Originally published on Creature-Corner.com

BOG CREATURES

3.10.03
By Scott Foy

Starring Debbie Rochon, T.J. Glenn, Courtney Henggegler, Jeffrey Howard, and Leia Thompson

Directed by J. Christian Ingyordsen

Life is too short to waste time watching movies like BOG CREATURES.

There’s nothing especially bad about the movie other than the fact that the movie takes forever to get where its going and as the ride nears its end you come to realize that it really wasn’t going anywhere to begin with. It’s the kind of film that the Fast Forward button was created for. Now let me give you a “SPOILER WARNING” because it wouldn’t be much of a review unless I actually talked about specific details.

I never would have even bothered with this movie if it weren’t for its title. With a title like BOG CREATURES I figured it was a movie about swamp monsters and I’m a sucker for swamp monster movies. Well, I was wrong. While it did have a bog, the creatures were just lightly moss-covered zombies wearing potato sack clothing and usually carrying a sword. In fact, if you replaced the moss with straw they could pass for scarecrows. Needless to say, this did not sit well with me at all. When a movie is called BOG CREATURES it should damn well have some sort of actual inhuman creature and not just zombies that look like they walked out of the local Knights of Columbus Halloween Haunted House.

BOG CREATURES begins 1,200 years ago at some Danish castle where a band of marauding Viking berserkers decide to rape and pillage. Well, actually they just run around whacking people with weapons and ripping the tops off fleeing maidens. I know this is a very low budget movie so you have to cut it some slack but this whole sequence features costumes and props that look like they came from the prop department of a Junior High production of HAMLET. It seems this band of berserkers isn’t your typical band of Viking warriors but actually some sort of demonic Nordic cult and they begin performing some rituals involving some of the fair maidens they’ve taken captive. Along comes Lord Somethingorother, the proprietor of the castle who was on vacation of something, who proceeds to single handedly kick Nordic ass and has all the bodies dumped into the local bog.

Skip to a present day college in Denmark where a wacko anthropologist has gathered a group of misfit wannabe scientists, all students that have been kicked out of other universities, to help him search for the remains of the “Bog People.” He gives this long speech about the history of these “Bog People” and how the acidity of the bog keeps the bodies preserved and how he’s never been able to find the actual bodies and how all the other scientists think he’s nuts and how he needs these students to go out in the field and do his dirty work because he had a mental breakdown the last time he tried. Got all that? Oh, this bog is also supposed to have supernatural powers or is cursed or something along those lines.

The good looking, young, misfit, wannabe scientists head out to the mystical bog to search for these legendary corpses which would apparently be a find of such incredible magnitude that everyone involved would become world famous. Despite the fact that the brilliant albeit mentally unbalanced scientist has never been able to find any bodies, the students manage to do so in less than 10 minutes. Turns out some of these “Bog People” are already walking around and keeping a close eye on the students. Oh, and there’s a creepy, old man serving as their guide who constantly mutters cryptic warnings about how they shouldn’t be there or about how something bad is going to happen. Sure enough, his ominous quips soon prove true. The only real plot twist, involving some of the bog women who may not be evil after all, isn’t even really followed up on.

Okay, that’s enough. The rest of the movie consists of one of five things, characters talking about the situation, characters looking for other characters, characters running for their lives, characters fighting for their lives, and, everyone’s personal favorite, long drawn out scenes of characters skulking about the bog usually done in a manner designed to make us think they’re about to get attacked but it just turns out to be another character. Topping it all off are the scenes in which Debbie Rochon tries to act. I won’t go into too much detail about her character because I just don’t feel like wasting the time to explain it. Let’s just say that she shows up halfway into the movie and she’s not who she appears to be.

I have a question. Aside from being a pretty girl who tends to shed her clothing quite often why does Debbie Rochon have a cult following? She is absolutely awful in this movie! She can't even overact or ham it up convincingly and even many bad actors can accomplish that much. One of the nicer things I could say about this movie is that at least the acting in the film is adequate. Aside from this one guy who recites his lines like a stoner reading a cue card, the cast does a serviceable job with the material. Then there’s Debbie Rochon who performs as if she’s in a totally different movie. There is no strong enough connotation of the word "bad" to accurately describe her acting in this movie. We are talking sub-porno level acting, people! These are truly dark days for scream queens.

So here you are left with a movie with a razor thin plot that takes forever to get going and the moment it does it immediately slams on the breaks and goes back to being a plodding movie that gets taken down several more notches by Miss Rochon’s nail-on-the-chalkboard non-acting. The film is utterly devoid of atmosphere, suspense, horror, or action and has very little in the way of nudity or gore so I have to wonder just what audience did the filmmakers think they were aiming for? Probably stupid people like me who actually thought a movie called BOG CREATURES would actually feature BOG CREATURES.

Life is too short to waste time reviewing movies like BOG CREATURES.