Meadhall of the Comitatus

Remember that time when bigfoots were all the rage in super-scary-monster-movies?  You don’t?  Right, I guess I don’t either.  But let’s assume that there ever was such a time.  This movie would fit right in back then!

MANOS! The HANDS of FATE!

Premise: 3/5

Bigfoot, or ‘Squatch as Jeffrey Combs in his genre-defining (and it is shocking this didn’t receive at least one Oscar nomination!) role of “clerk” calls it, exists up in the mountains somewhere.  It’s big, mean, and has a tendency to eat people.  Like, a LOT of people, I guess—although this is pretty new behavior for it.  It’s not explained why, suddenly, ‘Squatch has taken an interest in om-noming humans, but most of the locals still believe it’s just a big mean bear or something similar.  Everything and everyone living up in these mountains is in some serious trouble if this rogue ‘Squatch can’t be taken care of soon.

Wait . . . it's a car at a gas station. Not Manos then, it must be Vampires vs. Zombies!

But that’s only half the story—the weird thing is that the other half of this story is pretty much Rear Window with a Bigfoot in it.  Preston Rogers used to live up in these Yeti-haunted ranges, but six months back he and his wife had an accident while they were out rock-climbing one afternoon.  Their climbing cords snapped and while Preston’s wife died that day, he got “lucky” enough to land on an outlying rock ledge after a “lucky” bounce, which merely seems to have made him paraplegic.  His doctor (I don’t know if it’s his medical doctor or a psychiatric one) thinks six months is probably long enough off the wagon, and sends Preston out for a weekend at his old cabin under the care of an orderly (or nurse, or whatever Otis is supposed to be).  Preston’s not real keen on this idea, but doctor’s orders and all that.  Of course, since Preston’s confined to a wheelchair, there’s not a hell of a lot out there for him to do, so he takes to just watching the woods (and his cute new coed neighbors) through a pair of binoculars—which is when he suddenly sees a friggin’ Bigfoot abscond with one of the girls across the way.  As a traumatized paraplegic guy who hasn’t been up in the mountains since the accident, it’s really easy for Nurse Otis and the police department to just think the poor bastard’s off his gourd, so they don’t take his hysterical gibberish about a creature running off with one of the girls too seriously.  And the rest of the girls across the way just think their friend got lost, and that Preston’s probably just a weirdo perv.

Fundamentally, yes, this is just another monster movie, but the Rear Window conceit does give it a little extra flair and is pretty interesting, even if not much comes of it.  Still, it’s about Bigfoot eating people, and isn’t that enough?

OK, wait . . . wide-angle lens with red food coloring in it? Is it Howling 7?

Cast: 2/5

Well, I guess this movie was actually a SyFy channel original, so I’m actually pretty surprised someone like Screech from Saved by the Bell wasn’t in it.  Preston is played by Matt McCoy, who in some ways resembles a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Anthony Perkins, to keep with the Hitchcock vibe.  He’s actually pretty good—nothing spectacular, but he acts like a professional actor, especially given the silly Rear Bigfoot premise of the movie.  The soon-to-be-monster-chow  coeds are pretty cute, but you don’t get to know them too well and you probably wouldn’t care either—they’re warm bodies and provide a tiny bit of T&A without which SyFy thinks no horror movie would be complete.

What I don’t get is why this movie gets Jeffrey Combs (from Re-Animator, people!) and Lance Henriksen in this movie and fails to use them.  Shit, I would’ve loved a Combs/Henriksen Bigfoot-hunting movie, but instead I just get one scene and then they’re gone.  Combs is kind of hilarious as this weirdo gas station clerk that needs an oxygen tank and yet is still a compulsive smoker, and Henriksen is just classic Henriksen (read as: awesome.)  Gimme more, SyFy, damn your eyes!  Nope, they’re there for a bit, are awesome, and then get eaten, exit stage left.  That ain’t right, man, it just ain’t right at all.

Well, this is that guy from Re-Animator, but he kinda looks like that hick dude from House of 1000 Corpses.

Technical: 1.5/5

Well, in a move that doesn’t surprise me at all, the monster is a huge friggin’ joke and it would’ve been better to never see it at all.  Imagine what a retarded Super Mario would look like if he was excessively hairy and suffered from giantism—congratulations, you’ve still come up with something cooler in your brain than this ugly fucking monster from Abominable.  Instead of filling my soul with terror, the Abominable monster really was more a risk of me filling my underwear with pee from laughing too hard.  You just . . . you can’t . . . it’s beyond description how ugly and stupid this thing looks.  It’s hilarious, but it’s also an eyesore so if you’re looking for a cool monster, you are completely out of luck.

Hmm . . . it looks like this was a live-action Quake movie and Lance was trying to find the quad damage, but found a dead girl instead.

Monster notwithstanding, the movie also fails to make the cabin-y prison for Preston all that menacing or isolated-feeling.  Considering this is what the movie should have gotten right, it’s just too average and conventional to really deserve any credit.  And where’s my freaking GORE, guys?  Off-screen monster tackles and people being dragged out of frame screaming just don’t cut it when there’s nothing else going on.  There’s one scene where a character finds the partially eaten body of the first girl who went missing that’s probably the laziest “gross” effect ever.  She’s lying on the floor crying and the only clue that she’s been ripped open is someone put a little bit of fake stomach and intestine over her middle section.  There’s a scene later on where (OMG SPOILERZ!) Otis gets his head eaten by the monster and all we see is his body held so that his head is out of frame and blood coming down, then it cuts away to some chick screaming.  Come ON SyFy, you’ve gotta do better than this.

Oh WHAT THE FUCK?! This was a Bigfoot movie? Holy shit! Feast your eyes on THAT suckas!

Popcorn Factor: 2/5

As far as Bigfoot movies go, this is definitely one of them.  It’s not bad, really, and it does move at a pretty quick clip.  I’m disappointed Henriksen and Combs didn’t get more screen time, but at least the monster’s a pretty hilarious piece of work.  I don’t think this is destined to become a classic, or even a cult classic, it’s just another in a long line of disposable movies cranked out by SyFy that probably has no shelf life past the first weekend it airs.  On the other hand, compared to some of the other pieces of turd that SyFy has put out pretending they are “movies,” this one is kinda good actually.  It’s great for a night when you just want to veg out in front of the TV and not have to think much about what you’re seeing.  It also has 75 million less skiing scenes than that other Bigfoot movie I remember kind of hating back when.