Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes (2012) poster

Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes (2012)

Rating:

aka The Lost Coast Tapes


USA. 2012.

Crew

Director – Corey Grant, Screenplay – Brian P. Kelsey & Bryan O’Cain, Producers – Chris Beal, Chevez Frazier & Corey Grant, Photography – Richard Vialet, Music – Eddie Booze, Visual Effects Supervisor – Rick Sander, Makeup Effects – Greg McDougall, Production Design – Chris Davis. Production Company – New Breed Entertainment/Harrington Thomas Productions/Freeway Studios/Continental Media.

Cast

Drew Rausch (Sean Reynolds), Rich McDonald (Darryl Coleman), Ashley Wood (Robyn Conway), Noah Weisberg (Kevin Lancaster), Frank Ashmore (Carl Drybeck), Japheth Gordon (Curtis), Rowdy Kelley (Jacques Larouche), Sweetie Sherrie (Latonya)


Plot

Filmmaker Darryl Coleman is hired by Sean Reynolds who wants to make/host a documentary about a man who claims to have the carcass of a Bigfoot. Sean has brought Darryl’s ex-wife Robyn Conway on board as producer. When Darryl’s regular soundman refuses to trek out into the woods, they take the bumbling neophyte Kevin Lancaster. The group travel out into the remote woods along California’s Lost Coast, filming everything on the way. They meet Carl Drybeck who lives in a cabin with only a generator for electricity and wants $50,000 to show them the carcass. As they settle in for the night, the cabin is surrounded and attacked by what appear to be Bigfoot creatures, although Sean thinks these might be being faked by Carl.


The Patterson-Gimlin film of 1967 was a minute-long piece of film that purports to show a Bigfoot in the wild. It caused a sensation and in its aftermath there were a host of films and pseudo-documentaries made for drive-in audiences of the day. These included the likes of Bigfoot (1971), The Curse of Bigfoot (1972), The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), Shriek of the Mutilated (1974), The Legend of Bigfoot (1975), Creature from Black Lake (1976), In Search of Bigfoot (1976), Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot (1976) and The Capture of Bigfoot (1977).

The genre still continues today in the B horror movie field with the likes of Night of the Demon (1983), Search for the Beast (1997), The Untold (2002), Among Us (2004), Suburban Sasquatch (2004), Sasquatch Hunters (2005), The Unknown (2005), Abominable (2006), Bigfoot (2006), Paper Dolls (2007), The Shrieking (2008), Sasquatch Assault (2009), Lost Woods (2012), Feed the Gods (2014), Bigfoot Country (2017), Primal Rage (2018) and Monstrous (2020), among others. (For more detail see Bigfoot Films).

Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes was made amidst the huge surge in Found Footage films that came about after the success of Paranormal Activity (2007). There were several other Bigfoot films during this period that took the Found Footage route with the likes of The Sasquatch Hunters (1997), Hair of the Sasquatch (2008), No Burgers for Bigfoot (2008), Sawtooth (2009), Willow Creek (2013), Exists (2014), The Legend of Six Fingers (2016) and The Bigfoot Project (2017). (See Found Footage Films).

Ashley Woods and Frank Ashmore in Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes (2012)
Ashley Woods with crazed hermit Frank Ashmore

This follows the path of fairly much every Found Footage film. A group of filmmakers head out into the woods/remote area in search of ‘something’. We get lots of blurred footage with them running around in the woods hunted by a creature that is not clearly seen. We get the partly glimpsed appearance of something near the end and the film ends abruptly with presumably everybody killed, as is always the case in these films.

There is only mild tension ever generated. The characters are drawn with slightly more interplay than usual. Frank Ashmore stands out as the crusty woodsman of ambiguous reliability. But there is nothing here that does anything substantially different to every other similar Found Footage film – all of them follow the same paths whether it is witches, aliens or menacing psychos wandering around the woods.

Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes was the third film from African-American director Corey Grant. Grant has also made the thrillers Studio (2007) and Illicit (2017) and the comedies/relationship dramas Dysfunctional Friends (2012), Sister Code (2015) and I Got the Hook-Up 2 (2019), although none of these are genre films.


Trailer here


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