Enough of Mark Polonia’s stuff, let’s go deeper into the homegrown cinema territory with a “classic” by David Wascavage, Suburban Sasquatch.
Sometimes you think you know a certain genre, then see shit like this or Fungicide that makes you realize, yes, we can go lower than an early Polonia Bros direct-to-video film made in the late 90s, there is a 10th circle of movie hell… or heaven, depending on whom you ask.
If you ever wondered what those Donald Trump VS Bigfoot VS Nazi Shark fuckin movies would have looked like if they were made in the 90s, and were somehow worse than Curse Of Bigfoot… well, wonder no more, because while this was made in 2004, it looks like the first Feeders film or something like that, it’s that territory of shooting your own shit with pocket change (and some “locally sourced” weed as stand-in for salaries) as budget, with your friends as “actors” and location shooting meaning you most likely recorded the footage (“filmed” is too strong of a word) somewhere in some woods or field near your home, or inside a friends’ house.
This is HIGH amateur hour stuff, my fellows bad movie buffs, so amateur it hurts.
And not to call out Polonia again, but i do wonder if there’s something in Pennsylvania that makes people just suddendly feel like they have to make movies even if they don’t have money, because this also hails from that specific region of the United States.
We did feature these kind of movie before, and this is no exception, but it IS a masterclass in movie ineptitude so potent it destroys any willingness to play nice and make excuses on behalf of the director, producer and crew, and yet you wanna thank them anyway because it is AMAZINGLY bad it’s funny, fuckin hilarious, so shameless and yet somewhat earnest, even if the “special effects” are even worse than Birdemic’s.
I dunno what it is that makes Bigfoot movies in particular a magnet for these kind of spectacular trainwrecks Z-grade flicks done with some leftover allowance from grandma, but Suburban Sasquatch exists, and i thank the fine folks at Rifftrax for unearthing this one, though it’s arguably one of these that doesn’t even really need a comedic commentary, so unbelievably “funny bad” is it.
The plot is simple and nonsensical as they come: a bigfoot/sasquatch goes on a killing spree in a suburban area (fittingly enough), and it’s up to a couple of ranger, a reporter and a mystical Native American female warrior to stop it, or try, as the “squatch” has the magical ability of being friends with the editor so he can and will teleport out of existence when he feels like it.
To say nothing of the “Native American female warriors” that feels like someone had a crush on Humba Wumba from Banjo-Tooie, not that you will think much of her… costume, since the more obscene thing in the film is the sasquatch chesticular area, he has the bigger tits, and for some reasons they give him big ass inverted nipples the size of “pepperoni/salami” made out of papermacie and slapped on that cheap Halloween store ass gorilla suit in tow with the cheapest mask they could get.
It somehow looks worse than that “fried egg eyes” costume from Curse Of Bigfoot, with the hands/gloves part obviously cobbled from another costume as the “hand fur” doesn’t match the colour of the rest of the suit’s fur. Of course.
Even the sasquatch’s roar is a bust, sounding like they recorded an edgetrimmer or something.
It’s easier to say what Suburban Sasquatch doesn’t fuck up in some way, it is incredible how everything is wrong, inconsistent, these people clearly never acted anything before this (boy you can tell), the characters are inept as the acting itself, the music is fried ass, even the gore – which is the only selling point in these killer bigfoot movies – is almost entirely done in post with some of the worst, cheapest CGI effects ever, you can’t get more basic than these unless you decide to use Paint as your animation program, and that still won’t excuse anything.
Nothing can excuse scenes like the Sasquatch throwing cars, not even off-screen mountain lions.
So here it is.
This is on top of the usual stuff that’s kinda par for the course in homegrown cinema films, mostly audio problems up the wazoo (to the point the accidental rustling of leaves can – and will – make dialogues hard to make out), no care for any kind of continuity, inconsistent lighting, but i will admit i never saw a boom mic protrude into the shot (directly or a visible shadow) like in fuckin Dolemite, which is SOMETHING i would 100 % have expected.
It would be the perfect bad movie if it was 20 minutes shorter, some of the obvious filler isn’t even that funny, and while the movie starts out fast with his bullshit, i could have without the boring ass romance subplot between the reporter and the Native American warrior, which is exactly there to pad out the thing even further, as one would expect.
Even so, Suburban Sasquatch is UNBELIEVABLE levels of bad, so much that even Rifftrax, when uploading their version to Youtube (where you can also find the entire movie, FIY), did in 20 minutes parts/chunks, almost if it’s that bad it has to be taken in small doses.
You can hardly sink any lower without straight up making the movie so dark it’s almost impossible to see stuff happening (looking at you, Dracula VS Frankenstein), this is the abyssal depths of Z-grade cinema we’re talking about here.
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