Given that THE LEGEND OF BOOGY CREEK was a key influence on director Eduardo Sanchez’s iconic debut THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, it’s only fitting that he should return to the found-footage sub-genre with a take on the Bigfoot legend. It’s too bad that several other filmmakers (including Bobcat Goldthwait with the fun WILLOW CREEK) got there first, though Sanchez, armed with the kind of domestic camera equipment that wasn’t around in 1999, knows the territory well and executes some effective scares.
It’s a pared-down take on the myth, as the title blatantly suggests: there’s no room for ambiguity or exposition, this is simply a tale of a group of folks who head out to woodland Texas and get their ambitions of seeing the infamous monster fulfilled. It vastly tones down the rawer found footage tropes that irritated some BLAIR WITCH viewers, and sincerely sets out to be a good old fashioned monster-in-the-woods movie using some newly fangled gadgets. The over-saturation of the market nixes its novelty, but it’s still well paced and builds to a pretty intense finale.