Willow Creek (2013)

Movie Info

Bigfoot…or as close as you might get here…

Jim (Bryce Johnson) has had a dream to travel to North California and seeing the location of the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film.  With his girlfriend Kelly (Alexie Gilmore), Jim is making a documentary of his attempts to find Bigfoot.  Despite warnings, Kelly and Jim enter the woods…but getting out of the woods might be impossible!

Written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, Willow Creek is a found footage horror film.  The movie premiered at the Boston Independent Film Festival in 2013 before being released in 2014.  The movie was met with average reviews.  Do to the format of the movie, there is a *****Spoiler Alert***** from this point on.

Found footage films are very tired, but I like Bobcat Goldthwait and Bigfoot stories.  With a lot of hope, I checked out Willow Creek.  Unfortunately, Willow Creek suffers from the same problems that many found footage films have.

Most awkward marriage proposal ever! (and probably one of the best parts of the movie)

Though they don’t say it, you generally assume since the footage is “found” and raw that it had to have been lost…which doesn’t usually bode well for those shooting it.  The movie does a nice job with decent dialogue leading up to the woods, and it even has nice tension in the painfully long tent scene, but the movie makes the cardinal sin of a horror film…no real payoff.  I actually liked the ending of The Blair Witch Project, but this movie really doesn’t end well…you don’t get a great shot of Bigfoot or anything.

The actors also do a fair job.  Both leads are generally character actors who haven’t held many big roles.  This generally helps in found footage because “stars” don’t become a distraction.  The movie’s only “star” would be character actor Peter Jason who appears as a park ranger whose dog might have fallen victim to the unseen monster.

What’s the maybe Bigfoot doing with the kidnapped girl? Baby Bigfoots have to come from somewhere…

I kind of expected a big reveal in the movie.  A very visible charging sasquatch would have really livened up a scene.  There are a few jumps in the movie, but I feel that there were a lot of missed opportunity.  I know you are supposed to question if the creature is real, but the story is not involved enough to flesh out the answer to that question (nor is it interesting enough to make you want to restudy it).  With the painfully long suspense scene in the tent, I felt that the viewer deserved a bigger payoff.

Willow Creek was very average and that is upsetting.  They do some semi-interesting stuff with relationships and have a bit of a mystery involved in what happened at the end, but it is not enough.  I had a lot of hope for this film and with a surprisingly decent set-up, the movie really did end up feeling like The Blair Witch Project…it felt like nothing was planned except the set-up and ending.  Guess we’ll have to settle for Snowbeast…at least there was a monster there (even if it was cheesy).