Do not waste two hours of your life watching Discovering Bigfoot. I am a bigfoot agnostic, and typically enjoy sasquatch-hunting programs like Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot, because life gets boring and sometimes it’s fun to pretend there are fuzzy giants chilling in the forest. But this documentary sucks. It’s a molasses-paced slog through anonymous backcountry forests (presumably in Canada, but who knows) led by director/star Todd Standing.
Here’s the thing: According to the very trustworthy-sounding blog Team Squatchin’ USA, those in “Bigfootdom” have some serious doubts about Standing. Apparently he’s known for sharing “evidence” that’s obviously fake—in other words, he’s a hoaxer! I did not know this before viewing Discovering Bigfoot. My eyes were willing to trust what I saw, even if they glazed over after 20 minutes of watching Standing wander around the wilderness and yell into the darkness every night. Every so often, he’s joined by fellow bigfoot experts—some, he emphasizes, have PhDs—who gasp at odd footprints in the mossy earth and stick apples on tree branches while yelling “GIFT!” The tagline of Discovering Bigfoot is “you
will feel the fear.” I did not feel any fear, but was reminded of an excellent bigfoot film that did scare me: the 2013 found-footage horror movie Willow Creek, which is set in the tiny California town where the Patterson-Gimlin film was recorded in 1967. Watch that instead.
