The Bigfoot Trap

Mr. Pat
Oct 4
4 min read

It's been weeks, but Notre Dame's losses to Miami and Texas A&M still bug me. They should have beaten Miami. I blame that on terrible playcalling, but there's no excuse for losing that A&M game. They should have changed the locks to Chris Ash's office for that one. Anyway, let's talk about something else, like...

The Bigfoot Trap (2023)

When I was a much younger Mr. Pat, I believed in Bigfoot. I was never exposed to the hunting Bigfoot shows, but I can imagine, if I knew about them at that age, I'd have been all over them. Still, I was always a big fan, and anytime I was in a wooded area, I'd be looking around, seeing if I could find him. In case you're wondering, no, I never found him.

The movie follows a journalist who cut his teeth doing the kind of journalism where he recorded crazies so he, and the rest of the internet, could mock them. Anyway, he gets an assignment to follow a man who built a Bigfoot trap. As an aside, in 1974, the North American Wildlife Research Team actually built, what's believed to be the only one of its kind, an actual Bigfoot trap so they could catch the mythical beast. It was later abandoned in the early 80s. It's now maintained by the United States Forestry Service and is a tourist attraction.

Back to the movie. The journalist came out there with the intention to mock the dude, but as the days go by and the evidence piles up, coupled with the man's earnestness, he begins to think that maybe Bigfoot is out there, and his whole trip was unnecessarily cruel.

This is kind of an odd one that I can't quite put my finger on. For one, the movie starts with three men sitting on top of the newly-completed trap. Two of them are hardcore Bigfoot dudes, and the other is helping them build with weed as a payment. He makes a small joke about the whole thing, and it perturbs the other two. A few minutes later, he's alone and gets attacked and killed by what appears to be Bigfoot. We fast forward, and the journalist is out there, and even before they show you, it's obvious the dudes who operate the trap are faking stuff for the journalist. Despite it being obvious they're putting on a show, he starts believing it. They all go too far into the deception because the pair doesn't think the journalist sufficiently believes them. Things kind of get out of hand, the journalist gets his hands on a gun, and shoots and kills Bigfoot. Unfortunately, it's actually the friend in the suit who got a little ahead of his skis.

The movie does something weird here. It paints the antagonist in a very sympathetic light. You get his backstory, and you realize this Bigfoot stuff and the colorful tie-dye shirt are him trying to recapture the time in his life when he was happy. He and his grandfather would bond over Bigfoot, and he was the only one in the family who took him seriously. The shirt was also a gift from his grandpa, and that's why their merchandise shares that tie-dye theme. It's kind of touching.

At this point, I feel for the guy. He doesn't just want Bigfoot to be real; he needs Bigfoot to be real. But then we get the reveal that the dude and his friend straight-up murdered their builder friend strictly because he made fun of them, you lose that sympathy. It wasn't even a quick death. The dude gets straight up mauled. It seems a waste to spend that time making him sympathetic when he and his friend resort to murder if someone teases them. They spend that time building up the goodwill just to toss it away with little more than a shrug.

Still, I kind of like this part. Once the journalist is trapped in the cage, both of them are trying to think of ways in which they can both walk away from this, but each knows it's not going to happen. The ideas from both of them sound good in the moment, but given the slightest scrutiny, they fall apart. Only one of them, if that, can walk out of there, but the big man with the gun really doesn't want to kill the journalist trapped in the cage.

This leads to a shocking moment that I really didn't expect, and it caught me off guard. In my mind, I was picturing the endgame, and none of the 14,000,605 possibilities matched what happened.

I think I liked it. Look, it's not good. The acting is bad, the effects are worse and it looks like it was made for 50-money, but it had some things going for it. I like the earnestness of the antagonist; he wore his every emotion on his sleeve and seemed like a good guy, outside of the whiplash from giving the go-ahead to murdering their friend. I enjoyed the journalist as well, and what ended up happening to him. The big reveal didn't look very good visually, but it added a little something to the movie and made you wonder if all of them had been a little more patient, none of them would have had to die.

It's better than I thought it was going to be, but I went in with very low expectations. Still, it did enough things that I liked for me not to pan it completely or give it a failing grade.