VisualCrack

Dir. Charles Pierce

Cast: Charles Pierce, Charles Pierce, Jr., Cindy Butler, Jimmy Clem

Charles Pierce follows up on his own, The Legend Of Boggy Creek, what many profess to be the single foremost Bigfoot film of all time, with... this travasty! Disregarding completely 1977’s Return To Boggy Creek, made by another disparate group of low budget psuedo film-makers, which in turn, succeeded in ignoring the first film. This film instead turns out to be a bland assimilation of Shriek Of The Mutilated and an erstwhile episode of Dukes of Hazzard, any concept of mystery and foreboding is dissipated only to be commuted by a sense of utter apathy.


Gone are the forerunner's distant pans of the core protagonist, no more colourful, real life, provincial folk to augment the possible cachet of “maybe it truly happened” authenticity. All the viewer is left with are atmosphere eradicating close-ups of Mr. BigFoot, lots of Daisy Duke cut-offs, and sheer stupidity-borne monotony.

Professor Lockhart (Charles Pierce) embarks on a backwoods excursion to pursue the fabled Big Foot with the assistance of a new-fangled "Super Big Foot Scanning Computer"! Along for the ride are two indubitably disposable girls and a geeky chap (Charlie Pierce, Jr.) who seems to squander the majority of the movie in an obvious catatonic state. While the quartet spends what feels like a lifetime gazing at the 'marvel of modern science' computer screen and then managing to blunder into an inexplicable mad dog attack, we, the viewer, are remunerated with dream-like flashbacks told by the Professor.

These reminiscences comprise stories of local encounters with the Big Foot himself, despairingly for us, none of these tales are the least bit frightening, no matter how hard the film makers try to convince us different. Eventually, these four savants encounter “Old Man Crenshaw,” a dirt-covered backwoods man that lives a hermetic life in the eponymous Boggy Creek. But what kind of secret is he protecting? The answer by this point being... do we truly care!

Incoherent attempts by the cast at a thing termed “acting” and a story that makes a Charles Band movie take on the demeanor of a Scorsese epic, do not portend well for Boggy Creek II from the beginning. The style is leaden, it feels like an ignominious cash-in of a solid predecessor, and there’s never any palpable payoff. As much as it pains me to say it, Boggy Creek II was a towering disappointment.

Verdict: Better luck next time, Chuck...