…I found it surprisingly creepy when people are just minding their own business and Bigfoot himself just struts and grunts into the frame…

Usually I try to review real movies but this week I decided to mix it up and review Exists, which is a found footage horror film about Bigfoot. 

When I saw the trailer for this I was in a great mood, the sun was shining and I had reached that perfect state just before tipsy becomes drunk. I found myself thinking…

“You know, Bigfoot has been neglected by the filmmaking community! He gets not respect… I bet someone could make a great horror movie about poor old Bigfoot, and maybe this is it! I am going to watch Exists!!”

This was a nice thought, but I was stupid and wrong.

Bigfoot is just a big monkey man. He is not scary. In ‘Exists’ he looks like a hairy nude biker who has been lost in the woods for a few months.

Anyway that is the sorry tale of how I ended up watching a movie about the Sasquatch. What it’s about is that five humongous arseholes go to a cabin in the woods and purely through their own stupidity manage to piss of Bigfoot himself who was just minding his own business. They are not even surprised that they are being menaced by what is considered by most even moderately intelligent people to be a mythical creature.

Of course it must be Bigfoot. What else could it be?!?

I watched this movie 12 hours ago and don’t remember anyone’s names or any defining characteristics, except of course that one guy has a bunch of cameras and films everything. This is a standard character in found footage movies. Otherwise they are complete blank slates.  They don’t even stick to the found footage conceit, after laboriously setting it up, because they keep cutting to seemingly impossible angles.

You can’t have it both ways Exists!

Don’t bother spending countless scenes trying to justify why a character fearing for his life would nevertheless take the time to strap a camera to his head if you are not going to bother sticking with the gimmick! Anyway, that really irritated me.

The only important thing you want to know though is, was it scary? Not really…

It doesn’t bother clearly establishing things that are necessary for us to invest in this kind of scenario. Instead of keeping my eyes peeled for the Sasquatch, I kept wonder where this was supposed to be set?, how isolated are they really?, did their phones work?, were their neighbors around? A good movie would have elegantly answered those distracting questions in the set up.

There are a couple of neat shots, and I found it surprisingly creepy when people are just minding their own business and Bigfoot himself just struts and grunts into the frame. I could have used more of that type of shit. Instead, mostly it has one trick. That is, establish that Bigfoot is in bushes somewhere and then point a wobbly night vision camera at some trees while people whisper too close to a microphone about how scared they are. I got pretty sick of this trick.

What I am trying to say is, unless you have a Bigfoot fetish don’t bother with ‘Exists’. 

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