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MST3K 1006: Boggy Creek II
I picked out another Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode on DVD that I hadn't watched for a while, possibly not since first seeing it, and confronted "Boggy Creek II: And The Legend Continues". As Mike Nelson himself explains in a little introduction filmed for the DVD, this was actually the third Boggy Creek movie, but only the second made by the person who made the first, who "retroactively decanonized" the in-between film or something. Despite this, the movie does seem to stand on its own to me... in its own certain way.
There are a certain number of Mystery Science Theater experiments that were all "written, produced, and directed" by the same guy, but this particular movie also happens to star the same person, with his son in a co-starring role. It involves the "legend" of a Bigfoot clone lopping the heads off of deer somewhere in Arkansas swamps, a legend investigated by a heroic yet smugly self-satisfied professor and his three students, ("So these three are all majoring in Boggy Creek studies?") one of whom spends much of the movie showing off his whisper-thin yet shirtless chest. ("Can I borrow a cup of shirt?") Everything seems to drag, including a scene where the creature approaches our heroes' pop-up camper while tracked on a Zenith microcomputer (which inspires quite a lot of late-1990s computing "riffs"), and then at last, delving ever further into the swamps, the movie reaches the cabin of Old Man Crenshaw, hairy and overweight and dressed solely in blue overalls held up by one strap. Crenshaw happens to have an injured "little creature," one attracting the parent creature until the professor holds a gun to Crenshaw's head and reunites the Boggy Creek one-parent family. The professor then boats back to civilization, reflecting via his near-constant voice-over narration that the Boggy Creek creature should be left an untroubled part of nature. On the other hand, Charles B. ("in over his head") Pierce did make this second movie...
As I've said, the movie does seem to drag at the start, which perhaps suggests that the "riffing" takes a while to warm up. It does seem to sharpen as the movie progresses, though, and the rural trash gets more rural and trashier and the city folk get either more out of their depth or more self-important. As such, it's a nice complement to a possibly more famous Mystery Science Theater experiment taking on northern rural trash, The Giant Spider Invasion.
There are a certain number of Mystery Science Theater experiments that were all "written, produced, and directed" by the same guy, but this particular movie also happens to star the same person, with his son in a co-starring role. It involves the "legend" of a Bigfoot clone lopping the heads off of deer somewhere in Arkansas swamps, a legend investigated by a heroic yet smugly self-satisfied professor and his three students, ("So these three are all majoring in Boggy Creek studies?") one of whom spends much of the movie showing off his whisper-thin yet shirtless chest. ("Can I borrow a cup of shirt?") Everything seems to drag, including a scene where the creature approaches our heroes' pop-up camper while tracked on a Zenith microcomputer (which inspires quite a lot of late-1990s computing "riffs"), and then at last, delving ever further into the swamps, the movie reaches the cabin of Old Man Crenshaw, hairy and overweight and dressed solely in blue overalls held up by one strap. Crenshaw happens to have an injured "little creature," one attracting the parent creature until the professor holds a gun to Crenshaw's head and reunites the Boggy Creek one-parent family. The professor then boats back to civilization, reflecting via his near-constant voice-over narration that the Boggy Creek creature should be left an untroubled part of nature. On the other hand, Charles B. ("in over his head") Pierce did make this second movie...
As I've said, the movie does seem to drag at the start, which perhaps suggests that the "riffing" takes a while to warm up. It does seem to sharpen as the movie progresses, though, and the rural trash gets more rural and trashier and the city folk get either more out of their depth or more self-important. As such, it's a nice complement to a possibly more famous Mystery Science Theater experiment taking on northern rural trash, The Giant Spider Invasion.