15 Things You Didn’t Know About Bigfoot: Fun with clickbait journalists pursuing a hairy cryptid

Rating: B

Liam Lacey

 In the interests of truth in movie titles, let it be known that the mockumentary 15 Things You Didn’t Know About Bigfoot (Number 1 Will Blow Your Mind) is not structured around revelations about Bigfoot. 

Also, your mind is likely to remain un-blown. That said, as a sort of scruffy, patched-together sketch-comedy parody of contemporary clickbait journalism, the film is often wryly funny.

The title has been changed since the film premiered at the South By Southwest Film Festival in 2019, when it was known as The VICE Guide to Bigfoot.

Brian Emond and Jeff Stephenspn: If they go out in the woods today, they’re in for a big surprise.

In fact, VICE Media, the American-Canadian digital media and broadcast company, has no involvement in the film.  The movie does, however, appropriate the VICE trademark and investigative esthetic, with its skeleton crews, handheld camera work, use of confidential voice-over and suspenseful editing.  Saturday Night Live alumnae Bill Hader and Fred Armisen did a similar VICE parody in the El Chingon episode of the Netflix series, Documentary Now!

The movie was co-written by comedian Brian Emond, who stars as a millennial journalist, also named Brian Emond, who is fed up with the idiotic clickbait content he is forced to churn out. Director and co-writer Zach Lamplugh plays his (mostly) off-screen cameraman/producer, who’s quite at ease with idiotic clickbait content. 

The other principle character in the film is their Georgian guide, Jeff (Jeffrey Stephenson)  who plays a Georgia-based YouTube star and supposed Bigfoot expert known as “Cryptid Commander.”

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Cryptid Commander wears a leather hat and  is dismissed by Brian as a “GameStop Indiana Jones.” Stephenson’s character is broad, but he captures that guess-what-I-just-snorted? antic vibe of YouTube hosts. His other character trait is that he obsesses  about his fiancée who dumped him because of his Bigfoot fetish. 

Through the film, we’re tied to the perspective of Brian Emond, who sports a geek-chic hipster beard and designer glasses and a dressed-by-mom button-down style. 

He maintains a perpetual resting disappointed face, like someone who picks up the bad smell in the room a moment before anyone else. 

The core cast are strong, and this might have been a stronger movie, or even better a web series, if it had kept things simple. 15 Things loses its thread about midpoint, when it expands into a murder mystery. And it isn’t helped by punch-down stereotypes about sleazy rappers and meth-cooking hillbillies.   

Curiously, the film is billed as a “paranormal comedy,” which it isn’t, although it plays with found footage tropes (dying camera warnings, pixelated brown camera images) that have been used in horror films. 

Whether Bigfoot exists or not (spoiler alert: it does), has nothing to do with the paranormal. In fact, there’s a semi-factual basis behind the movie: Though the hairy one (Bigfoot or Sasquatch are both acceptable) is typically associated with the Pacific Northwest, the North Georgia mountains are also a hotspot for sightings.  

According to Deep South magazine, at the Expedition Bigfoot museum in the town of Cherry Log, Gilmer County, Georgia, owner David Bakara has possession of such Bigfoot-sourced items as “hair samples, footprints and handprints, butt prints and even a feces sample.”

Sensitive viewers should know that a “feces sample” plays a part in the movie. So perhaps it should be Number 2 that blows your mind.

15 Things You Didn’t Know About Bigfoot (Number 1 Will Blow Your Mind!) was directed by Zach Lamplugh, and co-written by Zack Lamplugh  and Brian Emond. It stars Brian Emond, Zach Lamplugh, and Jeffrey Stephenson. The movie is available on video on demand on May 7.