Last night, my wife and I watched Sasquatch Sunset, a feature film from Bleeker Street Films and directed by the Zellner brothers. My interest in the cryptid had me looking forward to it but after only the first opening minutes, my anticipation soon gave in to disappointment and disgust. The film's pretense is noble enough, following the movements and activities of a Sasquatch family of four through the seasons. There is a comedic approach, which is fine, but on all fronts, it fizzles clumsily. Though there is some star quality in the casting with Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network, Justice League) and Riley Keough (granddaughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley) as the parental units, it seems the film is just as decidedly low budget as it is low-brow, with ape costumes clearly showing the actors are wearing loose furry pants, and a baby that is no more than a thrift shop doll with hair pasted on it. A lot of this makes it cringy, but the real downfall of this film is the failure to balance the thoughtful and touching elements with the ridiculous and vulgar.
Though popular knowledge believes the Sasquatch to be majestic and cunning, the film has cast them as hapless babes in the woods, grunting unintelligibly and throwing their own shit when they are upset, lowering them below the mark of a chimpanzee or orangutan.
There is the interesting underlying element of their predicament as the last of their kind, with several scenes of their calling out into the wilderness, waiting for a response that never comes. Considering their clumsiness however, it’s a wonder they survive at all, too stupid to possess any sense of self-preservation. The screenwriters have these characters in a constant state of confusion, too high on mushrooms to repel cougar attacks, mistaking bear traps as playthings, playing with logs without realizing they can roll over on top of them. Indeed they make comparative Rhodes scholars out of the film’s actual animals as far as their survival instincts.
And for creatures that have been incredibly hard to find, with the amount of grunting and barking they do, and the amount of time they spend completely exposed on mountaintops and grassy meadows, how is it no-one has ever hunted one down? Or maybe the filmmakers are suggesting we are stupid ones for never noticing. Or perhaps it’s the fact that, for every point of contact between them and humans depicted in the movie- campsites, logging operations and even a small town, there is never an actual human being to be found. Indeed, and maybe on purpose for this film, humanity is the movie’s cryptic species.
It also seems that whatever research the developers put into the creation of this film, they spent more time studying chimpanzees than what has been actually documented about the mysterious animal. They would have done much better to draw deeper from indigenous knowledge and actual scientific papers on the subject. Any such attention is only glossed over in the movie and instead we are given a depiction of moronic, impulse-riddled goofs, clinging to survival for no apparent reason. To wit, any didactic or even touching moments are invariably spoiled by a fart joke or badly timed pratfall.
So what they’ve made is a comedic movie about Sasquatch. Unfortunately, what could have been a great idea for the art of film and the cultural phenomena of Bigfoot is, as a result, nothing more than unmemorable scatalogical humour and bumbling ineptitude both in front of and behind the camera. An insult to what is, by all indications, a regal and resilient creature of wonder, worthy of respect. As an agnostic observer of the Bigfoot phenomenon, I was looking forward to watching this movie, but now on the other side, I’m angry at how the creature has been depicted and I think they, and we as the audience, deserve better.
