Sasquatch (The Untold Story) (2002)

Based on actual events, this is the story of a rescue team headed by billionaire scientist Lance Henriksen who are out in the snowy wilderness searching for his daughter whose plane had disappeared after crashing in the region. Though Henriksen accepts that she couldn’t possibly have remained alive in the hostile surroundings, it is nevertheless it remains a huge mystery as to why the plane seems to have been torn apart and dragged all over the place.

Meanwhile, one of the geek-like members of the rescue team keeps jabbering on about how every culture known to humanity has a concept of a “Yeti” or the Abominable Snowman or a “Sasquatch” – different names for the same thing. This big-bad bogeyman lives in the forests of the mountains!

Gradually it becomes apparent to our relatively thick team that someone or something is stalking them and is mad as hell for having had his space invaded or something to that effect. What at first appears to be a very overweight and elderly lumbering gorilla-like creature turns out to be something far more sinister and lethal? For a while, all the audience sees the “beast”, a series of fuzzy, blurry images suggesting something big, dark and very unfriendly. As the action progresses, the beast mutates into something resembling a cut price version of the Predator. It even suffers the same polarized vision difficulties the Predator suffered from.

Interwoven into this supposed fact-based tale is an angst-ridden subplot of a father trying to “fix things” with his distant, misunderstood daughter whose video footage he discovers among the plane wreckage. When he watches it, he could have thought it was the Blair Witch Project as the video contains an identical “I think I’m gonna die out here” soliloquy that borders on parody rather than the rip-off it is! In a less than thrilling climax, the hulking, shuffling fat ape turns out to be a distant cousin of The Predator, who shares his predecessor’s hatred of man’s harmful use of technology.

This brain-dead, anaemic version of Predator is a wholly unsatisfying experience – it fails to excite as a creature feature as the creature itself is hardly ever visible. When it does come into view, it’s a most unthreatening sight. Even gorehounds will feel short-changed as so much is promised but very little delivered.

So, a Predator meets Blair Witch in Vertical Limits territory with dire results – a total waste of time. The acting is suitably abysmal, and the real star is the sound production team and the background score composer who work overtime (needlessly and in vain) to inject some sense of drama or tension into proceedings. Noble though their intentions are, they don’t cut it, and inevitably nothing can save this film from the oblivion it deserves.