THE BIGFOOT FILES/Chapter Forty-Eight: Bigfoot Country

In the movie Bigfoot Country, four hikers get lost in the woods, and a promising adventure turns into a nightmare. Shot on a low budget, the 2017 survival horror film doesn’t stray from the basic formula of most movies in the genre. However, it throws in a wild sequence of events in the last 20 minutes to make it interesting.

Bigfoot Country is available for free on ad-supported streaming services YouTube via Millspictures Studios, Horror Central, and Movie Central as well as Tubi. The film’s audience score on Rotten Tomatoes stands at 33 percent, and the IMDb score is 2.8 out of 10, so it’s not well reviewed.

The good news? It has more than 5.2 million views on the three YouTube channels, and a lot of people enjoyed the movie. But it is low budget.

Since I like the lost-in-the-woods trope and love Sasquatch, I’m watching this 78-minute tale of terror written and directed by Jason Mills.

For me, a Bigfoot movie rides or dies on the realism of the creature. While the Sasquatch in Bigfoot Country is suitably menacing from a distance, we only see it in silhouettes and glimpses of movement. Without a makeup or effects department, the director’s decision not to show the creature full-on is probably the right one. Nothing kills the creature-feature vibe quite like cheesy costumes or second-rate CGI.

Bigfoot Country opens with a grainy 1995 video of three men running from a shadowy beast before fast-forwarding to present day where we meet two young adult couples on a road trip, cruising in a cool Trans Am. On the way, they stop at the Tractorgrease Café and receive the requisite warnings from the locals. 

“People have gone missing out there,” the waitress explains. “If you guys stick to the main trails, you should be fine.” 

If characters in horror films acted on good advice, there’d be no horror, right? One of the hikers named Bryce brought a gun, so the bunch is not totally defenseless. 

After an uneventful first night filled with strange sounds, the group heads deeper into the woods. A couple of the hikers see “something” through the trees, and a half-hour into the movie a Bigfoot print makes its appearance. 

Fear starts creeping into the group, but the foursome is too deep into the woods to return home before dark. There’s a tense tent scene (say that three times fast) where Bryce blindly fires his gun through the canvas, injuring Bigfoot. 

What doesn’t kill Bigfoot, only makes it angrier, and a Sasquatch attacks the tent later that same night, scattering the group into the dark woods. The next morning, one of the guys discovers the old 1995 video camera, and one of the girls returns to the tent and finds Bryce’s gun.

All signs point to a battle royale with Sasquatch, but Bigfoot Country takes a different route, preferring to show how the fear caused by Bigfoot can take its toll on the human psyche. Fifty-five minutes into the film, a shocking moment is followed by a couple of other shocking moments leading to an intriguing final scene that prompts more questions than answers.

As a Sasquatch fanatic, I enjoyed Bigfoot Country enough to watch a sequel if one ever gets made. I liked how the climactic 20 minutes veered into a different direction than I expected.

NEXT UP: Chapter Forty-Nine: Feed the Gods. I review the 2014 film directed by Braden Croft.

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