Cult-Movie Review: The Evictors (1979)

There’s a case to be made that the seldom-seen The Evictors (1979) is actually Charles B. Pierce’s best horror film. 

Exhibit A: The Evictors doesn’t boast the lapses into amateurism that mar The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972).

Exhibit B: The film doesn’t feature the bizarre lapses in tone one finds in The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976), either.

Exhibit C: Finally,The Evictors features better performances and far more effective scares than the miserably bad Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues (1985).

Instead, The Evictors is a kind of back-to-basics horror film all about a woman alone in an isolated setting (a farm house), contending with a frightening, relentless intruder. 

In this case, Jessica Harper plays the imperiled character, and Michael Parks portrays the most useless, unhelpful husband in horror movie history. But the film’s most potent set-pieces involve Harper contending with an armed home intruder during the thick of the night

These scenes of terror (set in 1942) are cross-cut with quasi-documentary style sequences (presented in sepia tone coloring) of historical attacks in the same house, set in 1934 and 1939. By cutting between the scenes in the past (which ended badly for the home’s residents) with scenes from the movie’s present -- in which another character must overcome the same menacing individual -- a genuine sense of suspense is generated. In short order, we start to understand the house's history of horror and recognize Harper as only the latest, but not the last, victim.

You may cry foul over the film’s final twist or surprise, which suggests that a character would keep using broken glasses for nineteen years, but The Evictors nonetheless manages to impress, both in terms of its production values (and period detail), and visceral impact. In short, this is one of those diamonds in the rough, a real sleeper, that more horror fans should take a look at.

“There’s been a lot of strange things happening around here.”

In mid-summer 1928, a representative of Shreveport Union Bank attempts to deliver an eviction notice to a rural farm-house that belongs to the Monroe Family. 

Because he has failed to do so on previous attempts, the bank officer brings heavily-armed Federal agents this time. A confrontation ensues between the family inside and the agents of the law, with the Monroes believed gunned-down.

In 1942, real estate agent Jake Rudd (Vic Morrow) sells the long-vacant Monroe house to a young married couple, Ruth (Jessica Harper) and Ben Watkins (Michael Parks). Rudd doesn’t share any information about the house’s violent history, but Ruth soon learns that former owners were murdered in 1934.  

Later, she hears from a crippled neighbor, Mrs. Gibson (Sue Ane Langdon) that another couple died there as well, in 1939. The husband was electrocuted and the wife was burned alive.

Soon, Ruth begins seeing a strange intruder, wearing overalls, lurking around the house by night.  

Ben’s job often takes him away, to Shreveport, but he asks the town sheriff to patrol near the house, and then teaches Ruth how to use a gun.  Ruth, however, wants to move.

Unfortunately, neither the police nor the weapon can prevent the strange, obsessed intruder from waging a campaign of terror and death on the Watkins and their house…

“It’s so nice to see that old house come back to life.”

In some significant sense, all of Charles B. Pierce’s horror films deal with man’s connection to the land, or to his home. In The Legend of Boggy Creek, the Fouke Monster terrorizes the locals, but the film spends as much time introducing the storied people of the town as it does contending with the monster itself. Similarly, The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976) finds the folks of Texarkana under siege, fighting for their very homes against a ruthless, inexplicable killer.  

The Evictors -- which commences with the claim that it is based on a true story -- concerns what occurs when a family feels it has been displaced from its rightful land, its rightful home. The “evictors” of the title are not just the bankers and agents of the film’s first scene, but the murderous stranger and his hidden accomplices who use lethal force to keep “their” farm house unoccupied. If they can't live in their own home, no one will. At least not for long.

The Evictors thrives as the most consistent and suspenseful of Pierce’s films in part because the director sticks, largely, to that parcel of land upon which the Monroe House stands. There isn’t a lot of back forth, or opportunities for slapstick humor or car chases. 

Instead, Pierce crafts a sense of unnerving, unrelieved claustrophobia because Ruth (Suspiria’s Harper) really seems to have no hope for escape. She begs her husband to move, but he doesn’t acquiesce. Meanwhile, he is constantly going away on business trips or working late at the local town factory. He is almost never home when he is needed, and so we get the sense, after a while, that a confrontation between Ruth and the stranger is inevitable. She can’t escape that fate. 

In some way, this element of the story may be a sly commentary on what it meant to be married in the 1940s, at least from a woman's perspective. Ruth has no say in what happens to her family, even if her very life is on the line.

Pierce stages some splendid and disturbing sequences in the house, as Ruth’s safety is imperiled again and again. At one juncture, a lightning flash reveals the killer standing at the kitchen door in darkest night.  

On another occasion -- while Ruth is on the phone -- she sees the shadow’s stranger lurking upstairs, hovering above her on the second floor. She runs for her life as the killer begins to slowly descend the staircase.  In a scene that is reminiscent of the climax of Halloween (1978) but nonetheless highly effective, Ruth attempts to flee the killer in the house, only to find that he has braced something against the exterior door, thus making egress impossible. Ruth (like Laurie Strode) has to break the glass and remove the impediment, a wood board, to escape, and to run free into the dark, inhospitable night.

These scenes are authentically scary, and they are, for all practical purposes, the heart of the film. The Evictors concerns one woman -- disbelieved -- forced to rely on her own auspices in a time of precious little autonomy, if she wishes to survive. 

The film also plays cleverly with the idea of Ruth arming herself, and taking her defense into her own hands. There are, clearly, advantages and disadvantages to handing a loaded gun off to someone only minimally-trained in its usage. The Evictors plays on our expectations involving that gun, and in a manner that will drive you up the wall, as Ruth's danger grows, and a tragedy can't be averted.

My wife, who found herself unable to divert her attention away from the colorful The Town that Dreaded Sundown, liked The Evictors but felt that the trick ending was just too much. I've read the same complaint online.

Basically, we finally learn the identity of the stranger and his conspirators, but do so by the appearance of a prop (broken glasses) that, by this juncture in 1947 -- nineteen years since the original eviction -- should have been fixed, no doubt. 

The ending is actually bit unsavory all the way around, considering what it portends for Ruth. It’s not the greatest or most effective note for the movie to go out on, but I felt that the coda didn’t mar the good work that had been done in the rest of the film.  

Michael Parks (Red State) delivers a solid (if infuriating…) performance as the useless husband, but the film belongs to Harper. She is affecting as a sort of early “final girl” type in the immediate post-Halloween aftermath, before the onslaught of the 1980s. Harper's Ruth takes the time to learn about the house and its mysteries, seeks out help, attempts to defend herself, and fights ably against those who wish her ill-will. It’s too bad the movie doesn’t take the extra final step to reward Ruth for her insight and vigilance. The killers get the last laugh.

The Evictors ends with reports of another series of murders at the Monroe House, and news that “to this day, the house remains vacant,” thus leaving open the possibility of a sequel that, sadly, never came.

If you closely study The Evictors, the film also explores the idea that a social evil (even a legal one, like eviction), is bound to be met with another social evil. The original family never forgets its connection to the farmhouse, or that land, and so a legacy of terror grows around it. In today’s environment of myriad property foreclosures, it would be easy to remake The Evictors, set it in the present, and get rid of the silly eyeglasses coda. 

Why do it? If nothing else, a remake would draw attention back to the original film, which was a box office bomb but nonetheless represents the most effective, focused work of its late, great director, Charles B. Pierce. 

Cult-Movie Review: The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976)

Charles B. Pierce -- the director who brought the world the box office hit The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972) -- also gave audiences another beloved horror picture in the same decade: the recently re-made and re-imagined The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976).

A fictionalized, semi-documentary telling of the Moonlight or Phantom Murders that went unsolved in Texarkana in the immediate post-World War II era, this bicentennial year film has earned praise from horror aficionados over the decades. In part this praise is due to the disturbing nature of the movie's unforgettable boogeyman: an anonymous killer who attacks unsuspecting victims at remote lover’s lanes by moonlight, and who dons a white sack over his head (much as Jason Voorhees would in Friday the 13^th Part II [1981]). 

The mysterious killer in the film not only escapes detection and capture, but undertakes a genuinely harrowing reign of terror. Pierce, adopting a blunt approach to the action, spares the audience nothing. 

Accordingly, at least two sequences in The Town that Dreaded Sundown -- one involving a trombone as a murder weapon (!) and the other featuring Gilligan’s Island’s Dawn Wells as the prospective victim -- have achieved cult status today. They are effective genre set-pieces that raise one’s blood pressure significantly.

Uniquely, The Town that Dreaded Sundown also appears to forecast both the 1980s slasher movement in the genre and the 1990s obsession with serial killers. The boogeyman in Town is a strange combination of both types: a masked, murderous assailant who can be anywhere at any time, and a man -- sans “uniform” -- who can move freely about in Texarkana.  

That double-identity lends the film a significant degree of paranoia, since one is never certain if the killer hails from the police force or local government, or is otherwise nearby as Texas Ranger Morales (Ben Johnson) outlines his plans to catch the criminal. Clearly, the killer is someone who knows his way around the town, and regularly visits local establishments, like a restaurant seen late in the picture. Like Norman Bates in Psycho (1960), this madman can hide in plain sight.

A bizarrely-paced movie of highs and lows which pauses for some imbecilic humor and slow-motion car chases, The Town that Dreaded Sundown nonetheless impresses, even today, because of its strong period details, and its compelling story of a killer who emerges from nowhere to terrify a community and then, creepily, recedes to nowhere, leaving trauma and terror in his wake.

It's likely we will never know the identity of this real-life killer, and yet the movie places him squarely and prominently in the collective imagination, even attending a screening of the film itself...seeing his life's "work" reflected on the silver screen. In this way, Pierce ties the events of 1946 to the year 1976, and suggests that horror still dwells when the sun goes down.

“Texarkana looked normal during daytime hours...but everyone dreaded sundown.”

Just eight months after the end of World War II, on March 3, 1946, a Phantom Killer appears in Texarkana, attacking two youngsters at a local lover’s lane.

The killer goes silent until March 24, when he strikes again, this time murdering Emma Lou Cook and Howard Turner on a rainy night. 

While the Texarakana police, including Deputy Norm Ramsey (Andrew Prine) attempt to make sense of the killer’s motives and movements, legendary “lone wolf” Texas Ranger J.D. Morales (Ben Johnson) arrives in town to take over the investigation.

Meanwhile, the Phantom Killer becomes the subject of national news as the residents hide behind locked doors after sundown, and the killer strikes again, this time attacking a high school band player with a trombone and knife on the night of April 14.

Eventually, the Phantom Killer’s trail goes cold, but Morales and Ramsey get one last, unexpected chance to apprehend him…

“The fear spread like cancer…”

It looks like The Town that Dreaded Sundown actually got its title from Pierce’s The Legend of Boggy Creek. In that film, the narrator, Vern Stierman notes that the town of Fouke is fine by daytime. But by sundown it becomes a place of fear because of the Fouke Monster. 

Stierman's vocal services are also retained for The Town that Dreaded Sundown, and he repeats, almost verbatim that (good) line of dialogue about the fading of the light, and the fear that comes with the shroud of darkness.

Although based on a true story, The Town that Dreaded Sundown also captures a slow-dawning sense of uneasiness, circa 1946, in the American psyche. World War II had been won and soldiers were returning home, buying houses and attending college, thanks to the passage of the G.I. Bill. 

But the end of World War did not mean, necessarily, the end of anxiety. 

For example, Russia was developing and testing atomic bombs as early as 1949 and there was a feeling of marking time's passage, perhaps, until the next crisis emerged..such as the Korean War. 

One might describe this feeling as waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

That’s the very fear that feels almost tangible in The Town that Dreaded Sundown: a knowledge that a killer will strike again, but without knowing when or where. Thus the film thrives on the same sort of anticipatory anxiety that we saw again in the nineties, and in particular, in the works of Chris Carter.  All exterior signs indicated that times were good, but fears nonetheless lurked underneath the surface. Both time periods, in a sense, represented retrenchment, either after either World War, or the Cold War, as focus returned to the homeland, and the problems brewing and growing there.

One idea dropped from (the good) 2014 remake of The Town that Dreaded Sundown is that the killer in Texarkana is some brand of sexually frustrated psycho. For example, he “chews” on his female victims, leaving bite-marks on their flesh, including their breasts.  

And the film’s famous trombone death is symbolic, no doubt of the sexual act. In this scene, the killer straps a knife to the end of a trombone, and then keeps stabbing the knife (and trombone) into the back of a female victim, then retracting it, and doing it again. 

It’s no stretch or over-reading to see the repetitive thrusting and retraction of the trombone/knife as a coded visualization for an act that the killer himself can’t seem to complete successfully: sexual intercourse. Today, the scene plays as weird and almost a little comical, and yet if one considers the imagery, it’s clear that the trombone is standing in for something…else.  

Later, the film goes further, describing the character’s pathology. He’s a “sadist…motivated by a strong sexual drive,” according to the police. The killer targets desirable women he sees at the remote lover's lane locations. He doesn't sexually penetrate his victims, however, likely because he can't do so, for psychological reasons. He's impotent.

More harrowing in a conventional sense than the strange trombone scene is the set-piece in which Dawn Wells (as Texarkana local Helen Reed) is attacked in her home at night by the Phantom Killer.  

He shoots Helen's husband through a closed window, shattering the glass. She runs to the telephone to call for help, and he fires again.  This time the bullet perforates the side of her face, and she falls to the floor, attempting to crawl away from her assailant.  

This scene is alarming not merely because of the extreme violence portrayed on screen and the likability of the victim, but because Wells’ character -- even after being catastrophically wounded -- must continue to fight for her life. The terror doesn’t end quickly for her, and as viewers, we root for her to escape the killer alive.

The trombone scene and the Dawn Wells sequence make The Town that Dreaded Sundown truly horrific on a gut, visceral level, but the film’s sense of terror runs deeper than either set-piece suggests.  

In particular, the killer is often identified on screen only by the style of his boots. We never see a face to go with them.

At one point in the film, those tell-tale boots are seen on a restaurant patron, one sitting very near Morales. The killer has been listening all along to the officer's strategies and plans, and has not been noticed. This fact is chilling. It means that the killer can move in and out of polite society with impunity, without a second glance, even. 

The punctuation for this chilling thought is the film’s final, lingering scare.  A line queues up to see The Town that Dreaded Sundown -- this very film -- and we see those trademarks boots again, walking on the sidewalk outside the theater.  

The notion is, explicitly, that the killer is still out there, still unidentified. Half-a-century after his killing spree, the wolf is still hidden among the sheep, among the flock.

This final gut punch isn’t simply chilling, it suggests Charles B. Pierce’s cerebral, even nimble approach to the material. 

To wit: The Town that Dreaded Sundown is a retelling of a true story. The film goes back to the beginning of the Phantom Killings in 1946, and then chronicles the time period right up to and including the premiere of the film itself.  

In other words, Pierce writes his own film into the legend, on screen, so that it becomes the de facto myth or version of the tale.  

So the movie is "meta" and post-modern in nature well before Scream (1996) was even a glimmer in Kevin Williamson’s eyes...which is no doubt why the scribe referenced it in that popular film. To its credit, the Town remake of 2014 plays gamely with this aspect of the story in a way that honors the original and escalates the self-reflexive aspects of it.

The last time I watched The Town that Dreaded Sundown was likely during the preparation of my text Horror Films of the 1970s, and so I must assume from the timing that I viewed a kind of faded VHS copy. For this screening, I watched an HD streaming version, and the film looked absolutely incredible, gorgeous even. The period details are crisp and attentively-drawn, and part of the film’s appeal is our absolute immersion in 1946 Texarkana. For a low-budget film, this remains a remarkable feat, to so convincingly excavate a long gone time period.

Sadly, all of Pierce’s cerebral, visceral and period work is undercut, at least to some degree by the strange moments that lurch towards cheesy comedy. Pierce himself plays a character called Spark Plug (a policeman), who dresses up in drag in an attempt to catch the killer. Virtually every scene involving the character is hokey and dumb and off-putting.  

And the film’s third act foray into a Bonnie and Clyde (1967)-styled car chase is equally ill-advised. It's Smokey and the Bandit...forties style!

Pierce must have known that his movie had no real ending and been at something of a loss. After all, the Phantom Killer was never caught, let alone identified. So the director attempts to distract from the lack of an effective denouement with slow-motion stunts that would fit better in a Hal Needham flick than in a horror movie. The misdirection may be amusing, but it is hardly successful.

Despite the tonal missteps, one could make a case that The Town that Dreaded Sundown is Pierce’s most accomplished horror film, though The Evictors (1979) -- which I’ll review here on the blog this Friday -- would have to run neck and neck with it. But Town is more well-known, for certain, and the scenes featuring the killer on the prowl remain the stuff of nightmares.

On Thursday, I take a look at the new remake, 2014’s The Town that Dreaded Sundown.

Movie Trailer: The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976)

Cult Movie Review: The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)

I suspect that I owe my long-standing love of the horror genre to two productions that I encountered as a youngster.

The first is the “Dragon’s Domain” episode of Space: 1999 (1975 – 1977), about a deadly monster luring astronaut victims to their death in a graveyard of lost spaceships. 

The second is that ode to Arkansas’s variation on Big Foot, The Legend of Boggy Creek. (1972) from regional director Charlie B. Pierce. 

I saw this film at a drive-in when I was four or five years old, and memories of it have stayed with me ever since. 

My Mom and Dad took my sister Lara and me to a local drive-in theater in Essex County New Jersey to see a double-feature. The first film was some forgettable kid’s flick (probably a Herbie movie, or some such thing…). But after it ended, Lara and I were supposed to go to sleep in the back seat of the car for the duration of the second movie.

But the second movie happened to be The Legend of Boggy Creek, and I remember persistently peeking at the screen -- over my parents’ seats and shoulders -- watching in horror as the film’s events unfolded

I wondered not only what I would see on that giant screen, but what the movie would dare show me. As a kid, I was tantalized by the notion that I might really see Bigfoot, or discover convincing evidence that he existed.

Even as an adult, I can summon some moments from that drive-in viewing of The Legend of Boggy Creek quite vividly. I remember a little blond-haired boy running through a wide-open field, stopped suddenly in his tracks by the roars of the Sasquatch creature. 

And I recall the trademark scene in which the Fouke Monster attacks a man (sitting on a toilet) in a cabin bathroom. That description may sound laughable, but when I was four or five, there was nothing laughable at all about that attack. My attention was riveted to the screen.

The funny thing about “Dragon’s Domain” and the Legend of Boggy Creek is that the two productions actually share in common a good, scary idea: that there are things as yet unknown to modern, civilized man; things that we haven’t yet quantified, analyzed, processed, or thoroughly understood. 

That monster in Space: 1999 for instance, didn’t register on sensors or scanners, and so no one could prove it really lived…or, at story’s end, that it had really died.

And the Fouke Monster, despite his recurring appearances in and around Boggy Creek, has never been photographed or captured. Despite the best efforts of photographers, police, reporters and the like, he is still a myth, a shadow-figure existing outside the bounds of rational belief.

I suppose some very primal or basic part of my psychic gestalt loves horror films because they implicitly concern this idea that something magical and abnormal can yet exist in our technological, overpopulated, hyper-connected world. By nature, I am more a skeptic than a believer, yet I live in the hope that my skepticism will be proven wrong, not by some amorphous acceptance of blind faith, but through the auspices of science and technology.

In short, I want Nessie and Big Foot and the Mothman to be real. And I want science to find them.

Because if these quasi-mythical cryptids are proven to exist, then there is a chance that there are other things -- other beings -- out there that science hasn’t yet proved either, and the possibility, I suppose, that there is more to this human existence than readily meets the eye. 

Today, “Dragon’s Domain” actually holds up a hell of a lot better than does The Legend of Boggy Creek, but it is fair to note in any review of the film that I have a strong affection and fondness it, even if I can’t say with a straight face that it’s a particularly good film.

What the film gets right, and notes in a beautiful, even poetic way, is that there are areas of natural beauty on this Earth where man has not spoiled everything, and not seen everything. The moments in the film that track with that idea are, quite simply, beautiful and resonant.

But before long, The Legend of Boggy Creek gets lost in weird, unintentionally humorous folk songs about the monster, and travels down other narrative blind alleys too. The evidence of the monster’s existence, similarly, is so patently unpersuasive as to be hysterically funny.

In short, The Legend of Boggy Creek is a movie every fan of horror (and regional filmmaking, to boot), ought to see, but that doesn’t mean it’s a great work of art.  It is, however, an unforgettable one.

“…A right pleasant place to live…until the sun goes down.”

A mellifluous-voiced narrator named Jim (Vern Stierman), describes his home town of Fouke -- which borders on the Texas/Arkansas border and houses a population of less than four hundred. It’s the home to many simple, down-to-Earth folk, and also, alarmingly, a hairy man-beast, the “Fouke Monster.”

Jim recalls a time in his child-hood when he heard the monster’s roar and felt fear, and then launches into an on-screen examination of the creature’s history near Boggy Creek.

Several members of the Crabtree family have, for instance, reported seeing it. One man is certain he shot it.

Jim recounts for the audience the story of a night that the monster approached the house of Mary Beth Searcy (Judy Dalton), and the time a cabin fell under siege from the beast. 

Although hunting expeditions and dogs have searched out the monster, it has never been seen again.  

But Jim is satisfied that somewhere out in the night, the Fouke Monster still roams…

“He always travels the creeks. That’s one of the first things we learned about him.”

The Legend of Boggy Creek opens with some remarkable photography. The camera (ensconced on a slow-moving boat) prowls the Arkansas swamp, its eye falling on turtles, beavers, snakes, and other denizens of the wild.

These “nature” shots vividly capture the unspoiled beauty of the region, and set-up the film’s central conceit, that there’s “still a bit of wilderness” and still “some mysteries” to explore in the far corners of the world. 

Here, in this untamed, unexplored terrain, there be dragons.

The next scene, in order, is just as strong, for certain. Old Jimmy remembers back to his youth, and his one-time run across a giant field, when he first heard the cry of the monster.

“I was seven years old when I first heard him scream,” says Jim.  “I was scared then, and I’m scared now.”  

This line is not only chilling, but the images that go alongside it are remarkably evocative of childhood, a time of discovery, freedom, and even sometimes fear.

Pierce’s camera follows little blond-haired Billy on his run through the woods and field, and times, the audience actually tracks right alongside him, from above, as if positioned from a low-flying helicopter. 

These well-crafted shots suggest the boy’s momentum, his isolation, and the size of the wide-open field.

Again, the feeling is that out there, beyond the horizon, possibilities and mysteries lurk. The shots of Jimmy running through the field, untended by parents, unprotected by society, remind me very much of feelings that many of us experienced children in the 1970s, when we first left the confines of home (and the eyes of Mom and Dad) to go play. 

For me, there were railroad tracks and a field near my suburban house in New Jersey, and my parents would often permit me and my friends to play there, under the bright blue sky, for hours at a spell. The path along those tracks became an opportunity for play and discovery, and the occasional jolt, for certain (hobos!). 

The opening moments of The Legend of Boggy Creek ably and artfully suggest both the liberty of childhood -- when your time was your own, and discovering the world was a constant adventure -- and the outer limits of that liberty: the fear of interfacing with something mysterious or truly scary.

I admire the first several sequences of The Legend of Boggy Creek for so ably, and with such stunning imagery, capturing these not easily-described notions  Many more expensive films fail to resonate so effectively, or capture these feelings of childhood so lyrically and memorably.

But before long, The Legend of Boggy Creek starts to fall apart.

Is it a coincidence that so many of the residents who have seen the creature are named Crabtree?  The film introduces us to Smoky, Fred, Travis and James Crabtree, who all have stories to tell us about the Fouke Monster.  The story doesn’t stand up, since so many witnesses come from one family.

Similarly, the monster’s activities -- stealing pigs, turning over flower pats, and causing a fatal heart attack in a family cat -- don’t exactly rise to the standard of “hair raising” encounters with the Fouke Monster.  These sequences don’t provide one-to-one evidence that the beast was responsible for the damage.  Is it the monster’s fault the cat died of fright?

And the folk songs, which elevate Travis Crabtree and the Monster to quasi-mythical status, undercut the film’s questing, even elegiac tone.  It’s difficult to take the search for the monster seriously when the soundtrack singer warbles “Here the sulfur river flows…this is where the creature goes…safe within the world he knows.”

By the same token, descriptions of the monster’s “sour, pig-pen” stench tend to undercut the horror of the storytelling.

It seems apparent that The Legend of Boggy Creek owes both its remarkable strengths and its notable weaknesses to its nature as a low-budget, regional film. It is not an extruded-by-committee Hollywood product. Accordingly, there are moments of pure beauty and even poetry here that a Hollywood film might not stop to recognize or plumb.  But then there are also the described moments of bizarre, laughable narration and action that, similarly, would get re-shot if overseen by the movie industry.

To love The Legend of Boggy Creek -- as I do love it -- you must take the good with the bad, and understand how those qualities are all wrapped together in an inseparable, once-in-a-life-time cinematic package. 

The Legend of Boggy Creek is a time capsule of the 1970s, and yet it is more than that too. At its best, it is a reminder to all of us that there are more things on Heaven and Earth than is dreamed of by our science.

And more so, the film reminds of a wondrous quality about children. Childhood represents a time in which people are, without reservation, open to the possibility of magic in their everyday lives. 

Kids can even find that magic right over there, down by Boggy Creek...

Movie Trailer: The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)