Film Review: Humdrum Documentation of Bigfoot in Found-Footage Horror ‘Exists’

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CHICAGO – Director Eduardo Sánchez has found one bizarre way to commemorate the rogue nature of his horror film “The Blair Witch Project” for its 15-year-anniversary - by crafting an analogously lesser movie with the very rulebook he defied in 1999. In turn, his new Bigfoot found footage film “Exists” becomes a minimal horror project for the GoPro camera era that doesn’t have much of a life of its own outside of its “Blair Witch Project” context.

Rating: 1.5/5.0

The text from the very beginning of the “Exists” clues audiences into the number of recorded sightings regarding Bigfoot, a statistic that could be as fudged as when “Blair Witch Project” actor Joshua Leonard was reported as “missing, presumed dead” on his IMDb page. Sanchez has a generic batch of attractive and camera-savvy twenty-somethings (Dora Madison Burge, Denise Williamson, Roger Edwards, Samuel Davis, Chris Osborn) encounter this woods creature pretty quickly in the movie, when they accidentally clip it with its car while traveling to stay at a cabin in the woods. Everyone assumes that they’ve hit a deer or some sort, but camera tech geek Brian (Osborn) expects that it is something more; he had heard from his uncle (of whose abandoned cabin they’re going to crash) that there’s something else out there in the woods, and now he wants to film it.

As the rest of the group gallivants around the rundown cabin grounds, using GoPro cameras to capture their X-Treme shenanigans at a nearby lake, Brian sets up cameras around the sight to record any strange activity. Soon enough, Bigfoot does as he/she/it is controversially hoped to - appears - and then begins to terrorize the cabin folk. The group decides that they can’t stay on the premises for another night, but their efforts to flee are canceled when they see that Bigfoot has trashed their car. Even worse, they can’t get a stable cell phone signal to call for help. (A survival tip for all of you out there on the internet: Text messages use less battery and require a less consistent signal than an actual call.) Hot on their trail, Bigfoot proves to be a formidable force that runs really fast and doesn’t stick to strictly nocturnal menacing, causing the group to remain helpless as the creature rampages.

Continue reading for Nick Allen’s full review of “Exists”

Exists
Photo credit: Lionsgate

Continue reading for Nick Allen’s full review of “Exists”