Delayed Reaction: Willow Creek

Premise: A couple goes hunting for Bigfoot and succeeds.

 

It's very odd to see this is a Bobcat Goldthwaite movie. He's not exactly a mainstream director, but I associate him with major studio-adjacent films. Ones from production companies I've never heard of that do their best to mimic a major studio look. He makes movies with a perverse sense of humor that never seems to age well (World's Greatest Dad and God Bless America are both nearly unwatchable now for different reasons). Moving to a low budget found footage movie feels like an odd move for Goldthwaite, especially because it doesn't feel like one of his movies.

 

If you take off the fairly distracting name in the director credit though, this is a pretty decent horror movie. It spends a long time getting to know the main couple and feeling pretty innocuous. It adds a couple creepy touches, but most of the payoff is at the very end. The two main actors are pretty good. The boyfriend did have trouble picking a lane though. Sometimes he was making fun of all the Bigfoot lore. Other times, he seemed to legitimately believe Bigfoot was real. He needed to be about 20% more obsessive.

 

The centerpiece of the movie is that extended sequence in the tent at night. I didn't clock the exact length of it, but that was a long continuous take. The actors did a great job selling the feeling of being stuck in the wilderness, hearing strange sounds close.

 

This movie is a pretty good example of doing found footage too well though. The unspoken agreement with found footage is that the audience will accept the camera catching more than it actually would in the real situation, because it helps the story. In reality, the camera wouldn't be on and focused for most of the scariest moments because "fight or flight" isn't built for cinematography. Willow Creek sticks pretty close to what would really be caught on camera, which means we get a brief glimpse of a Bigfoot then they die. That's a little underwhelming. The way to counter that is to keep the tension high throughout the movie. The Blair Witch Project doesn't have many huge scares but it works so well because it's tense for almost the entire run. Willow Creek doesn't do much to create tension early on. That means the movie is light of tension and on scares. So, it's not the most effective horror movie. I appreciated aspects of this movie, yet, it doesn't justify why it's an entire movie rather than a short on a V/H/S movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend