I first saw this movie a while ago, and for some strange reason decided to put myself through it again. Some of us bloggers do insist on suffering.
Summary
In a small Oregon town, there are rumors of a Bigfoot walking about in the nearby woods. The mayor wants the former police chief to look into it, but having just lost his job because of stupid politics (as if there were any other kind), he’s not up for more foolishness. That is, until a couple of young girls are kidnapped by this Bigfoot. He and the mayor rather reluctantly team up and try to hunt down the creature and save the girls.
Cringe
Oh, yeah, everywhere. So very much cringe.
The Good
Despite my rather sarcastic opening, there is some good to be taken from this movie, which is more than I could say for, let’s say, Daniel’s Lot, the movie that still epitomizes the worst of the worst of Christian movies in my mind.
One thing that should be kept in mind is that this is pretty plainly a very low budget movie. In fact, it’s made by pretty much one family, with a few extra people. Keeping that into account, and in many ways it’s not a half-bad effort.
I noticed two things in rewatching it again.
One is that some effort was made to use some different kinds of camera angles, to offer some visual interest to scenes that could easily have been plain dialogue given by boring talking heads. One instance of this is early in the movie, when the mayor and the still-police chief are in a coffee shop, and she (the mayor) is telling him about the agenda in the coming town committee meeting. This scene shows that the film makers were trying to make the movie more visually interesting, perhaps trying to put into practice things they had learned and maybe seen in other movie’s they’d watched. I can applaud this.
Another thing is that the movie itself looks nice. I’m not sure what filming equipment they used, I’d guess it wasn’t very expensive, but they succeeded in making a movie that at the least looks nice. They were able to show the scenery in its natural beauty, and even the town looks cozy and inviting.
The Bad
This movie is filled with awkward dialogue and scenes, so much so that doing a list of all of it would be cumbersome, both to write as well as to read. I’m going to do something different in reviewing this movie, and I hope it’ll help. I’m going to focus on certain scenes. The names I’m giving for these scenes are my own, not ones taken from the movie.
The Council Meeting
This scene begins almost seven minutes into the movie.
In a scene of any group meeting, you would expect there would be shots of all the people at the meeting, probably gathered around a table with a bit of paperwork, and they’d talk to each other about whatever it is they are meeting about. In this movie, the mayor is briefly shown, then she goes off-camera and she says a bit to begin the meeting, then the camera focuses solely on Harrison, the police chief, staying on him the whole time as someone off-camera, an unnamed council member who, let’s be honest, sounds a lot like the actress playing the mayor, gives the reasons why the council wants to take money away from the police department.
It should be remembered that this movie came out in 2019, just before all the “Defund the police” nonsense, so that’s why such ideas weren’t used as a reason to disband this town’s police department. Still, the idea that they had to disband to police to give the money to the fire department seems coo-coo in its own right. But similarly lunacy seems to be not uncommon in modern politics, so I’ll just leave this by saying it’s all too stupid and all too realistic.
But this scene is bad. For all that I try to applaud their attempts at creative scene framing, in this case it doesn’t work. Keeping the camera on one guy doing pretty much nothing for about a minute is not a good idea.
If they weren’t able to get enough people to have a committee meeting on film, then they should have come up with another way of giving the viewer the information about Harrison losing his job through stupid politics.
Meeting at the Dock
This scene begins about 16 minutes in, with some build-up to it before that.
The mayor meets Harrison, now the former police chief, at the docks, and tells him about a hunter who claims to have seen something, to have seen Bigfoot. In one of the movie’s better moments, Harrison dismisses it as nonsense, “I don’t have time to play games”. There’s a bit more dialogue, then she says, “You’re the only hope we have in this town.”
Huh?
Understand, that at this point, Bigfoot is not in any way a threat to this town. Earlier in the movie, Harrison has what looks to have been a video chat with a man claiming that something has been killing and eating his grandfather’s cattle. And the mayor mentions a hunter having seen Bigfoot.
And that’s it, outside of various news snippets that may or may not involve this town.
At this point in the movie, the Bigfoot has not kidnapped the two girls.
So, what’s the mayor so very worked up over? There’s no there, there. Not yet. The movie has given us no reason to accept this hyperbolic “You’re our only hope” statement.
Hide And Seek
This begins a bit over 18 minutes in, though it is interrupted for a bit.
Three young girls, I’d guess not quite in their teens, a going to a park after school. They run around in the woods, playing some game, then sit at a picnic table to talk about boys and dances. Then they hear noises in the woods, and get scared and move away from the table. Then the noises continue to follow them, and they scream and run away. Then they…
Then they decide to play hide-and-seek in the woods.
If they had decided to run into a spooky old vacant house in the middle of the woods, I don’t think even that decision would have been as stupid as playing hide-and-seek after being chased away by a noisy Squatch.
And needless to say, that game of hide-and-seek doesn’t end well, as Sassy makes off with two of the girls.
This is one of those scenes that is so stupid it’s insulting to the viewer. Come on, put some thought into what you’re writing, into how your characters will act.
The Gun
So, Harrison arms himself and goes into the woods, and he runs into the mayor, who went before him. He’s not happy to have her tag along, and frankly I can’t blame him.
Yet for some reason, he gives her his gun, or at least the shotgun (later, rather mysteriously, he has a handgun, which I guess he forgot about for some part of the movie).
They tromp around a while, and she has to take a potty break. She puts the shotgun down, does her business, returns to him, and they continue on.
Without the shotgun, which is still on the ground.
And when he finally realizes what happened, he doesn’t go back to get it; no, he decides they don’t need it.
I don’t know how much that shotgun and ammo cost, but I’m pretty sure it was somewhere in the “Not Cheap” level. Plus, they were trying to hunt down a creature that is suppose to be very huge and very strong. While going back to find the gun may have taken time, it still seems much, much wiser than going on without it.
Again, so stupid it’s insulting.
The Final Fights
If people are going to make movies like this, they should at least offer the viewer some memorable scenes, and this one has some at the end, in the big fight against the Bigfoot.
To understand just why this is all so hilarious, you have to see the end credits, where you’ll learn that the actor who played Harrison was also the guy in the Bigfoot monkey suit.
In this final fight, we don’t really see Harrison and the Bigfoot fighting; instead, what we get is Harrison punching at something that is mostly off-screen, then the Bigfoot swiping at something mostly off-screen, the camera jumps from Harrison to Sassy and back again and again, they punch and swipe, Sassy picks up a large rock, and the mayor gets into the action a bit.
They couldn’t really put Harrison and Sassy in the same shot, because, well, they were the same actor.
The results of this were hilarious.
Was this all a dream
The movie’s final scene is so out of left field that it seems like it’s from another movie entirely.
Harrison wakes up from a nap, and he and the mayor, who now appears to be his wife, talk for a bit in what looks like a rather comfortable living room area.
So much about this scene is just, “Ugh”.
First, was this scene saying that Harrison has been dreaming this whole time? This seems like a not unreasonable conclusion.
Second, there is the hypocrisy of this movie’s final lecture.
Harrison is having second thoughts about some movies he enjoys, ones that he calls “violent movies” and “monster movies”.We aren’t given an example of what is meant by this.
I’ll ignore the psycho-babble they engage in about why he enjoys those movies, and just go with this—that a movie about a monster kidnapping children and two people running around in the forest trying to fight this monster now tries to lecture us viewers about the evils of “violent movies” and “monster movies”.
My response is: get the plank out of your own movie, then you can lecture me about any movies I enjoy watching.
Theology
It feels almost gratuitous to pile on this movie any more, but this does fall into the category of Christian movies, so the theology is of some importance.
Now, the movie does one good thing—there is no conversion scene. The two main character are already religious, so when they spend the last half of the movie tromping about in the woods, we are not subjected to a tiresome atheist/Christian dual-diatribe argument.
Still, the theology does go some strange places.
At one point, when the two mains are tromping about, the mayor says to Harrison, that since Bigfoot is only another animal and God gave man dominion over the animals, then all they have to do is find it, look it in the eye, and in Jesus name tell it to do something. Even Harrison more-or-less agrees with her.
Now, it could be pointed out that, when it comes to finally facing off against Sassy, neither of them do this; instead, the confrontations become a fight. Still, they said that, and it’s bad.
It could be said that, yes, God did give man dominion of the earth, which includes the animals. But this is more complicated than just using Jesus’ name as some kind of charm to get Fido to do tricks.
There is the fact of sin, and sin has had an effect on the natural world, and even Christians are affected by these consequences. In some times of persecutions, Christians were killed by animals.
In the events related in Daniel, the king had to throw Daniel into a “den of lions”. God sent an angel to close the lion’s mouths, so that Daniel was kept safe through the night. There is no hint in the account that Daniel was able to exercise some dominion over the lions.
Much of the rest of what passes for theology in this movie is just out-of-context biblical phrases used badly.
Conclusion
The problem with this movie isn’t the low budget. No, the problem is the story. It’s a mess.
