Willow Creek is a found footage horror movie about a Bigfoot enthusiast (Bryce Johnson) and his non-believer girlfriend (Alexie Gilmore) going deep out into the woods to film their attempt at recreating the journey Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin took when they captured their infamously grainy footage of a creature that may or may not have been a female Bigfoot back in 1967. Probably your immediate reaction to this premise is to sigh in defeat. You already know how this story is going to end, you already know every beat it’s going to hit while getting to that ending, and you already know how terrible the camera work is going to be thanks to the found footage gimmick, so what’s the point? Well, once you hear that this is also the latest movie from director Bobcat Goldthwait (World’s Greatest Dad, God Bless America), who’s basically a master of pitch black satire, your opinion probably changes. Clearly the only reason a filmmaker like this would want to take on a project like this is because he has a bunch of tricks up his sleeve regarding the skewering of all the conventions of this recent glut of found footage horror movies, right? Unfortunately, no. Turns out that’s not the case at all.
Never in a million years would I have imagined that Goldthwait would spend his time and energy making a movie like this, that’s made up entirely of cliché after cliché ran through without a single twist on the formula, but here it is nonetheless. From the threatening warnings from the locals to stay away, to the mysterious noises heard in the dark, to the sequence where the protagonists argue about whether or not they’ve already been past that tree before, you’ve already seen every scene Willow Creek offers up, and you have nothing to gain from seeing them again. At one point in the film, Gilmore’s character explains to her partner, “I’m trying to film and walk in a treacherous area at the same time. Bear with me,” and that’s pretty indicative of the experience as a whole. No, we will not bear with you. We’ve paid to watch this movie, and for it to just be a bunch of shaky footage shot by people stumbling over rocks and sticks for a good deal of its run time is completely unacceptable.
Perhaps sticking to the usual formula would have been reasonable if the protagonists were entertaining, or at least likable in any way, but these two dull drips going out into dense, remote wilderness that’s full of bears and mountain lions and whatnot, without a gun or any survival equipment of any kind, completely fails to inspire even a shred of affection or empathy. If anything, you can’t wait for something scary to tear these idiots apart and put the whole story to bed. The urge to shout, “Why don’t you hipsters have jobs?” at the screen is a real one—and constant. There are a couple of segments early in the film where Gilmore interviews Bigfoot-enthusiasts who are clearly non-actors and who likely weren’t reading from a script that are slightly interesting because of weirdness, and the whole thing only runs 80 minutes, so it doesn’t get too much of a chance to wear out its welcome, but other than that there’s not much to be said in the favor of Willow Creek. Hopefully Goldthwait’s next project will get him back to the subversiveness that he excels at.
