Florida. The land of artistic censorship, cartoon mouse dictators, tourist car jackings and mud bogging. Never heard of mud bogging? Here’s the 411, boyo. Gather a bunch of self-proclaimed rednecks and their wives/girlfriends. Load them into various trucks. Take them out to a series of ponds (most notably, Six-Mile Pond), let them loose and watch as a quiet Sunday is transformed into one of the several planes of Hell. That sound fun to you? Me neither.
I lived in the great Northeast, where snow often caused my vehicle to get stuck at the most inopportune times. Getting a truck stuck in the middle of a shallow pond seems only slightly less enjoyable, but that’s a mud bogger’s idea of Heaven, as this documentary attempts to show. (Ironically enough, they really get upset when their incapacitated trucks start to take on water. Mother nature fights back!)
“On Six-Mile Pond” depicts many aspects of the mud bogging lifestyle, and it also dispels the notion that mud boggers are poor, idiotic white trash. The trucks are expensive, and many of the people interviewed are business owners. Their hobby, however, doesn’t come across as all that exciting, and that’s the one major fault of this documentary. The guys and gals who do this every Sunday obviously love it, but the film never quite captures that in all its glory. What’s left is a film that is of little use to anyone other than those already interested in mud bogging … which rules out almost ninety-eight percent of the nation.
