Director: Donald Farmer
Year: 2024
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Bigfoot/Sasquatch
Plot:
After a string of disappearances, a nun finds that the cause is the returning creature she battled several years earlier that has now possessed a new victim turning him into a monstrous Bigfoot-like creature under the control of a Satanic cult and must battle the beast to stop its rampage.
Review:
This was a fairly fun indie creature feature. One of the better features here is the series of generally silly storylines that come into play due to the randomized approach this takes with the storyline. The main experience of the cult trying to carry out their Satanic ritual driving the monstrous Bigfoot creature to run wild in the woods attacking all who come across them serves this well enough as a solid enough throughline featuring the scenes chasing down intruders or other wanders looking into their actions. Getting to see that gets brought out by the secondary storyline involving the mission of the nuns to combat supernatural evil in the world that gets them dragged into the situation when it’s revealed they have a connection to the creature after encountering it years ago in a failed exorcism comes off nicely, and with the random strangers getting a reason to be out in the woods allowing them to come across the rampaging creature it makes for a solid enough setup.
It provides enough for some silly and outright cheesy confrontations that come about from the creature attacks throughout here. Starting off nicely with the immediate ambush on the different sets of hikers running through the area, including a lengthy stalking scene involving the victim having to escape from a group of locals before running into the creatures’ path who had been stalking her the entire time is a fun way to start. Other scenes including the ambush on the girlfriend in the woods, the stalking of the tourist who comes along to help the surviving girl avenge her girlfriend’s death from earlier, and the appearance at the adulterous camper’s house make use of the cheesy costume and low-budget indie gore in the graphic kills to get quite exciting. Leading into the fine finale where the race to stop the creature which includes the cult getting involved, an appropriately silly exorcism sequence, and a gruesome twist that fits with the story, there are some fun spots throughout this one.
There isn’t much to dislike here but it does have a few minor drawbacks. Those mostly revolve around the apparent and obvious low-budget setup featured here which has all the genre's hallmarks on display without much deviation or trickery. From the flimsy production value, low-budget shooting style, and on-location setups that give off the identity of guerilla filmmaking, it constantly feels quite upfront about this from the very start and extends to pretty much everything else here including the immobile Bigfoot costume that features a non-closing mouth, puppet-like hands, and an appearance more inline with an alien creature than the hairy humanoid normally associated with the beast. As well, with a randomized plot structure making for a disjointed storyline to get all the random characters involved, it constantly puts its origins on screen which tends to be the main issue here.
Overview: ***/5
An immensely entertaining if slightly flawed feature, there’s a lot to like with this one that manages to become entertaining in the right mindset for those that go for this type of genre effort. Viewers who enjoy this type of feature or are fans of the creative crew will have the most to like here while those turned off by these aspects might want to heed caution here.
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