REVIEW: BLACK WATER CREEK – LEGEND OF SASQUATCH / CERT:TBC / DIRECTOR: MARSHALL EVER / SCREENPLAY: MARSHALL EVER / STARRING: NELSON IZARRY, TELANA JACKSON, JONATHAN RUCKMAN, CHAD PETTIT / RELEASE DATE: TBC
Writing movie reviews for Starburst Magazine is, of course, an enormous privilege. It offers the opportunity to revisit forgotten gems, discover previously unseen or overlooked genre classics and, most excitingly, stumble upon new talents embarking on their first faltering steps in the wonderful world of movie-making. Sometimes, though, it’s about as much fun as pouring boiling hot water over the back of your hand or inserting knitting needles into orifices where knitting needles should never, ever be inserted.
Welcome to Black Water Creek – Legend of Sasquatch, a film so bad in every conceivable way it’s absolutely and utterly impossible to believe that anyone – anyone at all – involved in its misbegotten production could have believed they were involved in a creative endeavour with any artistic merit or point whatsoever. This is truly awful, dreadful, soul-destroying stuff, inept in so many ways that the very word inept is utterly inadequate to describe it. It’s so badly filmed and presented that it’s actually difficult to discern actually what the ‘story’ is but it appears to involve a cop whose partner is killed by something monstrous who eventually rouses himself from a drink’n’drugs lethargy to team up with his partner’s widow (also a cop) to track down a killer who has, occasionally, been slicing people’s faces off. Is it Sasquatch? Is it a random serial killer? Who gives a damn? It’s quite hard to tell, much less care, what the hell is going on.
Surely filmed on a cheap mobile phone (possibly one of those big brick jobs from the 1980s which didn’t even have cameras), this abhorrence is the work of director/writer Marshall Ever who surely can’t have seen any other film of any sort in his entire life so has presumably been unable to draw any inspiration from any other source. Beyond the laughable acting, appalling script and cacophonous musical soundtrack, Black Water Creek is a disaster of near-enough Biblical proportions from a technical perspective alone. The camera is rarely in focus, dialogue is frequently inaudible or drowned-out by unfiltered background noise, cross-fades and cuts are pitifully clumsy and inappropriate and the whole enterprise is either horribly over-exposed or filmed without the aid of any supporting light source whatsoever. Sasquatch himself lumbers about in the murk, a man in a gorilla suit with paper teeth which would have shamed a 1970s episode of The Tomorrow People and a final fight between our hero and a bad guy who’s kidnapped his partner’s wife is about as exciting as watching two toddlers fighting over a rusk.
Black River Creek is, you’ll have hopefully gathered, utter rubbish and an absolutely worthless waste of time. It’s currently awaiting a release date but it’s hard to imagine that any distributor worth their salt would want to sully their lists with such a woefully artless and painfully shocking effort. Our preview disc will, however, come in handy as a pizza slice and that alone has got to be worth one of any reviewer’s stars.
Extras: None
