Hey friends! Just one of those event heads up! If you are in Northwest Arkansas and are feeling comfortable with live events, I’ll be a part of the Death Ray Illustration and Print Expo show in Fayetteville, Arkansas this Saturday, October 30th. It’s got a wonderful collection of local artists and comic creators. Like true embarrassment of riches kind of stuff.
It’s also a pretty stellar place to grab some holiday gifts and get them in time to be wrapped. Lot of these folks, myself included, do a lot of the shipping and business end stuff on their own. And it’s looking like one of those years that last minute shipping might be impossible. Though who knows! I might be hermit in the woods, but not one of the seer kinds that can tell the future.
In any case, I’ll have the softcovers and (rapidly dwindling supply of) hardcovers of Volume 1 and 2 as well as En Route #1! Oh and whatever supply I have left of Eve of the Ozarks! And every other table will have just so many cool cool prints, comics, shirts, etc.
So if you are vaxxed up and ready grab a mask and come on down and say hello!
I don’t know how many have of you have followed me from the Eve of the Ozarks days, or hell even the Backwood Folk days. The blog here is new, so if you only ever interacted with this site in particular it’s likely that you know very little about me. I’m from the Ozarks and still planted firmly within them. As cartoonish as the stereotype is, I am an artist hiding out on a far away mountain in a cabin in the woods. It’s enough of a stereotype that I can’t even claim to be *the* artist on this mountain. Too many others around these parts for there to be a definitive article. Which honestly? Solid balm for the ego.
Because of this, most of my early comics were regionally focused with a specific interest into Arkansas and Ozarks folklore. Needless to say I went in quite familiar with the Fouke Monster and the Boggy Creek series. This is our home state Bigfoot variation with three toes after all. I had seen two Boggy Creek movies prior, though weirdly I had never seen the initial outing. Which feels slightly sacrilegious in retrospect.
Now as a point of clarity, Fouke and its mythical creature are in Southern Arkansas and far removed from the Ozarks. As it is with rivalries within state borders as an Ozarker I had to hiss “flatlanders” as often as I could throughout my watch. Truly speaking the culture across the state isn’t as different as much as we like to project at each other. And listen, I’ll side with the flatlanders over the Texans any day of the week. Though let’s be real, not a great time for either state for a lot of reasons. A lot those reasons are Republican, but plenty are rich folks with designs who would be thoroughly disgusted to be lumped in with the former. But it is what it is. So that’s the lens I went in watching The Legend of Boggy Creek with.
The first film forms a solid case that you don’t have to actually make a good movie to have a good movie. It’s not great cinema, but god damnit it sure is Arkansan cinema. There isn’t a narrative to speak of. Just a bunch of locals telling an unseen Charles B Pierce (our director and producer) about their experiences with the creature as reenactments play out. These reenactments are smart enough to never clearly show the monster. Instead we just get a distant shape in the woods buried in layers of trees and swamp. As it turns out though, you can point a camera anywhere in the Arkansas wilderness and have a beautiful looking picture. The hidden corners of this state just bleed the atmosphere of a ghost story. Plop a man in a gorilla costume far from the camera and this low budget movie can provide the kinda shot that a lot of other horror movies would kill for. Though nothing in the movie proves as threatening as a character being driven to the hospital across state lines. A distinct horror score plays over the Welcome to Texas sign. It does this completely oblivious to its potential as a grim portent of both the series’ and the state’s future.
Return to Boggy Creek, an immediate and unofficial sequel starring Dawn Wells of Gilligan’s Island, is a more slight affair. It lacks any of the atmosphere of the original and instead trades for an early live action Disney movie approach to the story. It has its charms, and is probably a solid little spooky movie for the G rated intended audience. It certainly was a VHS babysitter of mine as a pup, but there’s not a lot of ground to cover on it.
However, 1985’s Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues is a smorgasbord to Return’s lunchable. Charles B. Pierce returns here in full force to the point of playing the lead character and ignoring its unofficial predecessor. This movie not only plays on every indulgence of Pierce’s, it also plays on every Arkansan indulgence imaginable. Which is to say it opens on Pierce’s character enjoying some Razorback football. Finally a movie asking “How about them hogs?”
Pierce plays a University of Arkansas Anthropology Professor who has enlisted a bunch of his students into a mad quest to Southern Arkansas to finally answer the question of the Fouke Monster’s existence. Starting the movie at the University of Arkansas and Fayetteville puts this fully in my neck of the woods. It also gives the movie a constant perspective of the state’s various regional rivalries.
The structure of the movie is much like the first, save that the linking elements are an actual story with Pierce and his students having their own encounters and meeting the interviewees before the reenactments begin. They are shaggy things but so filled with Arkansan in-jokes that I can’t help but love it. Whether purposefully or not Pierce increasingly becomes a sort of Colonel Kurtz figure to his students. And his quest seems quite like a tongue in cheek take on the various folklorists and anthropologists who would treat the state as a case study. Because of this the locals of Fouke treat this college professor and his devoted students as city slickers and outsiders. Considering 1985’s Fayetteville this is a somewhat hilarious if accurate little joke on the rural region seeing a small town as “the city.” 2021’s Fayetteville it’s no longer a funny aside but a standard fact. Cut to the modern day and the University of Arkansas would start getting lax on its out of state tuition. The jokes of Fayetteville as the next Austin stopped having punchlines and started being bullet points in boardrooms. Increasingly old farm trucks on the roads of Northwest Arkansas would be replaced by spotless vanity trucks adorned with Texas plates. A more contemporary Boggy Creek II would probably be more accurate to have no Arkansas born characters as the leads.
Parallel to the Boggy Creek, movies a regional grocery store began conquering the world. Northwest Arkansas’s own Walmart would become a publicly traded company just two years before Charles B Pierce’s first film. It’s 25th anniversary followed two years after Boggy Creek II’s release. These are unrelated except for the sake that Walmart’s history would rapidly become synonymous with Arkansas history. In 2011, a massive art museum called Crystal Bridges would open not far from Sam Walton’s very first grocery store or that university that once employed Pierce’s fictional bigfoot hunter. It was a project of his daughter Alice and one that promised to introduce culture to Arkansas. Its accolades were loud enough to drown out the feint sound of a piper’s flute. A lot of us didn’t catch on to it as the first shot in a large effort to rebrand the region as more friendly and more cultured. But that’s a marketer’s dark arts for you. Because it never tells you who they are making it more friendly or more cultured for.
All the spit and twine that built Arkansas would be phased out for state of the art construction. The cities and towns of the region would salivate at the promise of a bold new world and cosigned quickly. Old rickety neighborhoods would be torn apart so towns could have fancy parking garages that they called art corridors. Music scenes and art venues would be replaced with expensive modern condos that were paradoxically less resilient than the spit and twine. After awhile it became apparent the Arkansans too had to be replaced. They couldn’t afford this new Arkansas. Modern places require modern people with modern money after all. Grants operated like bribes and were offered to out of state talent who could afford these new gifts. Turned out moneyed Texas could afford what Arkansans could not. And slowly the identity of a region is changed not by organic growth but total replacement. It’s a sort of culture I suppose.
2011 also saw the release of another unofficial entry in Boggy Creek: The Legend is True. A total remake of the series. One that would ditch its regional trappings and instead take the formula of a modern slasher just with Bigfoot. The spit and twine was replaced by cheap digital cameras and cgi bigfoots. The craggy faced locals were no longer necessary as the young unblemished faces of models could do the job. The regional humor was replaced by blood and jump scares. Haunted shots of the Arkansas wilderness were replaced by floodlights behind the trees. A mimicry of Platinum Dunes to illicit the feeling of a music video versus a folktale. Where was this? It sure didn’t feel like Boggy Creek anymore
Oh.
The Legend of Boggy Creek would be restored and remastered. It’s remastering in 2019 led to theater showings and blurays and inevitably streaming. Available as it was intended to be seen almost everywhere as a cherished little object of Arkansas history and lore. Boggy Creek: The Legend is True has largely vanished and been forgotten. An entity with a recognizable name but no identity.
There is a real specific strain of 80s horror that I always attribute to a select shelf of a middle school friend’s vhs collection. It had weirder and frankly goofier movies than the local supermarket bothered to carry. They carried R ratings, but I think we clearly tell that the 18+ set wasn’t the intended audience. They were stupid, and knowingly so. Goofy things with vaudevillian humor that just followed “nyuk nyuk” eye poking to its logical conclusion. It just makes a certain kind of sense to an adolescent brain. These were the immediate descendants of Sam Raimi. Praise be to that friend’s college aged sister in a far away place sending down her schlocky vhs down to her rural little brother and his even more rural little friend. Frankly, don’t think we would have had a laughing fit to House II: The Second Story or Night of the Creeps without the guidance of a higher intelligence.
Waxwork and Waxwork II: Lost in Time took me right back to sitting cross legged on that shag carpet in front of a tv that likely was the size of a modern tablet. Which is to say, I had a pretty good time.
I went into these knowing they’d been recommended, but without grasping the premise. I presumed it was the 80s horror take on something like House of Wax. I don’t think I was expecting a mixture of Doctor Who and Quantum Leap with every destination being a horror movie. Which I don’t think I need to gesture any harder at my comic to say that would appeal to me.
That’s a Doctor Who
Waxwork has David Warner as a madman out of time with a wax museum full of the greatest monsters across history. Now it’s no surprise to say these monsters aren’t just wax, but it is some to say they are actually frozen moments accessible from through magical portals across time and space. So not only will you get Dana Ashbrook chased by Jonathan Rhys Davies as a werewolf, you will get it through some hidden European woods. It’s all very convoluted, but the movie knows this. What it really wants to do is shutup and play the hits. In essence it takes every little lord Fauntleroy that composes its teen cast and tosses them each into a different horror movie. All of this framed by events outside the museum that build up the rules of the universe as well as delve into its comically over done lore. It all crescendos into one of the wilder ending set pieces this sillier end of the horror comedy can provide. Its set up is the classic villagers storm the castle, but with the caveat that every single kind of monster is here. It ratchets up the gore and kills but never losing the gonzo tone. At a point it feels almost like the anarchy of the ending of Blazing Saddles where various film sets just fall into the brawl. It also lands a joke that made me laugh harder than anything in the last couple years.
Waxwork II: Lost in Time is a rare sequel in these kind of movies. It not only starts directly after the last scene closes but fully expects you to have seen the first movie. And also unlike genre standards, doesn’t retain its villains for its sequel but its surviving protagonists. Our two leads (one who is Gremlins’ own Zach Galligan) are now thoroughly lost in time. Though conveniently for our purposes only in horror time. Fairly early in it completely ditches the contemporary world narrative to just get to the horror vignettes, and it works like gangbusters. The movie switches gears from setting to setting and just unleashing a manic chaos across them. Everything from a Hammer Horror tinged Frankenstein tale with an especially gruesome comedic end to a take on horror sci-fi with an Alien riff. Though it is never strong than in a black and white haunted house tale. Here they pull in Bruce Campbell, frankly the hero of that prior mention VHS shelf. And if this movie has anything figured out its how to best deploy him. Which of course is a long digression of just throwing things at Bruce Campbell and just watching him react.
A proud film tradition
So while I missed out some by these movies miraculously not being on that vhs shelf, I’m always happy to discover there are still new little corners for me to find.
Also no ranking this entry. I found both charming and a whole lot of fun. Thorough recommendations to both.
Next time I go back to Arkansas and take a stay at Boggy Creek.
It dawned on me pretty early into Joe Dante’s The Howling that I actually really haven’t seen that many werewolf movies. At least compared to your other classics such as your Frankensteins and your Draculas. It kinda surprised me, given how much of a sucker I am for big stupid monster suits. Eight movies later, and I’ve seen a werewolves do everything from have orgies to win an oscar. So you could say I’ve filled in some gaps. Maybe seen it all at this point.
The Howling starts strongly with Joe Dante’s original film. Good classic werewolf story stuff with Dante’s particular brand of mischief. It opens with a woman going on a retreat to a strange psychiatric commune after a close call with a serial killer. I found myself adoring the rising lunacy in this one. It starts in the terrain of a completely grounded thriller before slowly and methodically revealing the anarchy the movie intends to explode into. Heck, I wouldn’t be embarrassed to recommend to just about anyone in October horror movie watch. Which is may be the only entry in this franchise I can say that for. Now that’s not saying I didn’t have a good time with some of them. But lord there are so many scenes spread across this series that would require an “I can explain!” if someone walked in on me watching.
The immediate sequel The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is a movie composed entirely of those scenes. What if a pin-up calendar from a 90s garage was folded up and rolled in fake body hair and Worf make up. Though for as much of this movie is devoted the sexual proclivities of werewolves this movie has one real dirty little secret. It’s hardly a werewolf movie at all. It’s a vampire movie. The werewolves live in a Dracula castle in Eastern Europe with giant bats for pets, and everyone is so desperately ready for the goth rave they’ve dressed for. They even have their own Van Helsing as played by Christopher Lee himself to further inextricably tie this into Dracula iconography. Granted Van Helsing never went to a New Wave concert undercover.
You’re a champion for doing this with a straight face
What follows is somehow weirder, but at least it is definitely not a vampire movie. The Howling III: The Marsupials is one of those movies that’s impossible to give you the broad strokes of, but let’s give it a shot. An Australian Werethylacine escapes her abusive pack to live in the outside world. This outside world to her, of course, is becoming a scream queen in precisely the kind of movie you would find in a later Howling sequel. It’s also a story about family in so much that we see the life cycles of the werewolves move past the bedroom antics of Your Sister is a Werewolf. It has an almost weirdly tender edge as it gets into werewolf child rearing. Granted tender is relative here, because the baby born in this film is a hideous muppet that crawls in a newly discovered flesh pouch on the stomach of its mother’s human form. The Marsupials subtitled should have tipped me off I suppose. Now all be told, none of this actually scratches the surface of this movie. I haven’t given any air to the Russian Ballerina Werewolf, Government plots to eradicate lycanthropes, and a werewolf winning an Academy Award…strangely in Australia. Or a grim reality where Dame Edna is famous enough in the United States to become an Oscar presenter.
I can’t tell you that either of those movies are good. Hell, no one making them was terribly concerned about them being good. And that’s to their credit. They are weird and supremely off-putting, but damn it all I was never bored. So three movies in I was jazzed as hell to push through to The Howling IV: The Original Nightmare and see what sights it had to show me.
Oh. No.
This is truly where the sensation of slog hit me. It also landed at me having drawn about 50 people/pets for the portrait drive. While I enjoy doing these drives there is the inevitable point where it does become a bit more mechanically inclined instead of powered by a giddy excitement. There’s an arc to these things. I always come out of the gate swinging, then start realizing how long the list of commissions actually is. Then the drawing process is haunted by an inclination to stare out into some horizon a million miles away from my brain. Then for just a tad an air of excitement strikes again from some wild commission requests. Inevitably by a final slump occurs as I try to make sure everything is wrapped by Halloween proper. Unfortunately The Howling franchise would exactly parallel that arc.
The Howling IV is the return to basics entry. Maybe that’s a trend with fourth entries, or maybe my sample size is currently a little small. But The Original Nightmare is a remake/reboot of the initial Howling but without any of the fun and none of the budget. It doesn’t even have the budget to do a full werewolf transformation. Which at that point you have to ask what are we doing here. Unfortunately it’s a question I was forced to ask of multiple entries of the rest of the franchise.
Along the same lines, The Howling V: The Rebirth initially also felt like a reboot since it largely eschewed the wolf rules of the previous installment. But it was too boring to really make me want to dig in and find out. Which is a shame. Agatha Christie murder mystery in a dracula castle with werewolves should be a fun pitch. Really the only thing interesting here is that it clings to a lot of vampire imagery just like Your Sister is a Werewolf.
Luckily, The Howling VI: Freaks is a marked improvement. It’s functionally a movie which makes it the strongest entry in the backend of the franchise. But it’s also a fun and competent film, praise be! Taking our werewolves to the Jim Rose Circus and freakshow revival of the 90s plays out fairly strongly. It also merges it nicely with small town politics that make the movie much more lived in than any other entry beyond the first. It also finally just says screw it and tosses in an actual vampire for good measure. I wouldn’t go to bat for it as some lost classic, but damn it would make a fun episode of Tales From The Crypt.
As a recent and unexpected cat owner, yeah I get it wolfman
The Howling VII: New Moon Rising isn’t a movie. It’s a cast and crew sitting around a honky tonk and gabbing while they pull from almost certainly real bottles of booze. It’s a really shaggy dog movie. Even though there is barely a werewolf in sight. Lot of line dancing though. Lot of boozy line dancing. There is at least a thorough line of “what the hell are we doing here?” that keeps things at least a little confounding. New Moon Rising decided that it’s purpose was to link the previous three entries into a direct continuity. It’s the Mark Gruenwald entry of the Howling franchise, in a joke just for me. In reality I imagine this is mostly so it can lift scenes from the original entries to pad time out and steal some valor from their budgets, because buddy this one has none. Maybe I needed the recap of Original Nightmare and The Rebirth because they slid out of my memory like water on a duck. But really I would have preferred it that way.
Our last entry is the final reboot. 2011’s The Howling Reborn. The post Twilight entry. And boy howdy does it like to remind you of that. The genre aware nerd that was required by law post Scream makes sure to get a few potshots in at sparkling vampires, also required by law at this time. Which bold play when you are lifting Twilight’s blue filters and moody teens wholesale. Thankfully Howling Reborn is smart enough to go full tilt Breaking Dawn Part Two stupid by its climax. With werewolves trying to murder a high school graduation happening outdoors in a storm at midnight. A nerd makes a flamethrower in the chemistry lab to fend off his werewolf mom and her army of shirtless werewolf hunks. At least we are ending this self aware.
By the end I thought I would be fully burned out and ready to move on, but admittedly I felt slightly cheated. From werewolf murder dinner parties to werewolf line dancing rounding off with werewolf graduation I felt like we had to be two sequels off from an honest to god Werewolf Bar Mitzvah movie. Alas.
For the last four years I’ve done a local Halloween portrait drive series. I block out the last week of September and my whole October, take reduced commissions, and churn out spooky themed portraits. It’s picked up over the years to where I’m drawing at least a 100 portraits per drive. I’ve never really advertised it as such, but it’s the main way I fundraise the print editions of Tourist Unknown. It’s a reliable way to do it without the anxieties of crowdfunding. That said, it can be a pretty brutal affair. Not so much the drawing front as you might imagine. But mostly on what is effectively dealing with a dozens upon dozens of unique clients in the course of a month. Honestly? The drawing? That’s the fun part. I sit and draw all day every day anyways, and I find a noticeable uptick in my ability to shorthand unique faces. Which hey, turns out that’s a mega helpful skill for comics.
But it’s not the most intellectual work. My mind wanders pretty easily on the eighth Lydia/Beetlejuice couple portrait. Which isn’t an issue when I’m trying to make storytelling decision on a comic page. That sort of fog requires some problem solving of its own to combat. Usually? It’s tv. A lot of tv in the background. Yet even sitcoms tend to wear as you get too in-depth with their own rhythms.
This year I’m trying to switch things up a bit. I’m taking a stab at blowing through the schlockier end of horror franchises instead. B movie franchises tend to only get wilder as you go, lending themselves to a nice dose of consistent bafflement. As I finish a series, I’ll pop up a quick thing on the blog about it, ranking its entries and any other stupid notes. Nothing elaborate really. There’s a lot going on outside of the blog with the portraits as is, and I’m just trying to stay a little mentally engaged with the holiday season.
All this to say one day into drawing portraits and I had already watched all four movies in the Ghoulies franchise back to back.
Ghoulies as a series is pretty much the ideal way to start something like this. Each entry has a drastically different setting, new characters, and weird slimy puppets. My catnip. I’d also only truly seen one entry prior, Ghoulies: Ghoulies Go To College. But even that was in a packed bar in the before times. Though honestly? Probably a perfect way to be introduced to it. Now I’d always been aware of the series thanks to at least one entry of the series was on a shelf at what was Bob’s Supermarket rental section located in the nearest small rural town. I’d tell you which entry, but I can only remember that the VHS art included hideous puppets grinning from a toilet bowl. Which to the beauty of this series, doesn’t narrow it down.
Ghoulies is largely a series about magic rituals having the side effect of bring about some awful little goblins who like to reek havoc and mischief in their chosen setting. The first film largely being more about a house party that’s secretly about inducing a warlock’s spell than the Ghoulies proper. But hey when you see what lands you might as well lean in for the sequels right? And what worked best in Ghoulies?
The following two sequels still have aspects of the occult and black magic, but really its about taking a setting and dropping these chaos slime puppets in and seeing what happens. Ghoulies II takes them to a traveling carnival to great results.
And the pinnacle of the franchise, Ghoulies: Ghoulies Go To College needs no explanation. Except to say that higher learning seems to be a theme given the Ghoulies can now talk and wear beanies and varsity sweaters. It also breaks out from horror convention and straight into those of a college sex comedy. Where the residents of hell have been enlisted in a fraternity prank war. A green goblin in a beanie demands beer and it’s hard for me not fall for that. It also represents the curious trend I noticed. The strength of any individual Ghoulies film depends on their proximity to toilets. Each successive film of the initial trilogy leans into the tagline of the first movie “They’ll get you in the end!” To the point that their updated origin in Go To College involves an occult toilet with their little gargoyle faces sculpted around the bowl.
Quality differences aside I had a blast with the first three. Solid series for the b-movie set.
Unfortunately Ghoulies IV bucked the trend by somehow feeling longer than the first three entries combined despite running what should be a tight 84 minutes. It makes a fatal error in trying to return to the black magic plotlines through a returning character from the first movie. Also none of our little goblin friends return. Instead two new Ghoulies that take a costume approach versus a puppet one. They don’t really even cause problems, just commentate on the movie with the precision of 90s movie site comments section. Which man, I’m here for the Ghoulies doing Ghoulie stuff. Not an LA cop with an occult past that’s greatest opponent seems to be an abuse of a cartoon sound effect library. And to continue my findings? No toilets man. Not in the poster not in the film. No toilets, no Ghoulies.
