Director: Jon Olson
Cast: Clover Lutter, Chris Henry
Official Site

My first exposure Bigfoot, (more scientifically termed Sasquatch) was during a 1970’s television special. It may have been an episode of the Leonard Nimoy narrated “In Search Of” series. For a young child, the program was quite frightening. The grainy Super-8 images of a Bigfoot sighting are still seared into my subconscious. This early exposure was the beginning of a life-long fascination with North America’s hairy man-ape.

Needless to say, I was delighted to receive a copy of Ape Canyon to review. I had already heard quite a bit about this controversial comedy. The subtitle is “The Story of Bigfoot: North America’s Greatest Lover!!” I immediately recalled a late night Cinemax favorite from the mid-80’s entitled Tanya’s Island. This beautiful and erotic film dealt with the love story between a hot chick (Vanity) and an ape-beast.

Ape Canyon treats the subject matter differently—as a comedy. The film opens with a chick reading a magazine in a tent. Bigfoot appears and starts to have sex with (rape) her. However, since Bigfoot is such a good lover she falls in love with him. This is one element of the movie that I’m not quite comfortable with. After all, it seems to perpetuate the myth that women fantasize about rape which is not a good message to send. But, in this case, Bigfoot doesn’t even need to remove their pants to show them a good time.

After her monkey-love experience, Darcy, a Hooters waitress falls in love with Bigfoot. Her husband, Bill, is a redneck who wears fake goofy teeth and sits on the toilet a lot. He discovers a strange smell on his wife’s underwear and becomes suspicious. When he finds secret drawings that Darcy has made of Bigfoot , he goes into a jealous rage and decides to hunt down his rival. In the end, Bill is sodomized by Bigfoot in an extended Deliverance-style sequence. As with all of Bigfoot’ “victims,” Bill falls in love with Bigfoot.

The rest of the movie involves Bigfoot attack women and dry-humping them to orgasm. He also spears an effeminate runner in the butt with a stick and beats up a few guys. Some of his other victims involve a pair of environmentalists who have tied themselves to a tree. They believe that he is a nature spirit. The tied down chick only makes the monkey love easier for our hairy friend. Bigfoot also likes to urinate on people and masturbate a lot.

Another funny subplot involves a whiny young nerd who enjoys pleasuring himself to Britney Spears magazines. However, Bigfoot beats up the young man in order to get some masturbation material of his very own. The young man collapses into a quivering mess, crying “Why? Why?” Later, he gets another magazine and is pleasuring himself in his own room when Bigfoot reaches in through the window and steals the new magazine. “***censored*** Bigfoot!” the boy cries. This subplot is pure comic gold.

While this movie is very funny at times, in the end, it is really not very good. Perhaps, if it had been condensed into a short film, the poor quality of the film could be overlooked. However, the muddy hand-held video footage gets tiresome at feature-length. The video quality is lower than one would expect, even from a no-budget S.O.V. feature these days.

The Bigfoot suit is not convincing at all—in fact it seems to be a cheap gorilla suit picked up from a Halloween costume shop. Most importantly, for a B-movie there is a sad lack of nudity and gore. In a movie like this, I simply cannot excuse a lack of breasts. For a film that revels in being low-brow, ultimately Ape Canyon fails to deliver the goods.

Reviewed by Ed Donovan.