierce! Ha ha, his first big success at the ozoners was his 1971 pseudo-documentary The Legend of Boggy Creek; and then by some mysterious circumstance a quasi-sequel that Pierce had nothing to do with, Return to Boggy Creek, came along a handful of years later! Ha ha, and then, after doing a couple of horror pictures and some outdoor extravaganzas, I suppose Pierce figured he may as well do his own sequel: so in 1983 there appeared today’s movie, Boggy Creek II … and the Legend Continues!

Now, many of you may have seen this picture, but with a fellow and two robots gabbing over top of it! There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, not with a movie like this anyway; and indeed their mockery of the Pierce picture is fitfully amusing and generally on point! But all movies are worth giving a chance to without extraneous commentary, if only so you can provide your own!

Pierce himself writes, directs, produces, narrates and stars in the picture, ha ha! He plays Brian C. Lockhart, whose friends call him Doc: a university cryptozoologist trying to prove the existence of the Boggy Creek Creature! He goes on about how trackless and vast these southern Arkansas wildlands are, but really, how vast could they be? Anyway, Doc hears about a sighting of the monster and rounds up a crew consisting of a frequently shirtless skinnybones played by the director’s son, a pretty grad student, and the grad student’s best friend, a cracker princess forever looking for her blush!

Ha ha, eventually the big guy shows up! Doc has set up some kind of perimeter sensors, so the picture gets a chance to lift some beats from Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot! It never gets quite as tense, though, as that bipedal classic! Nor is the movie nearly as good as its close country cuzzin Creature from Black Lake, though there are some townie scenes that recall that marvelous picture! No, frankly, there’s no area in which you can point at Boggy Creek II and say “Ha ha, this is the movie that does that the best!”

Still, it’s a bigfoot movie, and that goes a long mile with me! Old Man Crenshaw, the heavily bearded river rat who shows up in the last portion of the picture, gives the picture a little more of the eccentric rural pep it needs, and to be sure, there is a scene in which the Bigfoot knocks a jet skier off his machine! I wish he’d et the guy too, though! In the end, when you tally it all up, Boggy Creek II is worth no more than an uncle’s promise, and I give it one headless deer!