Directed by Evan Jacobs
It’s day 1 of Bigfoot week and I should explain something right off the bat. I typically have no interest in watching or reviewing anything that includes AI generated content, which has pretty much included every movie I’ve covered as part of this series, and Backrooms Bigfoot is the one exception I will be allowing because I can’t watch this and not write about it. The usage of AI elements, which I will get into a bit later on, is not even close to the worst thing about this movie, which is absolutely the worst movie I’ve watched this Spooktober and it may be the worst movie I’ve covered for this site. With that bold statement, let’s talk about Backrooms Bigfoot.
Backrooms Bigfoot does not have a traditional narrative, instead, we see an almost anthology style series of vignettes which are loosely connected by the principle concept of there being at least one Bigfoot who lives in the liminal space known as the Backrooms. We start off learning about a Bigfoot hunter going missing and his brother hired a ‘Bigfoot expert’ to track the missing person down, but then we meet the Bigfoot expert and he never references looking for the brother. Unless he was talking about a different bigfoot hunter that he hired. Anyway, there’s that ‘plotline’ but then the real main(ish) character is a guy who is also an amateur Bigfoot hunter who is ‘hiking and camping’ in a spot where we can clearly see suburban houses and paved roads. The hiker gets caught in some kind of Backrooms/Blair Witch style loop where he is unable to leave the ‘wilderness’ and is just talking into his camera. This is almost all found footage by the way.
Even this description is giving too much structure to the narrative. We don’t see coherent segments for the most part, we typically see brief scenes introducing a person, like the hunter or the hiker, and then we cut away to a different “Guest Star” who appears alone in one scene in a random room. These guest stars act like they’re in the Backrooms, while just being in some random room in a house or building which doesn’t look that unusual, typically in a completely static shot, before an AI Bigfoot appears and kills them. This has to happen at least a dozen times. The performances, wardrobes, and set design in Guest Star scenes vary wildly, with some of those performances actually not being bad, and others being painfully amateur, and these sequences vary so much that the movie starts becoming surreal and experimental, like it’s challenging your brain as to what a movie can be.
Don’t think I’ve forgotten about the hiker and hunter! The hiker is not giving a particularly good performance, but the main problem with his sequences, aside from being able to see that he is clearly not in wilderness, is that there is no attempt to SHOW that he is in some Backrooms style maze or loop. He is on one paved road, walks to the end of it, turns around, walks the other way, and says he’s trapped in a maze. There isn’t any use of specific shots, looping background images, even any cuts to imply that he simply teleported to the start, he is just walking back and forth saying he is trapped for 20 minutes. And don’t get me started on the hunter. His whole shticky is ‘I’m not like other Bigfoot hunters’ while being exactly like other bigfoot hunters.
I guess now is a good time to get into the AI. Too much of the movie is AI generated, but it isn’t just that it’s AI generated, it’s that it is AI generated and looks like shit. There isn’t any visual consistency between the appearances of locations, probably because those prompts can be tricky, and even Bigfoot changes wildly between sequences. Maybe they’re supposed to be different Bigfoots. Maybe all the sequences in the Backrooms are supposed to look different because blah blah liminal space whatever. But the real issue isn’t that they look different, it’s that they look bad, and in a movie where certain shots and sequences get repeated multiple times (hey man, those tokens are expensive) that’s a big problem.
In my previous review for Dead Burger, I suggested a drinking game where you would drink every time there’s a continuity error. You can’t do that one for Backrooms Bigfoot, partially because there is no continuity, and partially because we have much bigger fish to fry. I can think of a dozen repetitive elements that could be made drink markers, but you only need two. 1) Take a drink whenever someone says Backrooms or Bigfoot. 2) Take two drinks whenever someone says “Backrooms Bigfoot”. Or don’t, that might kill you, because the only dialogue is people saying Bigfoot, Backrooms, and Backrooms Bigfoot over and over again. And with all of this padding and repetition and opening AND closing credits, we still just barely hit 69 minutes. Nice.
There’s only one scenario where I can imagine recommending this movie, and that’s if you thought the Backrooms movie didn’t have nearly enough AI or Bigfoot, and you wanted it to be much worse. If this review intrigued you and you need to see Backrooms Bigfoot, then go to YouTube. It’s free. But you have to look it up because I will not sully my page by putting the link to it here.