"Something came through here last night and killed my two prize shoats." I remember going home after seeing the movie in 1972, to look up what was a shoat. It is a young weaned pig. Yes, the music is hokey, or corny, but it sets a logical tone for this film. The man who is near rating it, should be near rating for a living, because he has such a perfect voice for it. The sound of "the creature" vocalizing reminds me of a bear.Here's a song sung about the creature:The Legend of Boggy Creek" Lyrics and Music: Earl E. Smith Sung by: Chuck BryantThis is where the story plays, A world on which we seldom gaze, A page from the book of yesterdays, Birds and beast and wind and water.Here beneath the bright blue sky, No man smoke blinds the eagle's eye. And things that crawl or swim or fly, Feed and breed and live and die.Here the sulfur river flow, Rising when the storm cloud blows. And this is where the creature goes, Safe within a world he knows.Perhaps he dimly wonders why, There is no other such as I. To touch, to love, before I die, To listen to my lonely cry.

I find that genre cinema is very subjective. A great drama is a great drama from the 30s to the 60s to the current. When we start talking about genres, though, from comedy to horror to sci-fi, they are often very much a product of their time and, quite often, one's opinion of a movie in that genre depends on time and place. There are a lot of bad 80s horror movies that I love. I won't try to tell you that they are good, but they are great to me. I can't help but feel that this is the case with those who love this movie. To be fair, this was a monster hit at the time, but that really only leaves me to wonder if people in 1972 just needed something better to do with their time.I was in elementary school at the dawn of the 80s and I used to look forward to those days when the teacher would wheel in that reel-to- reel movie projector. The smell of the bulbs and the film, the sounds of the spool, the look of the movies. It's still such a hot-wire memory for me. For those too young to remember, this reference is meaningless, but this movie is exactly the kind of thing I imagine watching on a sunny afternoon, sitting on my rug square, in a 3rd grade class on that projector. That's about the quality of it, too.Frankly, the film is terrible. The acting is atrocious, because most aren't actors, they are the real life people re-enacting their experiences. The music is cheesy. So many people on here are talking about how great it is. Really? Really??? Bad folk music that was dated two months after it came out and sounds downright hokey now. Wisely, we never really see the monster, but that's also one of the things hurting the movie. Yep, it's a guy in a Halloween store gorilla suit. We probably didn't want to see it much more than we do, but a little more monster would have gone a long, long way in this movie because there's just nothing else here.I'll break this movie down for you in one paragraph. This guy saw Bigfoot outside his house, there was some weird noise, there was a dark shape. This woman and her kids saw Bigfoot. There is more running, some more noises and some more vague shapes. Repeat this for about a dozen more encounters along the way. That's all you get. Like watching a dryer to see if the red sock will fall a different way this time, it's an endless litany of the same experiences, acted out poorly, hoping something will change with this one. Eventually, you are praying that Bigfoot will shred one of these people just to give you something different.Okay, it's supposedly a landmark movie. The first pseudo- documentary style horror film. That might be the case, but that doesn't make it interesting or exciting. I think I've only given a rating this low to a handful of movies, but this one deserved it. If you didn't see it at the drive-in in 1972 and it didn't scare you as a kid and you still have some childhood impression of it, then quite simply there is nothing, at all, worth watching here.

The Legend of Boggy Creek - like so many 'cult classics' - is a great example of how a film can carry a low critical rating and still be awesome.I remember seeing this film in Roger's Theater in the (then little) town of Poplar Bluff, Missouri - the nearest town to where I grew up, in very wooded, lakeside, Wappapello. So, I actually DID live in the same sort of woodsy, lakeside spookiness setting the film. Where I grew up, the word 'neighbor' meant the 'nearest house' and often you couldn't see their lights - or they may even be a nervous flashlight-trek through the pitch-black woods and along lonely, moonlit, gravel roads - and if the Fouke Monster happened to be tearing you apart out behind your place, they MIGHT hear your loudest screams. Probably not - and definitely not, if he got INSIDE.My pal and I got brought into town by my Grandma and dropped off outside the Roger's that night. Having been lured-in by the short, terrifying trailers on TV, we anxiously bought our tickets and headed for the center-front seats, shoving and prodding each other over our mutual certainty that the other would get a scare that would make him pee his pants.I can still remember ourselves - along with many others - cringing and ducking through several parts of this movie. As far as me and Bruce were concerned, to our eleven-year-old brains, the (then novel) documentary-like presentation and 'I-Sweah-Befo'-Gawd-Awmitey' testimony just seemed ALL too plausible - and real. We both KNEW people like those!Leaving the theater in shudders from flashes of snarling memories - and a new and real dread of returning to the remoteness of where we both lived - we climbed into the big, crimson-velor back seat my Grandma's Delta 88, wordless and white. To us, that Fouke Monster was REAL - and not only that, but it - or one just like it - could easily be living in the endless woods behind our very own houses!This film is a treasure for several reasons, not the least of which is the nostalgia it will hold for those of us to who got to see it at that perfect, naive age when it hits a kid exactly the way it was intended to - it's the perfect 'scary movie' for preteen sleepovers.I can watch it now and roll my eyes, of course, but, when I reminisce back to that darkened, all-enveloping theater, so many of us gasping, crying out, grabbing our armrests and jumping in unison - and the nighttime nervousness for a week, afterward... it still makes me smile. :}

The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972) * 1/2 (out of 4) Charles B. Pierce's drive-in hit takes a look at a Bigfoot-like creature living in Arkansas. Through interviews with locals and re-enactments, the docudrama tracks several stories of the beast terrorizing locals. You really have to admire Pierce for getting this film made and it turning into a major hit and as a young kid I really liked this movie. However, watching it as an adult lets me see the countless warts that are scattered throughout it even though there are a couple good moments. I think the highlight of the movie happens towards the middle when a couple women are in a cabin with their children when the monster comes for an attack. This sequence actually manages to have some nice tension but sadly the rest of the film isn't nearly as good. I think a lot of the problem is that the film is just too uneven for its own good. The film bounces around from redneck locals talking about the monster and then we get other scenes where locals make fun of those who believe in the creature. The problem is that these people aren't actors and their fake performances just give the film a fake feel. This is meant to be like a documentary but the line between fact and fiction are crossed so much that it's hard to know what to believe. Another problem I had with the film is that it's poorly edited together and I think the telling of the stories could have been handled in a much better way. With that said, I will say that the film is still only available in ugly, P&S prints so perhaps one day a real remastered version will come along and we'll be able to see something new.