I love Bigfoot. I don’t believe that the legends about Sasquatches and Yetis are true, but the concept of the missing link or man-ape is a fascinating one, and right on the boarder of believability. I also love that there are so many movies about Bigfoot that are either family films or horror movies. Most of the horror movies featuring a Bigfoot monster are made on a shoestring budget, have Lance Hendrikson in them, and are only watchable due to how campy they are. These films fall into the sub-genre of “Sasquatchslpoitation.” The film that really highlights this sub-genre, and is also the best Sy Fy original movie I have ever seen, is Ryan Schifrin’s Abominable. We start off in this movie with a farmer discovering his horse slaughtered in the snow, then spying a huge dark figure lurking in the shadows. He and his wife run inside until it seems safe, and look outside to find massive footprints in the snow. Months later we find Matt McCoy (his second time on this list) as the wheelchair bound Preston Rogers on his way to a mountain cabin for the week-end. He is being taken there, against his better judgment, by a bitchy man-nurse named Otis. (Christian Tinsley) Preston has reservations about going because it is where he and his late wife suffered a climbing accident that left him paralyzed and her dead. Preston and Otis are not alone, however, as a group of five young women are staying in the cottage a little ways down the street. The movie takes on a Rear Windows vibe when Preston, trapped in his cabin and armed with binoculars, witnesses one of the pretty girls, Karen (Ashley Hartman) talking on her phone near the tree line and sees some movement in the woods. When he goes to clean off the lenses to get a better look, Bigfoot grabs her and disappears back into the woods.
Otis, of course, does not believe that Preston saw what he thinks he saw, and refuses to let Preston warn the rest of the girls or call the police. Preston, being the smart guy that he is, uses his laptop to send a text message to Karen’s phone that she dropped when abducted. Elsewhere in the woods, a trio of men including the farmer from earlier Billy, (Rex Linn) the local general store clerk Buddy, (Jeffrey Combs) and Lance Hedrickson as some random hunter are out looking for whatever ate Billy’s horse. Lance heads off after a noise in the woods thinking it’s a bear and readies his shotgun. He enters a cave where he finds the missing Karen, but now her intestines are hanging out, and she gets dragged into the darkness. Lance runs back to the camp to warn his friends, but each f them gets picked off by the Sasquatch. Later that night, after the rest of the girls have found Karen’s phone and know she is missing, Preston continues to try and contact them that the creature is still lurking about. There are a lot of things about this movie that are fantastic. Matt McCoy has definitely improved as an actor since DeepStar Six, and his character presents a very vulnerable point of view for the audience to watch the movie unfold. Bigfoot is, by the very nature of the monster, is always best created as a big guy in a suit, and this Bigfoot has a great, menacing look and has very expressive facial mechanics. As a Sasquatch movie, Abominable stands tall over it’s low-budget predecessors.
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