I was gonna start this by saying that as Bigfoot movies go, Boggy Creek II is pretty dull – but you know, it seems that most Bigfoot movies come down on the dull and/or stupid side. I’m sitting here racking my brain to come up with one that was even remotely entertaining, and the only one that comes to mind is the first Boggy Creek picture, The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), also made by Arkansas-based producer/director Charles B. Pierce. That one succeeded largely because Pierce styled it as a documentary of sorts, with lots of eyewitness testimony and some convincingly creepy recreations in the style of In Search of… and the Sunn Classics speculative movies (like In Search of Noah’s Ark and Those Mysterious Monsters) that were popular at the time. But aside from that, Bigfoot just doesn’t have the same pull at the box office as his Asian cousin The Abominable Snowman (I’ll put up Shriek of the Mutilated and Hammer’s The Abominable Snowman against Night of the Demon and Legend of Bigfoot any day of the week). Don’t know why – maybe it’s the snow?

Anyway, Boggy Creek II isn’t going to change that situation. Writer/director/producer Pierce, who also stars as a cranky professor on the track of the monster, offers in a few watchable recreations (the best features a baby Boggy throwing a flying chokehold on a sheriff’s deputy), but wastes far too much time with shenanigans involving the prof’s students (if these galoots are as “promising” as he says they are, the state of Arkansas education is even worse off than we think), and worst of all, goes against his wise decision to not show the creature in Legend of Boggy Creek; here we get full frontal exposure of the adult Boggy and its child, and their immobile plastic masks and ratty suits do not inspire much fear. By far the scariest, hairiest beast on view in Boggy Creek II is Old Man Crenshaw (Jimmy Clem), a double wide hillbilly with the pre-requisite shotgun and tattered overalls, but he’s supposed to be the comic relief. I think.