There have been some serious disturbances in the base camp of Cap’s team expedition into the Northern California woods. A bearded madman is running around with sharp objects. Team members receive inexplicable counseling services from a red-headed angel. And someone wakes up in her tent one morning with a couple of Tampons stuck in her ears. It all comes with the search for the big, the dark, and the hairy, in writer/director Rick Dalton’s The Bigfoot Chronicles, a homegrown spectacle that can’t decide if it wants to be an After School Special or a theatrical installment of Mad Magazine.
It’s 1977, and Cap (Todd Manter) has spent much of the previous few decades pursuing some pretty heavy game, including the Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster. Now, he wants Bigfoot, and he’s assembled a motley crew of seekers (introduced cleverly in monologues and a projected video of everyone on horses). Emotionally speaking, they’re a pretty ragged bunch. Harris (Harris Cooley, loose and candid), a working-class joe, still feels guilty about the death of his kid brother, while veteran Pryce (Mike Best) got spat on upon returning from ’Nam. In lieu of a living best friend, Ronald, the developmentally disabled ingénue (Josh Douglas, reprising that alarmingly haloed gaze he’s been honing for Running Over) talks to a rubber chicken named Buck Buckock. Aggressive Janet (Chelsea Cook, cartoonishly fervent) was abused by her dad; happy-go-lucky hippie Jeff (Jeff Pellerin, with delightful stoner grin and delivery) has a history of mixing his medicines; and ex-spouses Jim and Claudia (the well-matched Will Stewart and Jana Regan) rival Albee’s George and Martha in hostility, if not wit.
As the team roster might suggest, nobody in this mismatched crew is really looking for Bigfoot, per se. Rather, they’re looking for therapy, i.e., a glimpse into the mysteries of (take your pick) inner creatures, souls, truth, illusion, love, aggression, and/or how one beefy, enigmatic man with a monster fetish can have so much damn charisma.
Dalton’s script careens between entertainingly crass absurdism and touchy-feely sincerity. On the one hand, we have lines like “Do you ever have to shit so bad you feel like a pervert?” On the other, we have Pryce remembering happiness via hummingbirds and the smell of baking bread. There’s a fun, punkish snarkiness when Ronald tells about a dream he had of the future, in which a guy in a frilly white shirt named Michael Bolton “used his voice to make everybody angry.” But there’s also a whole lot of straight-faced, maudlin, and verbally diarrheic episodes in which the angel (Sage Griffin) says things like “their pain, it was an animal inside of them, and it overflowed.”
The pourability of animals notwithstanding, it’s almost as if Dalton senses the show’s surplus of Lifetime-esque dialogue, and periodically stops short to engage in a little compensatory irony. In the middle of a series of heartfelt character scenes, Jeff undergoes a different sort of “character development” by smoking a joint. In his quick, wordless evolution from uptight to groovy, there’s actually more nuance than in most of the 10-minute-plus expository sessions. Scenes like this are funny, sharp, and self-aware — and thus refreshing — but taken with everything else, they’re also a little bewildering. Their effect is to diminish the straight scenes, because in the satirical mode they suggest, all the canned wholesome stuff would be fair game for mirth. Dalton tries to have it both ways, and his quite capable actors (particularly Stewart and Best) sprint between caricature and emotional depth. At times, trying to keep up with them, you might not know whether to laugh or cry.
