Bigfoot vs Zombies

Director: Mark Polonia
Writer: Mark Polonia
Producer: Mark Polonia
Cast: Dave Fife, Danielle Donahue, Jeff Kirkendall
Country: USA
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: TubiTV

Despite a filmography of 42 features since 2000 (plus a few earlier ones), this is the first ‘Polonia Brothers’ picture I have watched. I do view a lot of odd stuff but I’m pretty sure I would remember if I had seen Preylien: Alien Predators or Snow Shark: Ancient Snow Beast or Peter Rottentail or Curse of Pirate Death or Jurassic Prey or Snake Club: Revenge of the Snake Woman or any of the three dozen or so other titles in that list. And boy, do these guys do titles.

I say ‘guys’ but since 2008 when John Polonia passed away, ‘Polonia Brothers’ has been a solo project by his twin Mark. I suspect that’s why there’s a two-year gap between HalloweeNight (listed as 2009) and Snow Shark, after which Mark Polonia returned to his hugely impressive output of two to four features every year.

Unfortunately that’s going to be the only usage of the term ‘hugely impressive’ in this review. Bigfoot vs Zombies is watchable, if you’re in the mood for lacklustre micro-budget tosh, but I’d hesitate to call it enjoyable. Nevertheless it deserves to be noted, if only for its status as a crossover between two otherwise utterly disparate subgenres.

The one thing that the film has going for it is an original setting, which is a body farm. If you’re not familiar with the concept, don’t worry, it’s explained about ten minutes in. A body farm is where dead bodies are placed under controlled conditions in order to be studied by forensic experts. It’s a clever (if gross) concept. If you leave three corpses on the ground and examine one after a month, one after six months, one after a year – then when the cops discover an actual dead body somewhere, the forensics dudes can judge how long it’s been there by the state of decomposition.

Obviously any body farm has to be well away from habitation and protected by a stout metal fence to keep out both intruders and wildlife. The object is to see what happens when a human cadaver is eaten by bugs, not by foxes or bears.

A body farm would be a place where there were lots of dead folk just waiting to walk again, although in real life they would more likely by in shallow graves or ponds than just lying around. And this premise does at least justify why the zombies here appear different to each other, with some merely grey-faced and others having stiff, skull-like masks. Although that may be more the result of there being dozens of zombies but only 11 actors playing them. Even then, we see the same zombies killed multiple times. Also, it pains me to say it, but the quality of this film can be judged by the fact that one of the ‘skull-face’ zombies has been so shoddily created that we can clearly see the actor’s beard underneath the skull…

This particular zombie farm is run by mad scientist Dr Peele (Jeff Kirkendall) and his long-suffering, bored lab/admin assistant Renee (Danielle Donahue). There is a truck driver named Andy (Bob Dennis) who drives around the farm, delivering cadavers to requested locations. And there is a security guard (Todd Carpenter) on the main gate who has no character name. Rather cruelly, the others refer to him throughout the film as ‘the security guard’ despite the fact that he is 25% of the farm’s entire workforce and they must all see him at least twice a day.

Stu (James Carolus) and Ed (Dave Fife) are delivering a couple of new corpses in their van. Stu’s an old hand at this, Ed is the new guy. Stu and Andy both constantly hit on Renee who is repelled by their unsubtle advances but takes a liking to nice guy Ed. So, you know, characterisation.

The problem is that Dr Peele has been working away in his ‘secret lab’ (which is literally an office with a microscope and a couple of bottles on the desk) to develop a serum which will deteriorate the bodies faster. The idea being that he can then process more corpses through his body farm and thus make more money from the local hospital that supplies them. Don’t look too closely at that plan, it maketh not one lick of sense.

Actually the real problem is that, far from deteriorating the cadavers, this serum brings them back to life. Although it is unclear whether this is due to the injections that Dr Peele has given the dead bodies or leakage from the barrel of the stuff which drops off Andy’s truck near the start of the film. Much later, it is discovered that an overdose of this stuff will actually kill a zombie but this is never followed up on, as if both the characters and the director simply forgot this ever happened.

As the dead start to rise, one more character arrives at the farm. Duke Larson (Ken Van Sant) is a big game hunter called in by Dr Peele because Andy has reported that one of the shallow graves has been dug up, presumably by a bear that has somehow got into the compound.

Well, strictly speaking two more characters arrive because here comes Bigfoot. We have already met him in a prologue where he spies on a hiker/photographer (Greta Volkova) who is later munched by a zombie after somehow getting past the security fence. For no reason at all, Bigfoot hides in the back of Duke Larson’s Jeep to get into the farm, where he starts fighting zombies.

The last part of the preceding sentence sounds very exciting and is the nub of this high-concept film whose title basically is it plot. And kudos to Polonia for the amazing sleeve art showing a giant, fearsome sasquatch hurling itself at a shuffling army of the undead.

But you won’t be at all surprised if I tell you that there ain’t nuttin like dat on show here at all, no sir ma’am.

This film’s Bigfoot is, well, it’s an ill-fitting, tatty gorilla suit with a long, shaggy wig over its face. It’s really one of the very worst Bigfoot costumes you’ll ever see. I know the movie isn’t exactly taking itself seriously but nevertheless this is just kind of embarrassing. Uncredited on screen, the actor inside the suit is Steve Diasparra according to the old IMDB and he does at least attempt to give the creature some characterisation, establishing a mute, somewhat touching relationship with Renee.

At various points in the film we do get Bigfoot fighting zombies but it’s all really half-hearted and lame. Basically they shuffle towards him and he pushes them away. In fact, that’s the film’s biggest failing: it is utterly devoid of even the slightest hint of action. There’s gore, certainly. Or at least, there’s fake blood in some scenes as people scream. But obviously they couldn’t afford to get any of that on the gorilla suit as the dry-cleaning bill would have trebled the film’s budget. So we have lackadaisical shuffling scenes, and shots of bloody terror, but nothing inbetween. No actual fast or emphatic movement. Even in dialogue scenes, people just stand around talking. Then they walk somewhere. It’s like they can’t do both at the same time.

There are a few nice bits of dialogue but the quality of the acting is generally poor. Most of the cast have been in various other Polonia pictures and some have other credits at a similar level, but nothing notable. And, for all his experience in film-making, Polonia’s direction remains thoroughly pedestrian. Cut to Renee; Renee says line; cut to Ed; Ed says line; cut to Renee, Renee says line... and so on. There’s no flair here, but there’s also no real sense of storytelling or atmosphere. It certainly kills any potential comedy moments stone dead. There’s no verve, no pizzazz, no oomph in any scene in the entire 79 minutes. And if there’s one thing that a film called Bigfoot vs Zombies should have it’s oomph. I don’t think anyone ever actually runs anywhere in the entire film.

A sequence in which Duke Larson drives his Jeep across the farm, shooting at zombies with a pistol, is probably the closest we get to any action - but there again the direction hobbles the potential enjoyment. We have close-ups of Van Sant in his jeep, and cutaways of zombies falling over, but no shot of the Jeep actually driving past zombies as Larson blasts them out of the way.

Yes, budgets (or lack thereof). Yes, shooting schedules. Yes, lots of other limitations on micro-budget indies. But there are plenty of micro-budget indie pictures which manage to stage action sequences, which manage to film exciting scenes, that demonstrate oomph or just where characters, y’know, run.

The film carries a 2014 copyright date, is listed as a 2015 picture in the sales agent's publicity, and eventually appeared on DVD and VOD in February 2016. Mark Polonia's subsequent films have been Sharkenstein, Land Shark and Amityville Exorcism. You've got to give the guy props for coming up with titles (and commissioning great sleeve art).

I can’t say that Polonia’s movie is the worst zombie film out there, not by a long chalk. Neither am I convinced that it’s the worst bigfoot movie ever made. And certainly within that tiny lozenge at the centre of this previously unconsidered Venn diagram, Bigfoot vs Zombies holds its own – primarily because of the absence of any other pictures that tick both boxes.

But I can’t help feeling that this could have been better, without too much additional effort. It honestly doesn’t look like anyone had fun making it. Maybe they did, but that doesn’t come across at all. And with a film like this, if it doesn’t seem like it was fun to make, sadly it’s not much fun to watch.

Still, it hasn’t put me off watching other Polonia Brothers productions. And boy, do I have a lot to choose from.

MJS rating: D+

Little Bigfoot 2: The Journey Home

Director: Art Camacho
Writer: Richard Preston Jr
Producer: Raymon Khoury
Cast: Stephen Furst, Steve Eastin, Tom Bosley
Country: USA
Year of release: 1997
Reviewed from: R2 DVD

Stephen Furst from Babylon 5 and National Lampoon’s Animal House toplines this kiddie stravisnut as a divorced dad taking his son, daughter and son’s friend on a camping trip. Playing the character as what might reasonably be called ‘Woody Allen lite’, he is lumbered with dialogue exchanges like: “There is a dangerous wild animal loose in this area.” “My ex-wife is here?”

The story is hardly complex and, so far as I can tell, has no direct connection with the first Little Bigfoot film apart from the same costume and the same midget actor/stuntman inside it (Joseph S Griffo: Phantasm III, Magic Kid I and II, Freaked, T-Force, Monkeybone etc). Dad and kids go camping where the kids encounter an abandoned baby sasquatch (a prologue shows the little’un being separated from its parents by hunters), which they successfully hide from their father, even when they pack up camp and move into a motel. In a sequence obviously inspired by ET, Little Bigfoot (as they call their new friend) is dressed up and taken into town without anyone noticing.

The bad guy in all this is Cavendish (Steve Eastin: Night Warning, The Hidden I and II, Robot Wars, the When a Stranger Calls remake) who not only wants to catch himself a bigfoot but also owns land which rightfully belongs to a local Indian tribe but which cannot be claimed as long as there is no evidence of prior Native American settlement (so any Indian pottery found is smashed). He’s a thorough wrong’un with a squad of hunters/trackers whom he constantly berates and a tall Native American tracker who can sniff out a sasquatch at fifty paces.

Despite being subtitled The Journey Home, this is no road movie with only the final act fitting that concept, when the kids let their dad in on the secret and they work together to return Little Bigfoot from whence he came - although this involves little more than driving him from the motel back to the campsite. Cavendish’s tracker refuses to shoot the little creature in a stand-off for which the adjective ‘climactic’ seems a little overgenerous. Instead, the Indian uses some mumbo-jumbo magic to revive the injured creature which is subsequently seen, without any real explanation, rejoining its pack/tribe/herd/flock - what is the collective noun for these things? Oh, and the bigfoot’s cave contains some pre-Columbian cave paintings which establish the true ownership of the land.

There is an enormous amount of tree-hugging nonsense in this film about how the Chinook ways were the best and they were at one with nature yada yada yada - the sort of stuff that will only mislead and confuse kids old enough to understand it, rather than pointing them towards a real understanding of ecology and social history.

The three child actors are okay - not great but I’ve seen far worse and two of them were already established TV stars when they made this film. Thirteen-year-old Taran Noah Smith was one of the kids on Home Improvement and played Tiny Tim in a 1995 modern day version of A Christmas Carol entitled Miracle at Christmas: Ebbie’s Story. The best friend is played by Michael Fishman who was DJ in Roseanne. However Melody Clarke, who plays the deliberately infuriating, vegetarian kid sister, seems to have rapidly disappeared from acting after an episode of Baywatch and a sitcom called Unhappily Ever After.

Happy Days’ Tom Bosley (the voice of Gepetto in Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night) plays the kindly local ranger but doesn’t have much to do except warn Cavendish not to overstep the mark. Stephen Furst’s other genre credits include The Unseen and both Magic Kid movies. He was also, of course, the voice of Fanboy in Freakazoid! and Booster in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command.

Director and associate producer Art Camacho is, oddly, a fight choreographer with credits that range from The Master Demon in 1991, through Cyber-Tracker, Hologram Man and the Magic Kid movies, to Stephen Seagal’s 2002 opus Half Past Dead. Quite why he would have launched his own directorial career with a pair of kiddie monster movies - presumably shot back-to-back, as they were released within a few months of each other - is a mystery. Most of his other films are more likely fair including Soft Target, 13 Dead Men and Sci-Fighter.

Screenwriter Richard Preston Jr has left his name attached to some pretty dreadful straight-to-video movies including Dark Breed and Cyber-Tracker 2, as well as that swiftly forgotten fantasy series Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog. This appears to be a sole cinematography credit for Jeffrey A Cook whom the Inaccurate Movie Database says is otherwise usually employed as a sparks or gaffer on films like Charlie’s Angels and The Ring 2.

Special effects are credited to John Criswell (Project Vampire, Creepozoids) and Larry Finch. The bigfoot suit itself is little more than a black furry costume with a fairly immobile ape-like mask; curiously, it has black skin whereas the one on the sleeve is pink-skinned. Make-up artist Rela Martine has gone on to work on big TV shows such as The West Wing and CSI: New York, while second unit director Jerry P Jacobs also directed episodes of LA Heat and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

TF Simpson enjoyed Little Bigfoot 2 (which he calls Big Littlefoot) so if the intended audience was pre-schoolers then I suppose the film works. But despite Furst’s exasperated divorcee schtick, there’s nothing here for grown-ups.

MJS rating: C

review originally posted 1st july 2006

Creature from Black Lake

Director: Joy N Houck Jr
Writer: Jim McCullough Jr
Producer: Jim McCullough
Cast: John David Carson, Dennis Fimple, Jack Elam
Country: USA
Year of release: 1976
Reviewed from: UK DVD

I first came across this movie when I interviewed cinematographer Dean Cundey back in the mid-1990s and I have been wanting to see it ever since so I was delighted to find it tucked away with 19 other movies in a big, random ten-disc box set of horror movies. (You want random? This thing was on a disc with Queen of Blood!)

The title notwithstanding, this has no connection with a certain well-known 1950s Jack Arnold picture. This is instead part of the 1970s boom in bigfoot movies. It is superficially similar to the later Boggy Creek II but considerably better, not least because it is actually slightly interesting.

Rives (John David Carson: Empire of the Ants) and Pahoo (Dennis Fimple: the 1976 King Kong, Bug Buster, House of 1,000 Corpses) are two anthropology students from the University of Chicago who head down to Louisiana in search of a legendary ‘bipedal primate’. In the small town where the sightings have been reported, they find that most people claim to know nothing about any ‘creature’ or to have heard of ‘Joe Canton’, a trapper whose partner was killed by the beast. (We saw this in a prologue - the creature is clearly hairy and ape-like but also aquatic as it drags the man from a small boat.) In particular, the town’s Sheriff (Bill Thurman, who made a bunch of genre pictures in the 1960s including The Yesterday Machine, The Eye Creatures, The Black Cat, Night Fright, In the Year 2889 and Zontar the Thing from Venus) is downright hostile and tells the Yankees to stop asking questions and head home.

However, the two students meet a young man, Orville Bridges (writer Jim McCullough Jr), who says that the creature slew his parents when he was a kid. He and his grandfather (Dub Taylor: The Wild Bunch, A Man Called Horse) are prepared to discuss the animal, but not his grandmother. While sleeping in the family barn (after a dinner table faux pas) Rives and Pahoo hear - and are able to record - the nearby screams of the creature (which is never given a name).

Camping outside of town, they make out with two local young ladies but are interrupted by the arrival of the creature, who departs just as the sheriff arrives to take his daughter home (whoops!). By a stroke of luck they are locked up for the night in a cell with none other than Joe Canton (the ever-reliable - and top-billed - Jack Elam, whose genre credits include The Night of the Grizzly, Uninvited, the TV series Struck by Lightning, a Twilight Zone episode and the title role in a 1984 TV movie which has gone straight to the top of my list of A Christmas Carol adaptations that I absolutely have to see: Scrooge’s Rock’n’Roll Christmas) who tells them about his encounter and where he thinks they can find the creature. And indeed they do!

A large part of this film’s strength lies in the double act that Carson and Fimple create, helped by some neat dialogue and some smart editing (courtesy of Robert Gordon, who also cut Return of the Living Dead and Toy Story!). They are a likeable and believable pair of characters. It also helps greatly that the titular monster, although undoubtedly real, is neither explained nor properly revealed, with only a few dark long shots and a couple of less-than-a-second close-ups to show us what it looks like. (It looks like your standard bigfoot/sasquatch-type thing, frankly.)

Also in the cast are art director Roger Pancake (who also worked on Charles Band’s debut Mansion of the Doomed) and director Joy N Houck Jr as the university professor who sponsors Rives and Pahoo’s expedition. The Inaccurate Movie Database has some difficulty distinguishing between writer Jim McCullough Jr and producer Jim McCullough, but one or both of them also seems to have been involved with The Aurora Encounter, Video Murders and Mountaintop Motel Massacre. Director Houck’s other credits include The Brain Machine, Night of the Strangler and Night of Bloody Horror.

Bolivian composer Jaime Mendoza Nava (A Boy and His Dog, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The Legend of Boggy Creek) supplied the music while Sterling Franck (Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural) was responsible for the special effects. Cinematographer Cundey, who later worked with the likes of Carpenter, Zemeckis and Spielberg) does reasonable work here although the widescreen framing is ruined by some of the most cack-handed panning-and-scanning I have ever seen. Charlene Cundey (presumably related) handled make-up, her only known movie credit.

While nothing special, simple competence and a lack of tedium raises Creature from Black Lake (which had the working title Demon of the Lake) above many of the other films in this subgenre. The story trots along nicely and the characters are interesting. Some bits are funny, some bits are scary. It’s not a bad little movie.

MJS rating: B-

review originally posted 27th December 2005

Boggy Creek II

Director: Charles B Pierce
Writer: Charles B Pierce
Producer: Charles B Pierce
Cast: Charles B Pierce, Chuck Pierce, Cindy Butler, Serene Hedin
Year of release: 1983
Country: USA
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Hollywood DVD)

Or to give this film its full title: Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues... (in fact on the trailer it’s called Charles B Pierce’s Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues...!). It is also listed as The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek Part II, and no, I have never seen the first Boggy Creek film so I can make no direct comparison.

But oh, this must be one of the dullest monster films ever made. It’s not that it’s tedious or boring, it’s worse than that - it’s gentle. The first ten minutes is basically a nature documentary, a travelogue about the watery, swampy area on the Texas-Arkansas border where the story takes place.

Anthropologist Dr Brian Lockhart (writer/director/producer Charles B Pierce) heads down that way to search for the legendary Beast of Boggy Creek, a sort of redneck bigfoot. He is accompanied by two of his students, Tim Thornton (Pierce’s son Chuck) and Tanya Yazzie (Serene Hedin: Sacred Ground) plus Tanya’s friend Leslie Ann Walker (Cindy Butler: The Town That Dreaded Sundown) who wears make-up in the woods and would rather stay in a hotel. Tim spends almost the entire film showing off his skinny white chest which is an alarmingly gay subtext given that he’s being directed by his father.

As they search for the animal, we see various flashbacks to occasions when it was sighted. Despite Dr Lockhart’s comments that it hardly ever attacks people, that’s pretty much all we ever see it do. And once camp is established, including a frankly bizarre radar set-up, the Beast finds them almost immediately and then keeps popping up. So it’s not exactly difficult to track down, but once they spot it they get scared and do their best to scare it off. So quite what sort of research are they doing exactly? There is also a scene where the quartet are menaced by a rabid dog which has no bearing on anything but pads out the running time.

Eventually they get a lead and head off up-river to find an overweight redneck recluse named Old Man Crenshaw (Jimmy Clem, a regular in Pierce movies) who turns out to have a baby Beast lying injured in his back room. Quicker than you can say 'Gorgo', Momma Beast comes around looking for her kid. Dr Lockhart reunites the family and realises that to preserve this rare and special creature he must not report the positive findings of his expedition.

Which is all very well and laudable, in the same way that it was with Ted Danson and the plesiosaur much later in Loch Ness. But Boggy Creek II not only lacks the magic spark of that film, it misrepresents itself as a horror film, which it certainly isn’t. The acting, on the whole, is not up to much and the script is bland - with Leslie’s whinging the only concession to characterisation - but the photography is nice and that seems to be the main point. The hairy Beast suits are pretty good, though there are some inadvisable close-ups of the masks in the final scene.

MJS rating: C+

Review originally posted before November 2004