Well, Black Water Sasquatch didn't stand much of a chance. My initial plan was to ignore the election news and watch a real movie... but then the results starting coming in. And much like an accident that you can't look away from (a racist, sexist, and hateful accident), I was stuck. I drifted in and out of a different movie, but once it became clear that my mind was guaranteed to be elsewhere, I wanted to find something that I didn't really care about. And boy oh boy, did Black Water Sasquatch fit the bill. And fair warning, I'm writing this on the day after the election and my brain still feels detached from my body - the news and the implications of it just haven't sunk in. But even if I wasn't 100% with it, I'm still fairly confident in my assessment: Black Water Sasquatch is really quite bad.
It's kind of funny, actually. Just the other day while writing about Black Water Wilderness, I mentioned how much I'd like to see a bigfoot-slasher hybrid, where the big guy goes after victims with a knife. Well, imagine my surprise when that's exactly what happens in Black Water Sasquatch! What a Black Water coincidence! I was pretty stoked. The bigfoot here looks terrible, but apparently he kills people and cuts off their faces (!) - at first, it seemed like there was some potential for some good stuff.
My Synopsis: There are some cops investigating what they think is a serial killer. Mutilated bodies are turning up in the woods - the locals think it's a Bigfoot, but the cops aren't so sure. There's some crazy meth-type drug called Nova working it's way around town - and maybe the drug dealers are using the Sasquatch myth as a cover to kill people.
Elaborate Genre: Hilariously, Amazon has this listed as a documentary. It *definitely* isn't. More like a indie serial killer/bigfoot crime thriller, I guess?
Overall: Very, very bad.
I mean, Black Water Sasquatch hardly even feels like a movie at times. The production value is terrible and very amateurish - there are times where the camera is framed so tight on a character that you can't even tell what's going on. The lighting is no good, and there is no uniform look from scene to scene - there's weird filters on some shots, and I'm not sure if it's supposed to be artsy but more often than not it looks very bad and disjointed from one scene to the next.
And the editing is a goddamned mess. During the action/bigfoot hunting scenes it's hard to tell what's going on, and it seems like the story bounces around in time... characters who are killed by the bigfoot turn up later in the movie on more than one occasion. But the film never establishes any sort of coherent timeline, so as a viewer you are just left totally in the dark as to what's going on. It just feels like a bunch of scenes thrown together at random. You *kind of* get to know the cop characters; their story is told in a mostly straightforward manner. But everything else feels like a fever dream.
And about those cops - they are pretty much the only things that approach "okay" in Black Water Sasquatch. They aren't terrible actors, and they get to be in the part of movie that is at least trying to be a movie. They are given some really stupid stuff to do, and the climax of the film has one of them doing something so, so stupid that you almost need to see it to believe it. But it's not worth sitting through 100 minutes of nonsense to get there. (And seriously, this does NOT need to be 100 minutes. You could trim 10-15 minutes of stupid hicks doing drugs and talking about drinking their 'shine and lose nothing of value.)
The titular sasquatch does not look good - there's nothing worse than a bigfoot movie where a guy is wearing a baggy gorilla costume. Seriously, you should not be able to see any fabric bunching - I think they know he looks like crap because they only film him from far away. But yeah, that doesn't work. I will say that the face looks okay (it's more of a deformed thing, rather than a standard monkey mask), and there are a couple of cool shots of the bigfoot getting out of the water. And for what it's worth, I don't think it's definitively answered if he's real or not.
I guess the best thing is that there's a lot of hilariously bad dialogue about people getting their faces cut off. So if you're in a death metal band and want some audio samples, maybe try getting through Black Water Sasquatch?
For about five minutes, Black Water Sasquatch seems like it might be stupid enough to be fun. But the production value is so bad, and it is so disinterested in telling a coherent story, that it just becomes a slog. Avoid this one.
I would definitely not recommend this film.
No comments:
Post a Comment