Plot
A group of scientists and forest rangers head into a remote
forest somewhere in the Pacific Northwest after a previous trip uncovered some
bones belonging to an abnormally large primate. Apes aren't native to this part
of the world so the team wants to find out what they belong too. What they don't
bet on is that the bones belong to a family of Sasquatch, still living in the
area and unhappy that their burial ground has been disturbed.
Review
Is Bigfoot the biggest straight-to-DVD horror craze I've seen
for a while? Forget killer shark flicks, Bigfoot is now the modern day king of
the home video monsters. I can think of no less than four recent Bigfoot-themed horror films
with surely more in the pipeline. What is the sudden craze in the big hairy
monster when no one had even touched him for years? Why is Lance Henriksen in
three of them? Why do two of them have exactly the same cover box? Why do most
of them suck? Questions that this review will hopefully address.
Let me tell you first of all that this is the Bigfoot film which doesn't
star Lance Henriksen (he's got his hands full with Sasquatch,
Sasquatch Mountain and Abominable). I wouldn't have been too
surprised to see his weary face pop up for another brief cameo, simply to say
that he's got a monopoly on Bigfoot horror flicks. Even he has standards it
seems, as low as they may be. This may be the worst Bigfoot film ever made and
that is a stretch given how boring Sasquatch was. It's not that this film
isn't boring, quite the contrary, it's got plenty of the hairy fellas running
around the screen. It's just that all this film sees to do is have characters
walk around in the dark and let Bigfoot attack them. Instead of doing something
like, maybe getting the hell out of there, they just slowly walk around the
forest looking for one another. Needless to say Bigfoot has never had a lunch
easier than this. Pretty much the entire middle part of the film involves the
characters splitting up in the forest and then being attacked. There is a small
pre-title sequence in which a trio of rednecks is killed off by Bigfoot. Well,
one of them survives and it looks like he'll find his way to the expedition
later in the film to warn them of their impending doom. But before he even
reaches them, he's killed off! Simple filler to pad out the running time doesn't
come more evident.
Bigfoot comes to life like never before! Well that's
how the makers of this would have wanted to you to believe. A mixture of a man
in a monkey suit and CGI, this must rank as one of the worst-looking monsters
I've witnessed. For shots of the monster walking in the distance or approaching
the camera, it's a man in a suit. For any close-ups of the face or any attack
scenes, the face has been enhanced with CGI to make it look scarier. There is
one hilarious scene right at the end when the survivors make a dash for the
jeep, only to be pursued by a whole horde of sasquatch! Imagine what the 100m
dash would look like if the track was the woods and the runners were dressed in
gorilla outfits. I nearly cried when I saw this. A hilarious moment of pure
cheese and worthy of mention here. When I consider how mean the Bigfoot in
Abominable looked, I can only wonder what this one would have looked like if
they'd have put a bit more effort into the suit and ditched the CGI. Director
Fred Tepper has a long career with visual effects, having worked on projects
like SeaQuest DSV and Titanic. Unfortunately it seems he's
forgotten anything he learned about effects when he made this. There is one
decent moment with a woman using the flash on her camera to see where she is
going in the dark, leading to the moment where she takes a photo of Bigfoot
right in front of her. But moments like this are too few and far in between.
Verdict
I didn't think things could get any
worse for Bigfoot after Sasquatch but I was wrong and Sasquatch
Hunters has proved that. Maybe this was a sub-genre that didn't need
creating after all.
