Personally, the morbid-curiosity draw isn’t seeing the giant hairy beast, but watching The Brady Bunch’s Barry Williams square off against The Partridge Family’s Danny Bonaduce. Not since '80s pop tarts Tiffany and Debbie Gibson matched wits in Mega Python vs. Gatoroid has The Asylum’s casting been this interesting.
Williams plays a former rock star turned environmentalist; Bonaduce, an obnoxious DJ cutting down 50 acres of South Dakota forest for a big ’80s music festival he’s putting on in just a few days. Williams tries to stop him; Bigfoot tries to stop everyone from living, including one woman he attacks while she’s squatting in the woods.
A far cry from her Twin Peaks days, Sherilyn Fenn plays second fiddle as a detective from some Podunk town or another: "At least in Oklahoma City, our monsters carried guns."
This monster is, to no one’s surprise, completely computer-generated. He looks like a cartoon, and his footsteps sound the same submerged in water as they do when he’s running on the ground, which is most of the time.
Bigfoot has a sense of humor about itself, which I’m going to chalk up to X-Men actor and onetime Oscar nominee Bruce Davison, who not only plays the sheriff, but directs the damn thing. He gets rock legend Alice Cooper to poke fun at himself as himself, and even gets in digs at Williams and Bonaduce’s teen-idol pasts.
Not all of its laughs are intentional; witness this exchange between a reporter and Williams’ do-gooder character: “Some people are calling you the Jane Goodall of Bigfoot,” she says, to which he replies, “I'm just one man trying to do my part.”
At least I don’t think I was supposed to snicker at that. One thing I do know for sure: Listening to Bonaduce speak is like hearing cancer metastasize. —Rod Lott
Hey! Read This:
• Mega Python vs. Gatoroid Blu-ray review
