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  • Writer's pictureKelly M. Hudson

Don't Get Bogged Down!


So this dumb old redneck is out fishing in a swamp and gets lazy and decides to use dynamite to kill the fish. He is successful and scoops up a dozen dead fish when something else emerges from the murky waters, something bent on his blood! It seems the man has awakened a sort of swamp creature and now it is on the rampage. His next victims include the wives of a couple of city fellas who’ve come to the swamp to do some fishing and “roughing it.” These two jackholes are upset that their wives got killed and are now on the hunt for whatever did it. They petition the local law to help, and the Sheriff turns to a couple of older scientists who live in the area. The pursuit for the creature is on, but the monster is doing some hunting of its own…

This is one of those long-forgotten regionally-made horror films that is super cheap, not very good, pretty dumb, but is still somewhat entertaining. The acting is bad, of course, and the story itself is just something glommed together from a dozen other monster movies of the 50s and 60s. They simply changed the location and made the victims adults instead of teens. The kills are pretty dull and slow, featuring just a shadowy figure at first, then revealing a large claw, leading up to the final reveal of the full creature and of course it’s just a guy in an awkward monster suit. A not-very-scary monster suit. They throw around a lot of pseudo-scientific lingo (which I love; you can tell they’re faking it, just vomiting random words that sound important but really don’t say much at all) and there are long passages of the film that take place in someone’s basement somewhere, dolled-up to look like a room where science takes place. The two scientists are rickety actors and they had a love-scene that is excruciatingly slow and painful to look at. They have maybe the most passionless kiss in cinema history. Meanwhile, dumb people find a way to go to the swamp and get killed and the monster feeds, unable to be stopped by bullets. Don’t worry, the scientists come up with science to defeat the creature. Man, this is a mess, but the outdoor locations are cool and again, I love the low-budget do-it-yourself spirit. They tried to make a scary movie, they really did. That they failed miserably shouldn’t be held against them, because they got some atmosphere right, and it isn’t a total dud.

What can be said about movies like Bog? They don’t amount to much, less than a blip on the horror landscape. They’re this weird throwback to a 50s aesthetic that doesn’t really work at all but is hard to take your eyes off of. The filmmakers seem affable enough, as does the cast and crew. They looked like they had a good time, or at least some kind of fun, so kudos to them. For the viewers, this isn’t a swamp you really want to visit, to be honest. Just drive by, wave at the bad monster, and move on.

★★☆☆



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