The Bayou Bigfoot, Growly Elam, and Two Easy-Going Chicago Students Looking for Evidence

I hadn't realized it but twelve years to this day, I watched Creature from Black Lake (1976) as a first-time viewing on October 4th, 2007. I was looking back at when I last watched it, so imagine my surprise! This was a pleasant sleeper hit with me and a totally unexpected treat. I was expecting a drive-in turd and this low-budget gem was anything but. Good casting, a fun rural travelogue, and a well shot Bigfoot (its body hair looks appropriately disheveled and the great cinematographer, Dean Cundy, two years before Halloween (1978), painstakingly follows difficult setups in order to keep the creature carefully revealed in glimpses instead of full-body on-screen appearances) provide the film with plenty of highlights. Unfortunately, you will have to tolerate audio that is somewhat depreciated and Cundy's widescreen photography is compressed and pan-and-scan presented...the size of space seems cut off and what Cundy wants to give us in scope is deprived. Cleaned up and spread across a big screen, I imagine this could be so much more worthwhile. But this really isn't the kind of film that would have support for such expense. I think Bigfoot enthusiasts and 70s drive-in aficionados are the audience that would be in search of this kind of feature. But there are actually more of us out there. Not sure millennials necessarily will be as enthusiastic as my generation to unearth and locate such films as Creature from the Black Lake so perhaps the public domain will eventually serve as a film research archive future generations visit. Jack Elam, gruffy beard, backwoods outfitted, and wilderness fisherman and hunter, narrowly got away from the Bigfoot while boating in the swamp with a buddy not so lucky. Two college anthropology majors (Fimple and Carson, both extremely likeable and easy to watch, with great chemistry; you really believe they have been friends perhaps since they were kids) leave Chicago on a research project, hoping to find Elam or any other locals who might have seen or experienced the Bayou Bigfoot. I do imagine some might get those Boggy Creek vibes, as Louisiana in this film favors Arkansas in that one quite a bit. Dub Taylor as the harmonica-playing, overalls-covered-in-dust grandpa who lost a daughter in a car accident thanks to that creature, inviting the boys in for some grub, playing a ditty with his grandson before they mention the Bigfoot to his wife, stirring his anger as a result, is a hoot. ***

My Top 5 would be [1] the conclusion where Carson must defend himself against the angry beast causing him to wreck the van while Fimple is seriously injured by the creature in an assault, [2] Elam relating a gnarly foretelling of animals slaughtered by the creature with great, vivid detail as only he can, [3] a nice gathering with two locals (one of the girls the daughter of a sheriff tired of the visiting "Yankees") interrupted by the creature and rainfall, [4] Dub and his grandson giving the visitors a little country song before feeding them some comfort food from the garden, and [5] a past encounter with the beast told by Dub's grandson while getting a ride home with the guys in their van.