DVD Review – The Bigfoot Tapes (Bigfoot County) (2012)

Two guys and a girl go into the woods with a camera to film a documentary on a local legend. Sadly, things don’t go to well for them and the camera never turns off. Sound familiar?

There is a certain amount of comparisons that can be made between The Bigfoot Tapes (known as Bigfoot County Stateside) and the 1999 ground-breaking found footage godfather The Blair Witch Project. Both feature a similar set up and both feature the same cast of characters getting into the same kind of trouble. The major difference between them however is while The Blair Witch Project felt (and still feels) fresh and original, The Bigfoot Tapes feels tired and worn out.

All the found footage boxes are ticked here. People asking why the camera is on, never turning the camera off even when in a crisis, self shot monologues, shaky shots of the floor while they run, screaming about a noise they hear off camera, the sound going off because someone hits the on-board mic etc etc. I can’t be the only person to feel that found footage has outstayed its welcome.

The one positive I will give the movie is that writer, director and star Stephon Stewart is quite convincing in his role as the documentarian desperate to find Bigfoot. Likewise, Sam Ayers is pretty good as the troubled religious nut Travis who takes them out into the woods. However the same cannot be said for Stewart’s co-stars Davee Youngblood and Shy Pilgreen who are pretty horrendous with the jobs they’ve been given. Not only does Youngblood look nothing like his supposed brother Stewart, his acting is very wooden and Pilgreen does nothing more than whine and cry. It’s pretty tough going spending nearly an hour and a half with these people.

But of course, the biggest issue with The Bigfoot Tapes is that it’s head achingly boring. After the initial interviews with the locals (another similarity between The Blair Witch Project) and the trio reach the woods, the film just becomes dull  and the clichéd story moves at a snail’s pace. The Bigfoot Tapes features and extraordinary amount of padding towards the end, which I’m sure was meant to build to the bait and switch finale but it just doesn’t work. Even at a mere 80 minutes, The Bigfoot Tapes feels far too long.

Perhaps more annoyingly however is that the movie never really feels like a Bigfoot movie. Bigfoot is a fascinating character that could make for a great horror villain, but here it seems sidelined for some redneck hicks who want them “off their private property”. In that sense it feels like a found footage version of In Fear. But while that was a fantastic movie with a lot of character, tension and scares, this is a boring, by the numbers found footage farce that isn’t worth your time.

At the end of the day, The Bigfoot Tapes is just a boring, bland and uninteresting film. Aside from a couple of convincing performances, there is nothing here that you’ve not seen before and even the most hardened of found footage fans will be hard pressed to find any value in it. The Blair Witch Project came out 14 years ago, and we still can’t find a way to even match its originality.