User Reviews

We love Bigfoot movies enough to have an entire Letterboxd list devoted to them. Ape Canyon offers something that no other film on that list does. It's a life crisis film wrapped up in a need to find a living sasquatch.

Cal Piker (Jackson Trent, who also was in Bad Witch) reappears in the life of his sister Samantha (Anna Fagan) and demands that she go to Oregon with him to look for Bigfoot, a trip that he has paid for with her credit card.

The trip to Ape Canyon means facing danger and being guided by the Bigfoot Investigation Organization, which starts with everyone's money being stolen and then the group left in the woods to die.

Just as much a road trip and exploration of what happens when life doesn't live up to our dreams, Ape Canyon is anything but just another bigfoot movie. Joshua Land, its director, also co-directed the aforementioned Bad Witch, which also nicely sidesteps convention. I really liked how past meetings with the mysterious monster are only shown in animated form. I'm interested to see what he and screenwriter Harrison Demchick do next.

If I had the opportunity to rewrite this movie, I would not include the criminal mischief and arrests. I would simply have Cal, Samantha, and Charlie regrouping and hiking into Ape Canyon. The climax of the movie would be all 3 of them tracking footprints and then eventually seeing a Sasquatch at a distance in a clearing. Perhaps drinking from a lake, or picking berries from bushes on the edge of the woods. They would witness its activities for a few brief moments before it disappeared back into the woods. Both Cal and Charlie will then have been fulfilled/justified, and Samantha would have come away from the experience with a new respect for Cal and an awe for what she had witnessed. The three of them would have received "healing" on multiple levels, bringing a sense of closure to their characters. A missed opportunity indeed.

There's no need to use words that a big city rag critic would use here. This is a pure junker of movie.

Why is this even listed as a comedy? This is listed as a comedy but shows only people entitling other people's psychosis. Why is this listed as TV14, when the language turns reprehensible for anything less than an R or MA rating?

At first glance, the cinematography isn't bad, the actors are not looking like cardboard cutouts reading lines, like most other independent micro budget films. But, then... It drags and drags and drags.

And then you realize that this is not a comical bigfoot movie. The whole main cast is drugged and robbed by a scammer. The main protagonist is mentally unstable after his mother's death, his wife and either pets or children have left him, he steals his sister's credit card number to buy flight tickets, and he has this weird obsession of seeing bigfoot. His older sister has a teaching doctorate at an early age, which makes no sense how she is so unintelligent to allow her brother's obsession and psychosis. Then after they are robbed and drugged, they are rescued and are being put on a plane for home loke the rest of the simpletons that were robbed, but the sick brother, decides to steal a car to try to go back to look for bigfoot. His sister jumps in and unconvincingly tries to get him to stop but continues on with him. They are arrested and jailed. Still no ID on them to get proof of who they are. The man that originally scammed them, somehow gets caught by these same rural police because he wanted to pull more scams in the same location. Wow. Who wrote this? He is put in the same empty cell as the brother and sister. Has this cell ever held any living creature? Well, the criminal puts a piece of paper on the cell door lock before the officer can close the door so he can make his immediate escape. It was so blatant that a real cop with the IQ of Barney Fife could have seen it. When the door was shut, the sound and the feel was different. It was beyond cartoon level stupidity. And then the sister and brother engage the scammer in monolog before the sister hits him, and the he walks nonchalantly out. The two didn't yell or scream to let the officer know the scammer was about to or did escape.

Now the sister, with this title of doctor, she just follows her brother out the same way the scammer went. More depressing cartoon logic. The sister and brother almost make it to the Ape Canyon while they go back and forth with the hows and whys of his messed up childhood psychosis that has clearly become full blown. The rangers close in with their handguns drawn to re-arrest both of them. He runs, falls, runs again with her in tow. They stop and breath in a fake emotional and physically drained manner. He tells the police it was all his fault. He then is shown by himself, breathing in the mountain air, and he hears the howls of what we're supposed to believe is a bigfoot. Fade to credits.

Last statement about the cast. The sister's husband look like his family could have been inbred Vermont maple suckers. She has a doctorate at this young an age, first she would not have had time for a marriage type relationship, and secondly a marriage to what looked like a gas station attendant about to o.d. On meth.

I can't say there are any plot holes. There has to be a plot in order to have holes. I could easily say this is the worst movie I've ever watched because I've seen quite a few stinkers as of late. But, this movie is so bad, it makes you forget how horrible other movies could be. It seems as if this movie is a black hole of bad that sucks your memories of other bad movies away.

There are no bogfoots in this movie. There is no actual footage of them actually making it into Ape Canyon. There is no comedy. There is no action. It's just a sad piece someone with this psychosis would produce.