DailyView: Day 307, Movie 435

I love stories about Bigfoot. I am a believer that there has been some kind of mysterious beast in the wilds of the continent. So when I came across this documentary on Vudu, I was immediately intrigued. I came to find out that this doc was a combination of three episodes of a six episode from a series called Small Town Monsters.

Directed by documentarian Seth Breedlove, the film looked at the history of Bigfoot and where it came from, where it gained its immense popularity and how sighting across the country differed as well as were similar.

Breedlove investigated some of the earlier stories of the existence of a “wild man” or “devils” before the term Bigfoot was coined. He touched on the yeti, the skunk ape and the Minerva Monster. He discussed the story of the Bigfoot attack at Ape Canyon on Mt. Saint Helens, which was one of the earlier tales of a violent encounter with a sasquatch.

I found this to be very interesting and a fairly deep look at the legend of Bigfoot. I heard about some sightings and details that I had not heard about before.

The one massive flaw I found was the extremely limited focus on, what I believe is the biggest single piece of evidence in support of Bigfoot, The Patterson-Gimlin film. The famous film reportedly was filmed by the two men, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, of a large, female Bigfoot walking through California. The film has been debated for decades since 1967, when it was filmed. It has never been debunked and, deeper details show images on the film that could not be a costume. The Patterson-Gimlin film was mentioned but this film spent about 20 seconds on it, and alluded to it later once or twice. I do not think you can do any kind of doc on Bigfoot without spending more time on the Patterson-Gimlin film.

However, the rest of the doc is very well done and, putting aside that hole that I feel is in the middle of the film, I thought this was truly well covered and brought up some excellent items that I had not heard before.

This documentary ended with a “To Be Continued” on it, and, my further research indicated that there was another On the Trail of… which is subtitled “The Search” where, apparently, Seth Breedlove headed out on his own to see what he could find. That second part (episodes 4-6, I assume) went on my list to watch as I have found Breedlove’s documentary to be fair and balanced.