Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

49th Kill

I just hope those hunting dogs had a good, hard look in the mirror when they got home after refusing to follow that sasquatch trail into the woods. A shameful footnote in the history of Fouke, Arkansas - a town that prides itself as having the finest hunting dogs in the state, as many of these folks point out frequently.

First thing you have to accept is that the most monster action you're going to see in The Legend of Boggy Creek is an out-of-focus guy in an ape suit behind some trees. But the miracle of this film is how effective those scenes are. It really works quite well - I mean, imagine hiking through some godforsaken wilderness like that and seeing some shaggy dude through the trees like that. I would fucking shit myself.

That reminds me of one time I took my little brother hiking in this place called Morton National Park in Australia. It was an incredibly remote location that you had to drive an hour up a very rough dirt road to get to - this is a road I used to travel frequently and I never, ever saw another car on it. Anyway, this time, we got semi-lost on the hike and it was dark by the time we started driving back and on the way through this forest, my headlights picked out a dude in a red shirt and jeans standing halfway up in a tree - I just glimpsed him but I only remember a really pale blur of a face, like, too pale to be normal. Fuck knows what someone was doing there and maybe I should have stopped but I accelerated the fuck away from there. He was just sort of standing on a branch and not waving at me or anything so he mustn't have needed help, but there are no settlements or farms out there at all, and it's nowhere near the walking trails. Urgh, gives me the shivers to think about it - it might have just been a trick of the light and it was a pile of rags or something, I don't know.

But I digress, completely. The Legend of Boggy Creek is a very clunky, amateurish film in many ways, but it has a few very striking qualities which make it extremely worth watching, in my opinion. For a start, it somehow captures that eeriness of remote nature. Something about the character of this country, the barren wintry trees in the waterlogged earth, the sheer monotony of the landscape, as well as its huge scale (captured in aerial shots), is very affecting. And there's just something so damn eerie in that image of a silhouette through the trees, something not human, not animal.

The film is a sort of semi-documentary. It gave me a feeling of old TV reruns of random content from that old Wonderful World of Disney show - I can't say what specifically it reminded me of, but I feel like Disney used to use that weird format quite a bit in the late 60's/early 70's. Of course, this has a different vibe entirely, but some of the more ethnographic scenes had that same feel. Unusually, this is a film where about half the cast are actors, and the other half are the actual locals of Fouke just playing themselves in re-enactments. There's something wonderfully authentic about the end result. There's a timbre in the voiceovers from the various characters - a totally unique sense of place in the dialect. OK, as a compelling argument as to the existence of Bigfoot, nothing here is very convincing, but as a document capturing this little community and sub-culture, it's quite fascinating.

Laid over all this is some very cheesy-sounding narration and some very mawkish songs, with lyrics written to literally describe events in the film. There's one scene, evoking the monster's eight-year gap between sightings, where the song's lyrics describe how lonely he must have been. It's played over footage of the sasquatch sort of swaying behind the trees and I suddenly got a mental image of the film zooming in to show it actually singing the song itself, which would have been quite funny. But this less effective stuff also lends an "of-its-time" quality to the film which makes it weirdly hypnotic.

Best Kill (may contain traces of spoiler)

It's pretty slim pickings because no one ever got close enough to this thing to verify what it was, let alone to get ripped apart by it. But there is one scene where it was trying to get into someone's cabin one night, and the next day they find their cat dead outside. Because there were no signs of violence, we get a dramatic declaration from the narrator that it must have died of fright from the very sight of the monster. Da da DUMMM!!!!