On the edge of the Appalachian wilderness, from the empty streets and stark smokestacks of a vanishing steel town, Dallas Gilbert and Wayne Burton have found something to hold on to: the earnest and even desperate search for the mysterious Sasquatch—the ancient people of the forest. The Bigfoot.

Recently screened at the Starz Denver Film Festival, Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie documents a fall and winter in the bleak lives of these two rural Ohio townies. Much of the film is shockingly hilarious. Toothless Dallas explains that there is one thing separating him from his fellow Bigfoot researchers. He rubs his hand over his round crown, tousling his comb-over. “Right here,” he says.

Brains?

“I’ve got animal bone in my skull,” Dallas explains. “I’ve had four doctors tell me, Dal, you’ve got DNA of a sheep.”

The scene cuts immediately to Dallas and Wayne tramping in the woods with their cheap camera equipment. The audience erupts in laughter. We can hardly believe what we’ve just heard.

At times, the laughter is followed by uncomfortable seat-shifting. Is it right to laugh at these old men’s misfortunes? Their slowness? Are we a bunch of unfeeling highbrow film snobs? The woman beside me is particularly sensitive to the sad sincerity of the movie. I can feel her disapproving eyes on me, her pursed lips, when I chortle during Dallas’s retelling of the death of a fellow researcher and friend.

Dallas and Wayne are wholly serious about their endeavor. Dallas points to undoctored but unconvincing photographs of shadowy hollows in the trees and explains: “There. See? Aw, there’s three of ‘em.” Dallas has the real eye for the work. He is championed by the regional Bigfoot society and also by his longsuffering wife Chris, who shares a beautiful scene on the couch with Dallas, where their love for one another, lackluster though it may be, is shown to be true and enduring.

Dallas’s research partner Wayne is, on the other hand, one of the saddest tragic figures since Lenny in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. As he confesses his very personal misery and awful insecurities to the camera, from vantages within the stark forest and his own unheated living room, the audience winces at his pain in dumbfounded silence.

Still there is humor in the film—armfuls of it, like the scene where Dallas performs Reiki on Wayne out on the front porch. And the two men’s spirited Bigfoot calls, which sound like a mix between made-up Chickasaw and wounded bobcat, are the stuff of moviemaking legend. Are these men frauds or lunatics? Turns out they are neither. They are sincere in their lunacy. And above all, they are desperate, as we all are, for their lives to have meaning.

I am reminded of a man named Shorty. I worked a season running jeep tours with him in the Colorado San Juans near Silverton and Ouray. Shorty was a 6-foot 4-inch Indian from the Jicarilla Apache, raised off the reservation in the waning days of the Indian Schools. He was also the company mechanic, and he repaired jeeps in a hangar out at the Durango airport. He took me there once and showed me a quadrangle of the wilderness south of Pagosa Springs. The frayed map was taped to the sheet metal walls of the hangar. “Right here,” he said, pointing, “is where I saw a sow grizzly seven years ago. Big as an elk; blonde as a cheerleader.

The idea that there might be a remnant grizzly or two left hiding in the Colorado Rockies gripped my imagination. It changed the look of the landscape. And so I understand the great exhilaration Wayne and Dallas must feel when they are out researching, chasing after the unknown. Hell, I understand the great joy in just walking around in the woods with a good buddy.

As the credits roll, the woman beside me speaks with her man about the rude audience. “There were actually people who laughed when he told how his friend died of a heart attack,” she says, loudly.

“Excuse me,” I say to her. “But it wasn’t that he died of a heart attack that was so funny.”

“Oh really?” she says.

“It was that when he had a heart attack he fell off a cliff,” I explain.

“Oh that’s just hill-air-i-ous,” the woman says to me, eyes smoldering. “Just wait till your friend falls off a cliff.”

She leaves the theater then, and I sit back in my chair, thinking about Dallas and Wayne and Shorty and the San Juan grizzlies. Is there something out there—some ghostly vestige of a wilder America, where mysteries remain to be discovered? I know this: When there’s nothing else to hold on to, sometimes the mystery is enough.

DISCLAIMER: Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie was recently screened at the Starz Denver Film Festival. The author has not been able to determine when it will reappear in Denver, either on video or the big screen. But keep your eyes and ears open. It’s well worth the hour and ten minutes. And it’s out there somewhere.
For more info vist: www.notyourtypicalbigfootmovie.com and read their  press kit.

Photos and press kit courtesy of Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie

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