You have to cleanse your mind sometimes when you see some films. You get trapped in a seat for ninety-plus minutes as the cobwebs form in your brain at home as you watch. Your mind screams for the end credits to roll and when they do it’s with a perverse fascination with more attention than you gave the film to who made what you just saw. This was exactly the case the evening I partook of Director/Writer George Demick’s TAKU-HE: THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT (2017).
This is ninety, count them ninety minutes of excruciating idiocy that can only be supplemented if one enjoys other things with a companion of choice or stops the film and walks around to the bar. Firstly, it concerns the ever-popular film about making film in this case a zombie picture. Trying desperately to evolve a NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) aesthetic with a rural look you have filmmakers who are scouting a location for a zombie movie (Anubis, Lord of the Dead) out on a farm on the outskirts of a town called Riverdale, Tennessee. Archie comics beware the world is closing in on you. The farmer, Jim Owens, who owns the site they’re scouting, shows them a footprint from a creature that comes out at night and kills livestock, and people.
One of the filmmakers looks oddly like John Landis, which is interesting, but the moment passed in a sea of banality. The duo of Chuck (Ryan Williams) and Dallas (David Polk) who specialize in genre films and have a long history together with their crew. Rather, they’re so impressed by this footprint by a creature known as Taku-He hence the title, they secure additional funding from their producers, change the film direction, and start interviewing a cross-section of the town who have varying levels of skepticism. What follows is a mind-numbing section of amateurs giving it a good try with encounter confessions that scream to be edited down. The one bright spot is an odd bearded guy who doesn’t want to use his real name because the people’s Government will control him, so he picks Han Solo as his name. The person is so idiotic and so correct in silly paranoid behaviour that I wish he had more screen time.
After being told by the mayor and the local sheriff that there’s no monster in the area, a mysterious town resident claims there is and shows the filmmakers his collection of material. The only thing missing are the paper dolls and jars of urine he would save. He convinces them to pitch some tents and go on their own quest for Riverdale’s resident Bigfoot. They find the suited monster, or it finds them but not before you get a series of attempts to flesh out the character’s past lives that show up out of the blue.
TAKU-HE: THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT (2017) is amateur trash not in a good way that looks like it was scripted if you can call it that with a theatre group to make a film. We do the film and then hey let’s make some money out of it and put it into the festivals. What do you have to lose except your respect as a storyteller and you do lose it. This makes Dwain Esper’s catalogue of filmmaking look brilliant not the fun trash that Esper is. The saving grace is that the people in the film look like every day folk instead of the pretty people you often see in these camping horror films. Unfortunately, they should stay as everyday people in the audience or at least something that showcases what they are. Despite trying to show love for George Romero, this is a sad attempt at doing this by taking situations and simply being dumb.
My mind literally was stupefied watching this film which is perhaps the effect it was intended to give. So much so that I cleansed my brain with some utterly brilliant newfound trash in the form of THE MASTURBATING GUNMAN (2000). Why mention another film in this? Simply because the recall of TAKU- HE: THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT (2017) causes my brain to simply stop working making me ponder the aspects of clouds and not to the Rolling Stones. For me, it is that mind-numbing and perhaps for you as well. TAKU-HE: THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT (2017) made the moments in that film such as when the gun-toting bondage-masked assassin rips open the chest of a victim, takes out entrails and lassos a pistol out of someone’s hand with them seem commonplace. That’s another whole other story of which TAKU-HE: THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT (2017) is not.
Taku-He: The Legend Of Bigfoot is out now on DVD (Region Free) in the USA from BayView Entertainment.
Taku-He: The Legend Of Bigfoot is also available to rent/buy on Amazon Prime Video in the UK and Amazon Prime Video in the USA.
