#10 The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972). Charles B. Pierce was an Arkansas-based, one-man exploitation empire writing/producing/directing (and even appearing in) some of the best drive-in movies of his era. But the one that started it all for him was The Legend of Boggy Creek, a modest, 16mm feature he shot for approx. $160,000 that would go on to gross $22 million in independent release (eclipsing many of the biggest stars and studio releases of 1972). The unexpected success forever altered Mr. Cholly (as he was affectionately called), but he still maintained a fevered output of indie productions that later followed such as The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The Evictors and many others. Many who see The Legend of Boggy Creek today, without any understanding of how novel it was in its era, are mystified by its legendary status, and perceive it as poorly lit, badly cast, etc. But I was there as a terrified tyke seeing it as an 8-year-old in a small Southern town not that much different from the depicted Fouke, Arkansas, and it really hit home, literally and figuratively. The back woods accents, the rural locales, and even the folklore surrounding sightings of a regional cryptid known in the film as The Fouke Monster loomed large on my impressionable psyche. I remember I dragged my mother to the show the very next day after seeing it, insisting it was the scariest movie shed ever see. I was incensed even as a kid that the projectionist got the reels mixed up and showed them out of order! But the power the film had to make audiences scream and become hysterical was palpable. Among the highlights are the dead cat close-up (shocked to death by the very sight of the monster), the eerie location photography of the swampy bayous, the endlessly fearful witnesses who scream repeatedly, the cryptid claw through a bathroom window (which got laughs and yells in equal measure), and the horrific love squeeze the beast gives one of the men towards the end as they stage a night-long shotgun siege against the Fouke Monster as it terrorizes them and their womenfolk. Pierce used the Techniscope process favored by Leone and others to give the anamorphic comps of the lonely back roads and tributaries an epic feel, and the rack focus/deep focus cinematography produced visual tension. Countering the genuinely scary scenes is a peaceful, even meditative, layering of introspection, brought about from the opening moments in which the narrator explains he is looking back at his childhood and the stories he heard from the older types at the general store, all of whom swore by the creatures existence, as well as the plaintive folksy songs which have become emblematic of the films elegiac tone. Its impossible to appreciate the film (perhaps) without proper historical perspective, but I still find its many charms -- authenticity, creepy photography, and sudden shifts of tone -- outweigh the critical backlash that has set in against it in many circles. On an added note, I was fortunate to get to know Mr. Cholly briefly in the years before his death, and was grateful for the many stories he shared with me about this, and his other, films. He was a one-of-a-kind, and so was this film.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 13:57:51 +0000
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