Review of Willow Creek (2013) by Zachary P — 04 Jul 2014

The first fifty minutes or so of this one-hour-twenty-minutes found-footage horror Bigfoot film was incredibly boring. The camera work, being ostensibly for a YouTube-level documentary, is about at the level of a YouTube documentary, and the people interviewed are about as interesting as a box of rocks (or maybe I'm just not a documentary person), in addition to not advancing plot, as far as I can tell. I'm new to found footage, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Nevertheless, it sets up a few things--the ending, which I didn't realize until I googled it; the standard "don't go out there or bad things will happen and we'll all hate you" BS from the local yokels; and a love for the protagonists, a slightly egostical, determined Bigfoot believer and his sceptical girlfriend.

This is vital, because if you care about them when traditional plotting final returns, the the last half-hour or so will scare the crap out of you. A nineteen-minute-long take, featuring our heroes scared out of their wits in their tent AND NOTHING ELSE, remains beaten only by the ending of Psycho for "most disturbingly creepy thing I've ever seen on film". That and the remaining five minutes of runtime more than make up for the "slow burn", actually just boring, beginning of the film.