When I was gifted both parts of the Little Bigfoot saga this Christmas, I was expecting a couple of cheap laughs at the movies’ expense – and then to move on. But while the first film certainly delivers on that front – the second seems to deliver something completely unexpected: a legitimately funny introduction to B-movie schlock for all the family.
Little Bigfoot is a poor attempt at an E.T. rip-off. It is light on character development and consequence, heavy on a small ape-creature acting inappropriately around young children. If you happen to have seen Red Letter Media‘s review of it, you will understand what I am referring to. If not, I won’t be elaborating.
But besides the feral antics of Bilbo (the sasquatch youngling, named after a ‘Hobbit’ in a parallel universe’s version of Tolkien), the film still manages to speed by – provided, as with all bad movies, you are watching with someone to laugh along with at all the nonsensical loose ends it leaves in its plot. Characters repeatedly forget conversations they had moments before – including an eco-warrior who immediately decides to trespass on a logging company’s land in broad daylight, after the CEO suggests he will have her shot or prosecuted if he sees her again – or what their goal was in any given scene. One moment which sees the film reach a feverish high, comes as the kids who were trying to rescue the squatchlet from poachers suddenly turn on him, bellowing “get out of here“, and “I HATE YOU” at the bemused animal they had just been trying to coax into their house.
Safe to say, then, if you’re a connoisseur of cursed kids movies, especially with a hideously 90s aesthetic, and oddly risky-looking stunts, the Little Bigfoot franchise might be for you.
That isn’t a particularly big revelation – especially as I said, other critics have already promoted Little Bigfoot on this basis. The thing that surprised me enough to bother to write anything at all, however, was what happened next.
Usually, I would not recommend going anywhere near a B-movie sequel. Let alone a B-movie aimed at kids. Usually, all the insanity – the deranged and inappropriate ideas, and the energy to commit to them with 100% of your misguided hopes, dreams and budget – gets drained out when the first part flops; and a sequel which goes through the motions in the hope of duping someone to buy a gas-station DVD is spawned.
But Little Bigfoot II: The Journey Home managed to do something rare for this kind of movie: it made me laugh with it rather than simply at it. Of course I accept it’s still not The Godfather: Part II – some of the shortcomings of the first part remain, including a pantomime corporate villain who just really seems to enjoy destroying the natural world, and a world where death keeps being established as a real threat, only for the laws of physics to be turned off whenever it becomes an actual possibility.
BUT… The jokes land, more often than not. In part, that is thanks to the performance of Stephen Furst, cast as a fish-out-of-water single father, who is trying to reconnect with his kids on a weekend trip in the wilderness. Channelling his best Rick Moranis impression, Furst sells his dialogue with the kind of whiny, panicked characterisation that never materialised in the oppressive atmosphere of Part 1.
One highlight includes a reverse Home Alone joke, where the father discovers he has accidentally taken too many kids on holiday – during which Furst delivers his double-take with aplomb. And when it comes to selling a recycled fart-joke, which only managed to revolt us in before, he delivers something entirely lacking before: in his gasps of “Are you ALRIGHT?” at his flatulent son, we catch a glimmer of repulsed authenticity – something, someone to relate to.
It’s not very E.T., but suddenly it feels like that doesn’t matter; like we aren’t just watching a team of cynical professionals trying to unsubtly approximate something more successful. And perhaps, going beyond simply having done better with casting this time, that also reflects how this film was produced. Little Bigfoot was filmed under producer Scott McAboy, who also wrote the “story” that the screenwriter and director then had to work from. And he did that a year after he also produced Bigfoot: The Unforgettable Encounter (also about a sasquatch befriending an American kid in the wilderness) the year before, in a similar manner.
But mercifully, The Journey Home, a year later, sees McAboy absent from the crew listings. Without him, it seems that director Art Camacho and co-writer Richard Preston Jr. were afforded a little more freedom to do things a little less Spielberg-by-the-numbers, a little more absurd and immature. Yes, there is a time and a place for childish humour – and it feels pretty obvious that this is one of those places.
Things do judder to a halt as the film struggles to come to a coherent conclusion, leading to a resumption of so-bad-its-good japes (and a clearly deadly fall that results in a scratch). But even so, there is or was something there, which means The Journey Home left me feeling kind of lifted. Maybe it was just the afterglow of some successfully delivered toilet humour, maybe it was seeing that films and their sequels don’t always have to be sequentially worse, or maybe it was the apparent confirmation that you get the best results from artists if you let them call the shots – and when your hack producer doesn’t put everything on rails.
All I know is, I’d recommend this film. Especially if you have kids of your own, who one day you’d like to introduce to the world of B-movies. This is the place to start. Just don’t show them Little Bigfoot until they are much, much older. Or at least until you’ve had the chat.