No Burgers for Bigfoot (2007) - By Duane L. Martin

Film Reviews: No Burgers for Bigfoot (2007) - By Duane L. Martin
Posted on Tuesday, July 01, 2008 @ 00:05:00 Mountain Daylight Time by Duane

I really enjoy well done mockumentaries. By well done, I mean ones that aren't stupid and don't sound totally fake and like they're trying to hard to be funny. I've seen great ones and I've seen ones that totally blew it and just weren't enjoyable at all.

Naturally when you think mockumentary, films like Spinal Tap, Fear of a Black Hat and the Christoper Guest films like Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, etc...come to mind. No Burgers for Bigfoot is a similar kind of a film in that it follows the exploits of a less than adept film maker, his highly untalented cast, and his mostly clueless crew as they try to make a film about bigfoot.

So how was it? Was it great or was it a goat? Well, honestly I can say, this film was absolutely awesome. It's one of those films where through much of it you're kinda laughing quietly for smiling to yourself and really enjoying it, and then every so often something seriously, seriously funny happens and you really bust out laughing. I have to say that the funniest parts of this film for me revolved around this really nice and likeable black girl they hired as a production assistant. The director hired her because she was black and he wanted to have a little diversity, but the thing is, no one, including him, was at all comfortable saying anything stereotypical around her or even mentioning the fact that she was black. It created some unbelievably hilarious, awkward moments that were just beautifully acted and worked flawlessly. It takes a lot to make me laugh that hard at a film, so when that happens, you know they did something right. I think there were about three or so moments like that, and they were just priceless.

The film itself is shot in the kind of a documentary style that you see on a lot of behind the scenes featurettes on many DVDs, only this is full length, and includes a screening of the completed film at the end, with an epilogue afterward that checks up on the director and some of the cast and crew in the aftermath of the project.

What I really loved about this film was how great the performances were. The dialogue delivery sounded kind of typical for this type of a film, but the way it was done had a naturalness to it also that really enhanced all the awkwardness of the interactions and the ridiculous social and working situations the people in this film found themselves in. It was all brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed by an extremely talented cast.

Technically, the film was great. The edits jumped around the way these style of films usually do, covering different events in kind of a jumping around from one situation to the next fashion, if that makes any sense. The sound was excellent and I had no trouble hearing what anyone was saying. The only thing I could ding it on maybe a bit is the visual quality in a few of the outdoor scenes that had become over contrasted, but that's a minor ding at best.

There's some quotes on the DVD itself and one of them caught my eye that I just had to comment on. It's a quote from Gary Fredrickson, Oscar winning producer of The Godfather. It says, "A LOT funnier than N. Dynamite!" N. Dynamite being Napoleon Dynamite for those who don't know or haven't seen it. Anyway, I just had to say this. A dog doing the hunchback and dropping a turd is a LOT funnier than Napoleon Dynamite. That movie just sucked and wasn't funny in the least. It was more irritatingly annoying than anything else. So saying this movie was a LOT funnier than that one isn't saying much, nor is it really a comparison because they're different types of movies. A more fair comparison would be to say that it's a lot funnier than say a film like Spinal Tap, which while funny, wasn't as consistently as funny as this film, nor did its humor rise to the level that the humor in this film did. Don't get me wrong here, I love Spinal Tap. This one for me at least was just funnier and more enjoyable.

So that's it. What we have here is a seriously fun film that's a definite must see. If you want to find out more about the film, you can check out the film's website at http://noburgersforbigfoot.com. Just a warning though. As of the writing of this review, the image the web site loads on the main page is a 2350x2242 image scaled down in the code to 816x762 that comes in at around 4.7 meg. So if you got a slow connection, you might want to hold off on checking it out until you can get on a faster one.