Boggy Creek: The Legend is True Blu-ray features poor video and terrible audio in this disappointing Blu-ray release
Five college students take a vacation in a remote cabin in the Texarkana swamps, unaware that a mysterious Bigfoot-like creature has been repeatedly sighted in the area.
As we await the arrival of direct-to-video horror auteur Brian T. Jaynes's Humans Vs Zombies,
it's an appropriate moment to examine the writer-director's previous venture, one of the many
sequels to the 1972 docudrama, The Legend of Boggy Creek. Jaynes's effort has engendered
wildly divergent reactions, as a quick glance at the comments submitted by Amazon purchasers
will demonstrate. One of the reasons, I suspect, is that Jaynes is the reverse of many low-budget
horror aspirants today. He does care about character and story, and his Boggy Creek: The
Legend Is True spends most of its running time building, slowly and deliberately, to a grim finale in a manner that will bore anyone not intrigued
by the nuances of interactions among people. Where
Jaynes falls short is where most of today's technocratic filmmakers excel: Boggy Creek suffers
from technical shortcomings that Blu-ray only serves to magnify. More on that in the Video and
Audio sections.
The original Boggy Creek creature was known as the "Fouke Monster" after Fouke, Arkansas,
the site of the 1972 film. The film was made by Charles B. Pierce, who came from Texarkana,
the twin cities that straddle the Texas/Arkansas border. Fouke residents told of encounters with a
mysterious creature, and reenactments were staged. The menace, however, was primarily to farm
animals and pets.
A hunter of livestock isn't enough to scare today's audience; so Jaynes and his writing partner,
Jennifer Minar, turned to the standard horror trope cleverly deconstructed in the recent The Cabin
in the Woods: a group of young people served up as victims. Jaynes and Minar just wrote the
routine better than we're used to seeing it, so much so that they reminded everyone just how bad
most scripts really are today.
Boggy Creek follows the traditional plot in which a group of young people (here, they're
college students) go on holiday to a remote location—and yes, it is a cabin in the woods—only to encounter something unexpected,
terrifying and deadly. But they don't meet the monster until
well into the movie, and by then the audience has spent over an hour getting to know them. If
that kind of filmmaking bores you, then Boggy Creek will too. A viewer has to be interested
enough in people, in what they say and hold back, in the pauses and evasions in conversation,
and in the life that preceded their arrivals, to be entertained by the interactions of the surprisingly
talented young cast. I don't want to overstate the case; Jaynes and Minar aren't Eugene O'Neill,
and they haven't written drama for the ages. But they've created characters that are several cuts
above the usual cartoon cutouts that populate cookie-cutter slice-and-dice horror films.
The cabin in question belongs to Jennifer Dupree (Melissa Carnell), who inherited it from her
father (Bryan Massey), to whom she was devoted and who died recently, the apparent victim of a
hit-and-run accident on the nearby highway. Jennifer hasn't been to the cabin in years, because
she has vivid and sad memories of watching her parents argue there when she was little. They
split up, and now Jennifer lives with her mother (Jennifer Sipes), from who she's currently
estranged.
The original plan was for Jennifer to get away for a week with her best friend, Maya Jones
(Shavon Kirksey), who's as easygoing as Jennifer is buttoned-up. But Maya scuttles the plan by
inviting her father's godson, Dave Marshall (Damon Lipari), to join them. When she breaks the
news to Jennifer, Maya vouches for Dave's good looks and character and suggests that maybe a
romance will be good for her friend. Unfortunately for both of them, Maya didn't know about
Dave's girlfriend, a "high maintenance" number named Brooke (Stephanie Honore), who
accompanies Dave with a big smile and claws bared.
Maya also forgot to mention that she'd invited her own boyfriend, an overgrown kid named
Tommy (Texas Battle, Final Destination 3). With five people, four of them in couples, and only
two bedrooms, the house is now thoroughly overcrowded, but Jennifer takes this in stride. She's
too lost in her memories to care. That quality intrigues Dave, who has his own reasons for feeling
detached (which I won't reveal). He and Jennifer find themselves frequently talking, and Brooke
finds herself frequently fuming.
To make sure we remember what the film is really about—and to give us critical information, in
the best Hitchcock tradition—Jaynes introduces two additional plot elements. The first is a
sheriff and his squeamish deputy (Carl Savering and Frederic Doss), who are following a bloody
trail of mangled bodies. In between puking, the deputy keeps telling his boss, "You know what
did this!", to which the sheriff replies that he should shut up and call the coroner. One of the
scenes they encounter involves a dismembered body in a pickup truck for which, according to the
disc's extras, a lengthier sequence of attack was filmed than appears in the finished cut. Another
results from an attack on a pair of campers that's shown in all its gory detail.
The second additional plot element is the shotgun-toting inhabitant of the neighboring cabin,
Casey Guthrie (Cody Callahan), whom Jennifer encounters at key points in the film. A cryptic
obsessive with a thousand-yard stare, Casey tells terrible tales of how his pretty wife was
snatched by a creature in the woods and warns Jennifer and her friends to leave. In any other
film, he'd be much older and a red herring, but Jaynes cast an actor not much older than the kids
in the cabin, which instantly makes Casey seem somehow credible (though not especially
helpful).
Everything comes to a head when the vacationers embark on an overnight camping trip in the
woods, minus Brooke, who has stormed off in a jealous huff to encounter . . . do I really need to
say it? As the ending approached, I wondered whether Jaynes could possibly wind it all up in a
manner that didn't cheat. To my relief and admiration, he succeeded.
Both IMDb and a close reading of the credits indicate that Boggy Creek was shot digitally (on
the Panasonic Varicam, according to IMDb). More direct evidence appears in the film itself in a
phenomenon I have seen in Blu-ray and DVD extras but never before in a feature film: combing
artifacts—obvious and distracting ones, mostly in the first half of the film. These are not a
result of a 1080i encode; the Blu-ray from Hannover House is a 1080p, AVC-encoded disc. No, these
artifacts appear to be part and parcel of the original material, probably a result of some
misadjustment of the Varicam's variable shutter rate (which is one its chief selling points).
Maybe someone tried to fix the problem in post and failed, or maybe no one noticed. I've
included examples in the extra screenshots (nos. 11-14), but they only hint at the extent of the
distraction caused by watching parts of the image separate and recombine on your screen while
viewing the film. (You may need to expand the images to their full size to see the "scissoring"
effect that combing creates.)
Even without this glaring flaw, the image for Boggy Creek demonstrates that digital capture
isn't automatically superior. It's clean and noiseless, but detail is inconsistent. Some shots are
sharp and focused, while others are soft and fuzzy as if film had been exposed through gauze or a
diffusion filter. This does not appear to be a deliberate effect, because there's no apparent pattern
to the variations. An occasional shot in direct sunlight appears overexposed, resulting in a texture
that is almost granular.
Black levels are adequate, but the production rarely has to show deep blacks, because the script
specifies a full moon. The color palette is never richly saturated, even when it comes to red
blood; I suspect this was necessary to help "sell" the creature effects. Other than the
aforementioned combing, I didn't notice any other artifacts, but then again I was sufficiently
distracted by those and the sound issues (see below) that I might have missed them.
What happened in post-production? While some Blu-ray purists will immediately fixate on the
lack of a lossless track, the real issue, as always, is the mix itself. At the maximum bitrate of 640
kbps, the Dolby Digital 5.1 track does a thoroughly capable job of presenting the film's
soundtrack, and that's the problem—the track is a botch job. Voices often sound hollow and off-center,
as if there were no center channel at all, and the dialogue had been poorly split between
the front and left mains. Worse still, the mix sounds like it was never finished. Ambiant noise
switches on and off from shot to shot, as it would in a temp edit using production sound; the
effect is far too common and haphazard to represent a deliberate choice. It's simply a distraction.
Bass levels are too loud and boomy at times when they aren't needed, so that they lack the
requisite impact when they are. The movie literally sounds like the production ran out of money
part way through post, and someone made the decision to release the film's soundtrack in
whatever state it was in.
All of the extras are in hi-def at 1080p and presented at 1.78:1.
Behind the Scenes (10:49): A brief compilation of on-set and on-location footage
from various scenes, including an extended sequence that didn't make the film, although its
aftermath is discovered by the two cops. The longest portion shows the prosthetic "gag"
involved in creating one of the creature's gory fatalities.
Photo Gallery: Twenty-two photos that appear to be publicity stills. Some of
them are too explicit to serve as traditional "lobby cards" (which, in any case, are rarely if ever
used these days).
Trailers (3.34): This section contains trailers for Boggy Creek and
Humans Vs Zombies. The Boggy Creek trailer contains mock interview footage not seen
in the final film, and it's unclear whether it was created specially for the trailer or was taken from
scenes cut from the film.
Jaynes has talent as a storyteller, and he clearly has a knack both for casting and for directing
actors. But a director also has to be master of the technical craft of filmmaking, or at least have
people working for him on whom he can rely. Boggy Creek should have been an interesting
discovery, and I'd love to be able to recommend it. Instead, I find myself in the unfortunate
position of warning purchasers that the technical flaws of the film—the film, not the Blu-ray
—make this one to skip. Let's hope lessons were learned for Humans Vs Zombies, which, at
least from the trailer, looks promising.
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