brendan halpin

Ah, Tubi. You are a neverending banquet of shitty horror movies, and I love you for it!

This review is for people like me who have a real soft spot for bad horror movies. That is to say, people who see a title like Bigfoot vs. Zombies and go, “Oh, yeah, I’m in.”

Now, one thing I enjoy about a shitty, almost-zero budget horror movie is the punk rock DIY aspect of the whole thing. Many, many horror movies are made for the love of the art form, and make up for in charm what they lack in skill. Thankskilling is the exemplar of this kind of filmmaking.

This is not the case for Bigfoot vs. Zombies. Sure, it’s got inept direction and editing and wooden acting, but it turns out that even indie artists can do cynical money grabs.

Full disclosure. I finished this movie. The script is actually not terrible, and there’s an undeniable charm to people who can’t really act giving their all to a production. (Special shoutout to Ken Van Sant, who plays the idiotic gung-ho hunter role perfectly and also looks kind of like Ed Begley Jr.).

But though writer/director/editor Mark Polonia doesn’t really know how to frame a shot and slows the pace of the movie by holding too long on almost every shot, he still had the opportunity to make something fun and over the top, but he bungles this by being cheap.

Because here’s the thing about Mark Polonia. This wasn’t his first movie. Or his third, or even his tenth. This was his thirty-ninth movie. This man churns this shit out at a rate of about three movies per year, which means he’s either found a way to make money off it or he’s independently wealthy.

So clearly this is not a labor of love. It’s a money grab. (I’m actually very interested in how he makes this whole venture work. The man has directed ninety-six movies in the last forty years.)

So we have a zombie movie with almost no practical effects. When the aformentioned deranged hunter (named Duke Larson, so respect for that choice) is shooting zombies in the head, this is signaled by a little splash of CGI blood. When Bigfoot is cracking zombie skulls, which is what we came to this party for, we again get only a brief glimpse of CGI gore. In other words, this movie utterly fails to deliver the goods that you have every right to expect.

There are lots of other bad choices—the “lab” is clearly just a room in an office park that they don’t even bother to put a whiteboard with some equations in. The mad scientist guy estimates thirty to thirty-five bodies on the corpse farm where the movie is set (again, props for a clever move—like, once you know there are such things as corpse farms, how could you not set a zombie movie there?), but we see the same seven zombies over and over again. This was actually shocking to me. I have to imagine finding extras to shamble around in zombie makeup is the least challenging part about making a zombie movie, because who doesn’t want to play a zombie? Hell, I’d do it this afternoon if they needed me!

And then there’s Bigfoot. Who is a guy in a gorilla suit. Or, more accurately a guy in what looks like “a gorilla with really bad psoriasis” suit. He isn’t even played by a particularly tall actor. And, I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is kind of funny, and had it been accompanied by some halfway decent practical effects, I would have rolled with it. But Jesus Christ Mark Polonia, take some fucking pride in your work, would you?