Classic Horrors Club

Creature from Black Lake (1976) may not be the best movie about a bipedal primate, but it sure looks good! We must credit cinematographer Dean Cundey when the camera moodily pans through the woods at night, then hovers over the moonlit lake. Cundey, of course, would make Michael Myers appear seamlessly from the darkness in Halloween two years later. Oscar-nominated for Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1989), he was astonishingly never a recipient of the gold statue.

I can’t emphasize enough what a difference it makes in an otherwise low budget bigfoot movie that was one of many in the 1970s. With the exception of one shot that perhaps lets the face of the creature linger in the light, it remains in the darkness, quickly moving through the shadows and brush. POV shots and waist-down angles of it swinging its ape-like arms contribute to the illusion that it’s a true threat. However, what we hear from the sounds it makes is more terrifying than what we see.

This is the kind of movie I’d see at the Esquire Theater in downtown Enid, Oklahoma when I was an early teen in the mid-1970s. It features the familiar-to-me faces of Jack Elam and Dub Taylor, both whom I had the pleasure of meeting in my oft-told tale of attending the Lee Majors Charity Golf Classic about the same time as the movie was released. That is to say, it’s familiar to an Oklahoman. Taking place in Louisiana, it’s not quite the Sooner State, but shares a strong woodsy-country vibe.

Elam plays Joe Canton, a trapper whose buddy is pulled from their motorboat by a long, hairy arm in an effective scene that opens the movie. Since he’s known to have experience with the “bipedal primate,” two college students from Chicago travel to Oil City to find him. Rives (John David Carson) fits the role, but Pahoo (Dennis Fimple) must be a late bloomer or was held back a few grades. The screenplay by writer/producer Jim McCullough Jr. gives us a little time up front to get to know their characters.

Rives and Pahoo find the townsfolk reluctant (or scared) to talk about the creature, but they encounter Orville Bridges (McCullough) in the barber shop, and he shares that when he was a toddler, his parents were killed in a car crash as the family tried to escape the creature’s attack. He’s been raised by Grandpaw Bridges (Taylor), who welcomes them to dinner as long as they don’t mention the creature. But when his mule brays outside, Pahoo exclaims:

Was that it? Was that it? Was that the creature?

Not consistently suspenseful or scary, Creature from Black Lake nevertheless has one good jump scare and one horrifying scene in which the creature kills Grandpaw’s dog. That’s the cardinal sin, you know… babies, OK; animals, no. Director Joy N. Houck Jr. has somewhat of a pedigree with Night of Bloody Horror (1969), Women & Bloody Terror (1970), and The Night of the Strangler (1972.) I haven’t seen any of those, but I’m willing to bet Creature is his best effort. I enjoyed it. It’s definitely above average.

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