Bigfoot County, The Bigfoot Tapes (2012)
Directed by: Stephon Stewart
Written by: Stephon Stewart
Starring: Davee Youngblood, Sam Ayers, Shy Pilgreen, Stephon Stewart
THE BIGFOOT TAPES (aka BIGFOOT COUNTY) [2012]
Written and directed by Stephon Stewart
The Bigfoot Tapes is a found footage film, plain and simple, drawing a lot of inspiration from The Blair Witch Project and for a good portion of the film, mimicking the woodland horror. The film gets off to a strong start by introducing Stephon, Davee and Shy, and featuring the 911 call that set the documentary in motion. Just like The Blair Witch Project, the three make their way to Bigfoot county and start to interview the locals on the suspected Bigfoot and if they know who the recent mystery 911 caller is. Eventually they find the chap, a religious man named Travis (played by Sam Ayers) who surrounds his caravan home with chickens, goats and other farmyard type wildlife. Whilst Davee has his reserves about this religious nut, Stephon is totally committed to capturing some bigfoot action on camera and asks Travis to show them to the corridor in the woods where he last saw the Bigfoot.
The film manages to keep an interesting pace, even if the camera swirls round in the nauseating handheld style. However, three quarters into the film, the trio run into some unwanted danger, and from then on the film suffers. What starts off shocking, starts to becoming annoying and when something major happens to one of the characters, the others don’t seem to be that concerned or bothered, with their efforts focused towards escaping the woodland maze. It’s the final act though which brings the film to its knees, turning the film from a bigfoot mystery to something more in tune with a torture porn horror title, completely ruining the original idea that had brought us to this point.
It’s kind of upsetting that the filmmaker felt he had to interject the strange ending in order to shock the audience. What people really want to see in this movie is Bigfoot, after all, the film is called The Bigfoot Tapes. However, the viewer will be left disappointed as the titular Bigfoot very rarely makes an appearance, making the film a very tiresome experience come to the unfavourable conclusion. What I was itching for from this movie was the woodland tension of The Blair Witch Project, which it mildly achieved, with the impressive creature depictions as seen in the excellent Troll Hunter, the latter of which proved how to make a perfect documentary style film on legendary, mythical beasts. If The Bigfoot Tapes had gone in this direction, it could have been one of the biggest hidden gems yet, to sit alongside the aforementioned movies as must-see features for horror film fans.
For the initial half of the film, the cast do a fantastic job and are a believable trio who we can relate to. They speak our lingo, dropping F-bombs every other sentence, and are just like any other young adults out there. However, during the latter end of the film, they get a bit tiresome and the script, if there was a script, becomes ropey and feels somewhat forced. It’s a real shame as The Bigfoot Tapes had potential but it just lost sight of what it wanted to achieve and ended up being a poor attempt at imitating The Blair Witch Project.
Despite the above issues, director and star Stephon Gregory has shown potential in his directing and I would definitely watch more of his work, but only if the screenplay did what it said on the tin.
The search for the ultimate Bigfoot movie continues…
Rating: 
Be the first to comment