| Tagline(s): | The Myth Is True |
| Monsters Are Real |
A recently-retired Army ranger takes his girlfriend on a back country hiking trip and, after about fifteen minutes of hiking through the woods, proposes to her. That night, after yet more hiking through the woods, their camp is attacked by a mysterious creature and, like the crack special forces soldier he is, he walks off into the woods in search of it, leaving the camp unprotected. When he gets back, the camp is trashed and his fiancee is gone.
Cut to a year later, when he is being released from a mental hospital after finally admitting that his fiancee was killed in a bear attack, not by some weird monster. He goes home and is met by his enabling mother, who assures him that it wasn't a bear and encourages him to go back, hunt the monster, and try to find his fiancee. He gathers a high-powered rifle and a backpack full of supplies, and wanders around in the woods for a really, really long time while, like the crack special forces soldier he is, utterly failing to notice Bigfoot skulking around spying on him from about ten feet away. He eventually goes back to his Jeep to sleep and, in the morning, is menaced by Bigfoot, and, like the crack special forces soldier he is, completely fails to shoot at it while it pounds on his Jeep.
Fortunately, a random survivalist with a high-powered rifle wanders by and scares it off, although not by shooting it. The survivalist takes the ranger back to his camp where they have a beer and agree to hunt Bigfoot together. They gather up their high-powered rifles and hike through the woods for a really, really, really long time, discussing the possible origins of Bigfoot. The survivalist notes that the local Native American shamans built a spiritual perimeter around the area that was disrupted by the Mount St. Helens eruption. On the other hand, he also notes that the area is surrounded by "no trespassing" signs from a mysterious corporation that has no buildings and has never sent as much as a single employee to the area. Neither of these subplots goes anywhere, presumably because it would distract from all the hiking. Finally, like the crack special forces soldier he is, the ranger trips and falls into a pit full of bones where Bigfoot has been leaving the remains of his dinners -- including the ranger's fiancee.
Bigfoot is not amused at these humans digging through its garbage and confronts them. Bigfoot growls. The humans wave around their high-powered rifles. Bigfoot throws a rock at them. The humans, like the crack special forces soldier and survivalist they are, drop the high-powered rifles that give them a huge advantage over Bigfoot and flee without ever firing a shot. The survivalist is wounded. The ranger is down to only his giant Dirty Harry style pistol. They hike through the woods for days (in-movie time; it only feels like days of viewing time), being stalked by Bigfoot but not actually shooting at it with their giant pistol. Eventually, the survivalist decides the audience ranger will never escape while dragging him along, so he sneaks off in the night and shoots himself with the pistol, demonstrating that it is actually useful for something after all. Bigfoot eats his body.
Realizing the pistol is useless, since he never actually fires it, the ranger takes his combat knife and makes a spear out of a handy branch, since this is obviously going to be way more effective than the two high-powered rifles and Magnum pistol that he's so far declined to shoot Bigfoot with. That done, the ranger walks back to his truck in, for once, an implausibly short time. He grabs his stuff and heads for the survivalist's camp where he sets up a trap which he then baits by, no kidding, holding down a car horn for two solid minutes of screen time to piss the audience Bigfoot off into coming to murder him. It works. There is a climactic final battle where the ranger, armed with pistol and homemade spear, demonstrates his crack special forces training by cowering in a pickup truck while Bigfoot tips it over.
An indeterminate time later, the ranger wakes up in a hospital where a wheelchair-bound Lance Henrickson explains that this is actually just the pilot for a monster-hunting TV series that, thank god, never got made. Or maybe it did and the five years since this movie came out just hasn't been enough time to film enough hiking footage for the first episode.
Justin Lee
Kevin Makely
Todd A. Robinson
Summer Spiro
Amanda Wyss
Lance Henriksen
Adrienne Barbeau
