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Our
film opens with a disclaimer: Warning us
that this is a true story, and some of the
people in the picture portray themselves
-- and in most cases on actual locations. Wait,
were are you going? No come back.
There's a monster! And he, uh, attacks
people! Well, he eats some chickens.
No! Really! It's true! Sit down and we'll
tell you all about. Comfy. Good. Pssst.
Lock the theater doors. (Okay,
I made that last part up.)
The
camera comes to life, giving us a swooping,
pan sweep of some water-logged marshlands.
All we here are the ambient noises of the
wetlands; cicadas, nutrias, frogs and lots
of birds. And the tour continues as an
ominous wind blows. Then the natural,
almost-droning animal symphony is
shattered by a strange guttural howl that
doesn't really fit any of these indigenous
critters, bringing all noise to a stop. Was
that the wind? The howl sounds again,
scaring all the animals off. It wasn't the
wind...
We
spy a young boy running hell bent for the
horizon, away from the marshes and the
strange noises. He pauses to scan the tree
lines, keeping an eye out for something.
He runs and runs and runs, and finally
makes it to a filling station and finds
Willie Smith inside gabbing with a few
other locals. The boy tells Smith that
there is a "wild man" prowling
around his house and his mom sent him to
get help.
Smith
and the others laugh at the boy, and send
him back home promising to check out the
place tomorrow. It's the third time this
week that his mom has seen "a
monster" lurking about. With that, the
boy shrugs and beats feet back the way he
came, racing the setting sun, to be home
before dark. He barely makes it back in
time, but before he gets inside, he hears
the primal screams again.
A
older narrator finally chimes in claiming
to be that boy. That was his first
encounter with the legendary Fouke
Monster, a Sasquatch like creature,
back when he was seven. It scared him then,
and still scares him now. The
narrator (Vern
Stierman) goes on and gives us some
background information and the nickel tour
of Fouke, Arkansas; the setting for our
tale. Fouke is near the Texas border and
within ten miles of Texarkana. A small
agricultural community, with barley 300
people (and
everyone of them owns a gun), that
is surrounded by wetlands, creeks and
rivers that flood the thick forests making
them un-navigable and almost impenetrable.
He says that Fouke is a nice and peaceful
place to live -- until the sun goes down...
*
* * *
Back
in the summer of 1971, it was a slow news
day at the offices of the Texarkana
Gazette and Daily News when reporter
Jim Powell received a phone call from his
friend, Dave Hall. Hall was the news
director at Texarkana's KTFS radio
station and he had received word that
something strange was going on up the road
a ways in the little town of Fouke,
Arkansas. Both newsmen made their way to
Fouke, and the news trail led them to Bob
Ford's house where he and his family were
quickly packing all their belongings into
a U-Haul; determined to vacate the area as
soon as possible. The family was scared.
Why? The night before, something
had come out of the swamp and attacked
them.
Powell
reported that while Ford was out hunting,
he was drawn back to the house because of
his wife's screaming. He arrived in time
to take a few shots at a large hairy
creature, with "eyes as big as silver
dollars that burned coal red",
driving it back into the trees. But the
creature came back and attacked the house
again, and Bob, despite injuries received
battling the creature and crashing through
a door to escape it, managed to drive the
creature off again. Abandoning the house,
the family took him to a hospital in
Texarkana where he was treated for shock
and abrasions. The
next day, the only evidence found around
the house were some strange footprints and
a few broken off saplings. Ford swears he
hit the creature, several times, but no
evidence of blood was found.
Powell
didn't know if he believed the fantastic
story, but he wrote it up and filed it
anyway. Amazingly enough, both the AP and
UPI wire services picked up the story and
the tale of "The Fouke Monster"
soon became a national sensation. Fouke
was soon overrun with monster hunters,
hoping to catch a glimpse of America's
newest folk legend. Like its cousin the
Sasquatch, though, the creature remained
maddeningly elusive.
The
Ford family attack wasn't the first
appearance of the strange creature. There
had been sightings of the beast as far
back as 1940s; walking along the creek bed
here, crossing the road there,
slaughtering a few pigs now and again, and
at least one documented case of it
attacking someone while they were taking a
crap in an outhouse. Some say it's all a
hoax. Others say it's a gorilla that
escaped from a derailed circus train. Who
knows for sure. But sometimes, usually at
night, something big and hairy crawls out
of the wetlands along the Boggy Creek and
prowls the house-trailers and shot-gun
shacks of Fouke, growling and shrieking
and making a general nuisance of itself.
And the rest of the film shows us
interviews with eye-witnesses and dramatic
reenactments of harrowing encounters with
the creature.
John
Hixon saw it jump a fence and ramble
across his yard. And it killed two of John
Oates' prized hogs. Fred Crabtree saw it
bathing itself in a creek but couldn't
bring himself to shoot it because he
thought it might be a man. Later that same
day, his brother James also caught a
glimpse of the creature. On another
night, it prowled around the Searcy house,
scaring the hell out of the women folk
trapped inside. They watched in horror and
listened to the strange, grunting noises
the creature makes as it circled closer
and closer to the house. The attack then
culminates with the monster scaring the
family cat to death.
Sightings
of the beast continued until, one day, a
hunter stumbled upon the creature. He
fired several rounds, wounding but not
killing it. The boy abandoned his gun and
ran for help while the monster howled in
pain. After changing his soiled britches,
he gathered up some help and returned to
the spot of the shooting -- but the
monster was gone. Several trees had been
snapped off and uprooted, and some blood
was found, but in all the excitement, none
was collected or saved.
A
massive search was finally organized to
try and flush the creature out, but most
of these efforts failed because the
hunting dogs refused to track the creature
due to it's awful smell. The creature was
never found.
After
the failed big hunt, the creature wasn't
spotted again for almost eight years. To
pass the time, we get another ten-minute
padding sequence of marshland footage
while a John Denver clone warbles the
ballad of the Fouke monster; "Oh...just
sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a
tale that's a piece of sh*t, that started
on this marshy shore, along the Boggy Crick..."
(Okay, I made that part up, too.)
Well,
since all we've heard from so far are the
true believers, it's time to hear from the
skeptics. Old Herb is a skeptic, and a
real cranky one at that. He's lived out in
the boonies in a shanty for over twenty
years, blown part of his foot off with a
shotgun in a "boating accident",
and has a bottle tree, but he's never seen
the Fouke Monster and thinks it's a load
of bull-twaddle.
Well,
Herb, you'd better tell that to the
monster because he's back again; and
developed a taste for chicken as we watch
him run amok in a chicken coup.
The
hardest evidence of the creature's
existence was a set of three-toed tracks
found by Will Kennedy in a bean field.
Kennedy had never seen the creature but
always felt uneasy -- like he was being
watched -- while working in that
particular field, Kennedy
is then interviewed by some
"experts." They ask him if he
thinks the Fouke Monster is a Sasquatch,
but Kennedy doesn't know what that is. So
they explain it to him, and he still isn't
sure. But the experts don't think it is
because a Sasquatch's footprints are much
bigger and have five toes. They also rule
out a gorilla or an orangutan. So what is
it? Who knows.
The
sightings continue: A group of children
drag there mother out to see the monster
they spotted along a creek. She doesn't
believe them, but sure enough, there he is
and they all flee in terror.
And
there seems to be something different
about the latest rash of sightings. The
creature appears to be growing more
belligerent and more brazen in it's
attacks. After he harasses a group of
teenage girls at a slumber party, the
narrator theorizes that the creature is
the last of its kind and very lonely (and
looking for a little nookie? Git your
hands offen our wimmenfolk ya dern
kumquatch, you!)
Having
struck out at the slumber party, the
creature takes it's frustration out on a
couple of dogs by "tearing the hide
clean off of them." The angered owner
vows bloody revenge on the creature for
killing his prized hounds.
Then
the creature's rash behavior culminates
with a two night attack on the Ford family
house. The Ford's shared the house with
the Turner family because they both worked
together at a nearby ranch. The first
attack occurred when the wives and
children were home alone and they heard
the creature lurking about outside on the
porch. Luckily for them, the critter
doesn't quite grasp the concept of a door
knob. When the men come home, they scare
the creature off. But the creature attacks
again the next night. This time, the men
are home (and
maybe that's why they left the windows
open),
and the monster reaches in through a
window and paws at them. (Morons.)
The men round up their guns and drive it
away in a hail of buckshot. They also
round up the sheriff but can find no
evidence of the creature. He thinks it's
just a cougar but can see the families are
truly scared, so the sheriff leaves them
his shotgun for more protection and
promises to return in the morning when the
light is better.
As
things quiet down, the Fords and Turners
settles in for the night. While one of the
men uses the restroom, the creature
attacks him through the window. The men
rush outside again, spot the creature with
their flashlights, and fire several rounds
at it until the creature falls out of
sight into the dark. They
cautiously leave the porch to try and find
what they shot at. The women are
hysterical, and when Bob Ford tries to
return to the house to quiet them, he's
jumped and savaged by the creature! (And
the filmmakers make a huge mistake, here,
as the costume-shop origin of the creature
is painfully obvious as we see it's just a
plain old gorilla mask with big old
eye-holes.)
Ford manages to break away and crashes
through the front door to get away from
the claws and teeth. The
monster is driven off again, but the
families abandon the house -- never to
return again.
The
film ends with the narrator returning to
his home where he first heard the
creature's roar those many years ago. What
was the creature after that night at the
Ford's house? Who knows for sure. But he
is sure for certain that the monster is
still lurking in the backwaters and creeks
around Fouke.
The
End
One
individual who wanted to cash in on this
new monster phenomenon back in the 1970s
was Texarkana film entrepreneur, Charles
B. "Chuck" Pierce. Here,
Pierce implemented a documentary style of
filming, using testimonials of the locals
and had them narrate re-enactments of
their encounters with the beast with some
truly fascinating results. His
first effort is one of those
in-betweeners. It has plenty of camp value,
but I personally think the film
overachieves enough that the camp can be
overlooked. Pierce's
matter of fact style, coupled with his
knack for beautiful cinematography and
staging, somehow puts the hypno-whammy on
your brain making even the most jaded
viewer actually believe this stuff.
Personally, I don't need that much
convincing but I'm just weird that way.
Others
were too, because Pierce's film was a huge
hit and started a rash of exploitative
pseudo-documentaries and crypto-zoological
inspired films that helped fuel the fire
of the Bigfoot-Mania that was sweeping the
country at the time.
How
big was the Bigfoot-mania back in the
'70s for those of you who were not party
to it? Well, when Star Wars came
out, me and my friends were ecstatic
because we were under the mistaken
assumption from the previews, posters
and comics that Chewbacca was a Bigfoot
and, dare I say, a little disappointed
when we found it he was just a wookie.
Pierce
used this same type of style to tell the
tale of another Texarkana folk legend in The
Town That Dreaded Sundown.
A story of an unknown serial killer that
ran rampant in 1946, whose killing spree
mysteriously stopped as soon as it
started.
Pierce also gave us Lee Majors as a Viking
in The
Norseman,
that I haven't seen in twenty years but
would like to see again. But Pierce
had nothing to do with the immediate
sequel, Return
to Boggy Creek,
which boasted both Dana Plato, Dawn Wells
and a less belligerent monster doing good
deeds. Then Pierce returned with a sequel
of his own called The
Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek Returns.
Returning the creature to it's more
cantankerous nature, Pierce also took the
lead in that one leading a collegiate
expedition into the swamps of Fouke to try
and collect scientific proof of the
creature's existence (and
if I can find a copy of it, we'll be
reviewing it next week.) It tries
to use the same style but it just doesn't
have the magic of the original -- but it's
an absolute turd-burger of a riot to
watch.
Legend
of Boggy Creek
is a completely different story though.
Right from the beginning, the film's
opening sequence really grabs you and sets
the tone; and you realize this might not
be as bad as you think (especially
if you saw Boggy
Creek II
first.) You
watch the young boy running through the
tall brush and weeds, stopping -- ever so
suddenly -- to peer back to make sure something
isn't following him (and you urge
the kid to keep running, and faster at
that, because you feel as exposed as the
kid really is.) Despite being out
in the open country, the atmosphere of
dread is as thick as the chorus of cicadas
that drown out the soundtrack. And the
camera teases us, keeping the kid in
frame, just so, that it appears he's never
quite out of danger and something could
loom into frame and overtake him at any
second.
That's
what you're hoping for in this type of
mock-documentary film: That scene when
John Q. tells you about how it started out
as just another normal day...And we follow
him around for awhile...And then the
camera pans on past him...Ever so slightly...And
-- WHAMMO! Holy flipping snot on a
cracker there it is! The creature is
looking right at you. You may laugh later
at the creature's low-budget features, but
if you had that little knot of dread in
the pit of your stomach right before you
got that first glimpse, THAT is
what separates the good monster
mockumentaries from the bad ones.
When
The
Legend of Boggy Creek
is in full mockumentary mode, using the
locals and the scholarly narrator, it
excels. But it does kind of falls apart in
the last third when it abandons this for
bad melodrama as it concentrates solely on
the attack and siege on the Ford house.
It's technically sound -- and there is
some suspense here, but the actors just
can't quite pull it off and we do get a
disastrous look at the monster where it's
costume shop origins are all too easy to
spot. (You
can see the stuntman through the eyeholes.)
Still,
the first two-thirds of the film is truly
fascinating (if
you can leave your bias against back-water
America at home -- right where it belongs)
and
I can't recommend the movie enough. And a
big thanks to Hen's Tooth Video for
finally getting this thing back in
circulation.
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