CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE
Directed by Joy N. Houck Jr. 1976. United States.
A couple of mid-30s college students from the University of Chicago head off to the Louisiana-Arkansas border to go Bigfoot hunting in Joy N. Houck Jr.’s 1976 slice of cryptid terror, CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE. Although our leads, Vietnam vet and hamburger enthusiast, Pahoo (!), and his impossibly naive classmate, Rives (!!), are full of enthusiasm and wonder at the thought of bagging a Sasquatch and possibly disproving decades of evolutionary biology, they find the townsfolk aren’t nearly as keen. News of the monster is treated as either a joke or something not to be spoken about.
Pahoo and Rives give a guy named Orville a ride back to his house. On the way, Orville tells them the story of how his parents died. Panicked after a close call with the monster, they sped off down the road in the family car, crashing headlong into a tree. The events of that day still weigh heavily on the minds of Orville’s grandparents, so although our boys are invited to stay for dinner, they are forbidden from mentioning the creature. That doesn’t stop it from coming around after dark, howling in the woods like a crazed animal. Rives manages to record the shrieks on his tape recorder. Despite the crystal clear recording, their teacher demands further evidence.
After a run-in with the local Sheriff and another close encounter with the creature while camping out with two local girls, Rives and Pahoo finally meet Joe Canton, a drunk trapper whose friend was yanked out of his boat and drowned by the creature not too long ago. Canton tells Rives and Pahoo where he last saw monster tracks, and off they go, setting up camp with nothing but a tape recorder and a rifle. If you’ve ever seen a Bigfoot movie, you know what happens next.
As someone who has loved cryptids since childhood, I am an absolute sucker for a Bigfoot movie. You won’t have to ask me twice to get me to watch one. There’s something I find undeniably appealing about them. Just the thought of trudging through the forest hunting a Sasquatch… Goddamn, that sounds like a blast. It would be a total waste of time, mind you, as there ain’t no such thing as Bigfoot or Nessie or Mothman or any other cryptid, really. Crytpids are modern-day folk stories, that’s it. Still, it’s fun to imagine.
That said, if you really believed an aggressive and territorial bipedal ape, especially one as large as a Sasquatch, was lurking in the woods, would you really go looking for it? It’s a bit like riding your bike around the neighborhood looking for the rabid dog your neighbor swore she saw running around. At best, you’re the one who finds the rabid dog. At worst, you’re the one who finds the rabid dog. You’ll be too busy staving off encephalitis to brag about your tracking capabilities. But facts are facts; hundreds of people go wandering off into the woods or out on boats to track down cryptids every single day. Hundreds of people stumble around abandoned buildings trying to contact ghosts. People are drawn by the mystery of it all. If I didn’t dread going outside, I’d probably do it too just for shits and giggles.
Thankfully, I can live vicariously through the medium of motion pictures, and CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE is a goddamn joy. I don’t care that a large chunk of this picture was just two friends bantering about hamburgers, chicken, girls, and skunk apes. I couldn’t care less that the science lecture at the start sounded like a Kent Hovind screed. I don’t even mind that the movie doesn’t have anything close to a B-story to help flesh out the setting. Instead of a more rounded narrative, it gives us a small cast of charming recurring characters like Eve, the stereotypical flirty waitress, and the backwoods Grandpaw talking about dem damn Yanks. Some of the characterization here, especially from Jack Elam, borders on hicksploitation, and I love it to death. I’ll happily trade narrative complexity for atmospheric flavor any day of the week.
And speaking of atmosphere, the nighttime photography by none other than Dean Cundey is breathtaking. It would have been so easy for Cundey and Houck Jr. to do what pretty much every other low-budget filmmaker would have done and just shot the finale day for night. But no, Cundey spends the finale wowing you with wonderful use of shadows and natural light. It’s outright creepy, and it triggers a tonal shift that sends this film off on a frightening high note.
CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE doesn’t fuck around with its depiction of Bigfoot. We’ve already seen it thrashing dogs and terrorizing a child, but the finale turns the hairy sumbitch into a bona fide slasher villain, sneaking up on poor Pahoo to pummel him, and throttling Rives as he sits in his van, all the while shrugging off stab wounds like goddamn Jason Voorhees. These movies almost always build up to one big climactic attack scene, and CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE knocks it out of the water, elevating it from a slightly spooky but ultimately goofy semi-comedic cryptid flick to a full-blown horror movie. And just when you think it has nothing left to throw at you, a final gutpunch comes a’ calling out of freaking nowhere to send the stakes through the roof.
The finale is great stuff, the kind of cryptid horror I like to see. That said, I did really enjoy the lighter, more comedic moments, and I was surprised to find just how much affection there was for the side characters. In a lot of movies, small-town Southern folks are typically treated like chuckleheads and nincompoops. CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE doesn’t look down on its characters. Sure, there’s an understandable bit of culture clash going on, but it’s a film that genuinely likes the people who populate it. It gives them dignity and shows them respect.
It also highlights something that we tend to overlook. Multiple times in the movie, we meet characters who are hesitant to speak about their encounters, not because of fear of the monster coming for ‘em, but because they understand how insane they must look to other people. Whether you believe in monsters, UFO abductions, or ghosts, lots and lots of people genuinely believe in those things. Their experiences have dramatically changed their lives, and not always for the best. Now, do I believe aliens abduct people from their homes? No. But some people swear that they’ve been taken. Some people, like Tim Dinsdale, have encounters with cryptids that alter the course of their lives forever. Are their experience genuine? Does it ultimately matter? Experiences, real or imagined, have ruined lives forever.
CREATURE FROM BLACK LAKE stands with the best of them, a genuinely great cryptid thriller with charm to burn. Will it crank your shaft if you don’t have an affinity for these kinds of films? Maybe not. I can see why some people find it meandering and clumsy. I’m in heaven every time I watch it. It’s comfort food, just like reruns of In Search Of… or faux-documentaries like THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK. If Bigfoot movies are your kind of thing, this is an unmissable gem.