DVD Review: HUNTING THE LEGEND, Where Even The Scares Are Nowhere To Be Found

The found footage Bigfoot flick Hunting The Legend is being released on DVD today, July 8th. 

Hunting the Legend is sold on the premise that this is found footage edited together from a number of GoPros and digital cameras found, mostly with bodies, in the backwoods of Alabama. It starts with the title card, "The producers would like to thank the families of the deceased and missing, as well as the Wilcox County Sheriff's Office for their permission to release the following footage". 

Chris, together with his girlfriend Hanna and best friend Jeff, head into the Alabama backwoods with videographer (director/writer) Justin and his sound guy, Alex. They interview a few eye witnesses along the way. They buy guns from a guy who does not want them to share his name yet has no problem being filmed. They also hire an attack-trained German Shepherd, Scout, for additional protection. They are ready to go hunt themselves a Sasquatch! 

Hunting The Legend is void of scares and tension. Even in the final minutes of the flick, when things finally get going, there is nothing scary about their predicament. Visual comprehension takes a back seat as the doomed Sasquatch hunters and filmographers take flight in separate directions allowing themselves to become easy pickins. With the cameras strapped to their heads there is a whole lot of shaky-cam going on. Cameras eventually fall off and lie prone as anything that happens to the victims happens away from the eye of the lense.

Noise and sound is used to limited effect; only once does anything sound close enough to their tents to solicit fear. But because the camera operator cannot see where the night vision setting is on his camera we have to listen to them sound scared. This may not be a bad thing because there is only one sighting of that 'something in the woods', caught on a camera pointed at the camp, and it is as blurry as Roger Patterson's '67 footage. The digital age has changed nothing. 

In the epilogue there is a title card. It reads as a translation of Coast Salish which is a dialect of First Nations people in the Pacific Northwest. I do not know if this is supposed to be a translation of a Sasquatch talking in the movie. But Alabama is a longs ways away from the Pacific Northwest. Is Steeley suggesting that Sasquatches migrate? Perhaps if swallows grabbed them by the husks? 

Obscure reference aside, the placement of this title card in the epilogue suggests that Sasquatches are top of the food chain in any forest they inhabit and should be left alone. Much like this movie. With the influx of found footage Bigfoot related films Hunting The Legend is not at the top of this food chain.