31 Movies of May, Day 30: Bigfoot
May 30th viewing: Bigfoot, chosen by scrolling alphabetically through the new streaming service that popped up in my cable subscription, Peacock.
Year of Release: 2012
Directed by: Bruce Davison
Written by: Brian Brinkman and Micho Rutare
Starring: Danny Bonaduce, Barry Williams, Sherilyn Fenn, Bruce Davison, Howard Hesseman, Andre Royo, Stephanie Sarreal Park, Alice Cooper
Accompanying Beverage of Choice: Kid Kölsch (Kölsch, 5.5% ABV), New Glarus Brewing Company, New Glarus, Wisconsin
(Support Independent Breweries - buy local when getting buzzed during quarantine)
My dad grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota - “the gateway to the Black Hills” - and all of my relatives on his side of the family still live out there. Every year when I was a kid, my family would travel out to Rapid City and spend a week with my grandparents, venturing out each day to explore a different tourist destination in the area. I got to know the area pretty well. I never saw Bigfoot.
I suppose it might be weird to think I need to say that last part, considering Bigfoot is, well, fictional. And to the extent that anybody does believe he exists, Bigfoot is generally considered a resident of the Pacific Northwest, over one thousand miles away. But it wasn’t my idea to try and arbitrarily connect Bigfoot to the Black Hills, that was the idea of The Asylum, the production company behind the Sharknado series and various cheap ripoffs of summer blockbusters like Transmorphers.
As per The Asylum (led here by actor-turned-occasional-TV-movie-director Bruce Davison and regular Asylum writers Brian Brinkman and Micho Rutare), this version of Bigfoot is apparently a long term resident of the Black Hills, living just outside the town of Deadwood. He’s disturbed by the preparations for a music festival organized by a proto-MAGA radio DJ (former member of a musical TV family Danny Bonaduce) and the protests against the festival by a fame-obsessed environmentalist (former member of a musical TV family Barry Williams).
Now, nevermind that here Deadwood is depicted as being surrounded by mountains that don’t exist (the Black Hills are called “hills” for a reason) or that the heads of Mount Rushmore are shown to be visible from the town, despite Mount Rushmore residing 50 miles away from Deadwood and facing in the opposite direction. There is actually a town right outside Mount Rushmore, it’s called Keystone. They could have just run with that as the main town in the movie, but I guess they wanted the bigger brand recognition of Deadwood, despite not seeming to reference any of the wild west history that most people would know Deadwood for. The movie seems confused about Black Hills geography at best, and more likely completely ambivalent about it. There are establishing shots of the town that are clearly identifiable as downtown Rapid City, one of which even has a truck from the Rapid City Fire Department driving unobscured through the frame.
It would have been much simpler and logical to set this whole thing in Washington state, where much of the movie was actually filmed and a place that Bigfoot is actually associated with. But this movie was very clearly reverse engineered from one image: Somebody wanted to see Bigfoot climb Mount Rushmore. And he does here, in all his terribly computer generated glory. I’m not sure if having him climb the Space Needle or Mount Ranier was too expensive or insufficiently campy.
This isn’t the first time a movie has done weird things with Mount Rushmore. The monument’s most famous cinematic moment is in North By Northwest, when Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint flee the clutches of James Mason down the faces of the monument, but many people forget that whole sequence began at a grand villa and airstrip on top of the structure, two things that decidedly are not actually there That little cafeteria where Cary Grant gets shot with blanks though? Totally real place, I got a hot dog there once before it got renovated.
But of course, North By Northwest is an all-time classic and one of the greatest popcorn movies ever. This is a cheap SyFy flick intentionally going for so-bad-it’s-good vibes, in the process defeating the whole purpose of enjoying a so-bad-it’s-good movie. If you’re going to make a craven cash-in attempt, the least you can do is show a modicum of respect to the setting of your movie, none of which is on display here. That is, unless, there really was a Bigfoot roaming around South Dakota all those times I visited. I suppose he probably could’ve blended in with the bikers in Sturgis and I might have missed it.
