I have a confession to make: I am addicted to watching Bigfoot documentaries of all kinds. I’ve been watching them since my dad took me to the theater to see The Mysterious Monsters in 1975. Ever since then, I’ve been fascinated with the idea that a large, humanoid creature could be living on the fringes of human civilization without being discovered.
Amazon Prime is a hotbed of Bigfoot documentaries of all kinds and where I end up looking to satisfy my craving for some Sasquatch footage. Some of these “documentaries” are obvious fakes. Some provide a new perspective or break new ground. Some are just plain unusual. But I find all of them interesting if not necessarily worth recommending. While scanning for my latest Bigfoot fix, I came across The Back 80: A Modern Day Bigfoot Encounter. After seeing that it was only an hour and two minutes long, I figured I had little to lose by giving it a shot.
The Back 80 documents a “flap” of Bigfoot sightings in an area near Loudonville, Ohio. A woman named Suzanne Ferencak was driving along a dirt road when she saw what she described as a large, black animal jump across the road. After trying to process what she saw, she decided she’d seen Bigfoot. She wasn’t a believer in Bigfoot and knew very little about the creature, so she looked up whether there had been any sightings in Ohio. She discovered that not only had there been sightings but some had taken place just down the road from her sighting in the last year.
We are then introduced to several other witnesses who have seen what they describe as Bigfoot on or around Suzanne’s property or “The Back 80,” an 80 acre, fenced-in area that is popular with deer hunters. Meanwhile, we learn that Suzanne’s encounter has made her uncomfortable on her own property, someplace she’s felt safe since buying the land in 1999.
What follows is a strange combination of interviews with Suzanne and other witnesses, re-enactments of various sightings (sometimes including an obvious monkey suit), and a deceptively pleasant soundtrack that’s punctuated with stabs of dramatic sound effects.
The “highlight” is a night walk with Suzanne and her husband, Bernie. Equipped with infrared cameras, the couple saunters into “The Back 80” and listens for audible evidence of Bigfoot’s presence. Unfortunately, the filmmakers, Jesse Morgan and Alan Megargle, decide to intercut the walk with footage of the man in the monkey suit. This invalidates the entire sequence and casts a pall over the whole production.
While The Back 80 doesn’t offer much in the way of evidence, it does possess an earnestness that documentaries of this type usually lack. That all goes out the window when the line between reenactment, fiction, and fact is blurred by a poor editing choice. Suzanne’s story is believable and, up until that scene, so is the movie. In a niche genre where fakery and disingenuousness are a dime a dozen, it was a true disappointment to find yet another example of the same.
2.5 out of 5.0 stars
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