In short: Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues (1983)

aka The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek, Part II

As the long-time regulars among my imaginary readers will know, I am a bit of a fan of hard-working regional Arkansas filmmaker Charles B. Pierce’s original Legend of Boggy Creek. The curiously authentic feel of a 70s documentary about Forteana with added restaging of Beast encounters that can turn out to be surprisingly creepy, the songs that comment on the action, the brilliant swampy atmosphere of the whole business all combine into something truly special that breathes a sense of its time and its place.

A decade and more than half a dozen films later, Pierce returned to the Arkansas swamp well, with decidedly mixed results. There was also a Pierce-less Boggy Creek movie, Return to Boggy Creek, in the meantime but let’s just ignore that one, like Pierce himself did.

At first, Boggy Creek II appears to go for the same mood of mock documentary scenes connected by a nature documentary voice track, but quickly, something of a more conventional plot develops. Gun-toting anthropologist Dr. Brian C. Lockhart (played by Pierce himself), two of his students (Cindy Butler and Pierce’s son Chuck Jr.) and a friend of student number one (Serene Hedin) travel to the Legend’s boggy home because the number of sightings in the last months has increased heavily, and the beast has begun to become rather aggressive. When they are not wandering the swamps, using high-tech of 1983 for their monster hunt, or have a melodramatic fight against a mad dog, Lockhart tells his students some Boggy Creek monster tales. These segments are clear attempts at recapturing the magic of the first movie, but they simply aren’t quite as good or fun as those in the original. They also tend to break up the little dramatic tension Pierce has been able to build in the adventures of Lockhart and company, giving the film a start/stop feeling for no productive reason whatsoever.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing worthwhile about Boggy Creek II whatsoever: Pierce can still be rather good at producing a feeling of a specific time and place, if now one that has to fight its way through the usual monster movie clichés; and the photography is often pretty. From time to time, Boggy Creek II even reaches small plateaus of actual campfire bigfoot tale creepiness. Which isn’t much when compared to the first movie, but did provide me with enough seasonal chills to make this less of a disappointment than it could have been.