Night Claws

Bigfoot walks around in the forest and kills two young people. Although they have been torn into pieces with incredible strength, the sheriff believes a human killer must be to blame, even if the claw marks seem a bit weird. Several tourists and hunters enter the forest so the beast gets plenty of opportunity to kill more people. Besides, one of the hunters has a personal revenge business going on, for which the beast's attacks will provide enough distraction.

Hard to believe this movie was shot in the 2010s, it is totally 1980s. Which is good. Instead of CGI creatures, you get an old-fashioned monster (tall guy in a hairy suit) walking around, and there are several familiar actors from 80s trash movies (Reb Brown as the sheriff, Frank Stallone, Ted Prior). Simple minded fun mainly for the older supporters of the genre, probably young audiences will like it less.

"Night Claws" looks like it was really fun to make, with David A. Prior meeting a lot of his old friends again. At this point Prior had pretty much retired, but a young producer by the name of Fabio Soldani gave him some money and sent him back to those woods in Mobile, Alabama where he filmed roughly 102% of his movies. Hell, by this point I'm pretty sure I could be a tour guide in that town. Unfortunately, as fun as this reunion must have been, the joy doesn't translate well to the screen.

This movie is supposed to be about Bigfoot, but he's really just an afterthought. His plot remains unresolved and we barely ever see him. For some reason creature features often have the tendency to add human villains as well, which never works and just takes up precious screen-time from the monster we actually want to see. To add insult to injury, this movie looks really ugly. Most of it is shot day-for-night, which really shouldn't be that obvious when shot by a director who's been at this for three decades. There are amateur films on YouTube who use this technique far better than "Night Claws", which is not a ringing endorsement.

That's not to say the movie is completely without enjoyable moments. The climax is very low on Bigfoot, but high on laughable plot twists and unexpected deaths. Everyone's favorite Norm MacDonald punchline Frank Stallone shows up from nowhere for a cameo so brief I'm pretty sure he left his engine running. Sherrie Rose co-stars as a deputy, but looks way more like a stripper. The best part has got to be the unknown Art James though, who gives us some great line readings as the town drunk who tells us everything about Bigfoot (in exchange for alcohol, naturally). This movie has some decent laughs, but no story progression or coherent action. Given that you don't know what's happening half the time, you'll be looking at the clock regularly.

P.S: The credits read 'no Bigfoots were harmed in the making of this movie'. It deserves an extra star for that at least.

My friend Mike looked at me and asked, "Wanna come over to my house Friday night? We're gonna have tons of booze, play games, watch stupid horror movies, and even try a Ouija Board." He had me at "tons of booze." So I showed up Friday night but I skipped the card games because I suck at poker. I went downstairs and 10 people were about to watch a movie. I asked, "What movie are we watching?" and sat down. The guy next to me shrugged. "I think some Sasquatch movie." I thought he was talking about some Sasquatch documentary. But as the opening credits came on I saw the words "Midnight Releasing" and I said out loud, "Oh s***." Everyone laughed at that. But they should have known it was no laughing matter.

Midnight Releasing is a production company that is notorious for putting out horror movies so garbage even Uwe Boll would be unable to watch. I went to their website once and checked out their trailers. It was just one piece of garbage after the other. I shouldn't have watched this Night Claws movie. But I thought the booze would make it tolerable. It didn't.

Immediately, when the movie began we're shown the obligatory "young people having sex in a secluded area" scene. During the sex, the inevitable girl stops the sex because she heard something part, where the guy says, "Probably just the wind". Followed by "There it is again. John, go into that creepy dark, forest and check out that terrifying sound" part.

Although the movie already started downhill, it goes further downhill by the minute. The acting is atrocious. Plus, a lot of the voice work for the outdoor scenes sounded like it was post-synchronized in an indoor setting. Plus, the script was bad. Unnecessary scenes and people arguing with each other because the writer thought that was necessary for the plot, or something. The regular stock characters in horror were there: the bimbo; the selfish jerk who acts aggressively to everyone for little or no reason; the deranged redneck who knows about the creature; the violent redneck who wants to do whatever he can to kill it; the old, guttural-voiced sheriff who relies on some scientist to inform him on the creature; and the plethora of random people who are just thrown in to increase the kill count.

The special effects is stuff any guy off the street could do. There's this one scene that is extremely dark but it's clear that it was filmed at daytime and darkened with a filter. In this scene, they build a fire. But it's painfully obvious the fire is computer-generated. The computer animated "fire" looked like Super Mario Bros. graphics.

There actually isn't any gore in this movie. For a monster movie to lack gore, that's truly awful. I'll just stop here. To be honest, this is the type of movie only for those horror fans looking for a horror movie where it's obvious the filmmakers just wanted to make a stupid horror without any thought to being scary, original, suspenseful, or innovative. It's clear everyone involved with this movie knew this movie would suck. And if you watch this movie, you'll know it's gonna suck within the first 10 minutes. 1/10 stars from me only because a zero rating isn't allowed on this site.

Goofballs in the woods try to figure out what happened to a couple of dumbbells who died violently last night.

Lots of talk and other bulls**t. It takes a long time for more of these in-bred scumbags to buy it, and predictably, there's no monster to be found. Why do all these half-wit directors make the same kinds of movies? They want to create, but all they do is regurgitate. Jesus, take a lesson from my words, you greasy dildos.

Just another small-time attempt to cash in on interesting subject matter, followed up with just another small-time failure.

Avoid this tripe. Go to YouTube and watch the Leonard Nimoy 'In Search Of' episode about Bigfoot instead.

This is what I would call an utterly formulaic, check-the-box kind of movie.

Dumb as a bag of hammer's sheriff who steadfastly refuses to accept the evidence? Check .

Hot-headed, belligerent idiot who wants to pick fights with everyone else in the movie? Check.

Air-headed, sweet-natured bimbo married to hot-headed idiot? Check.

Tough-as-nails female character, a la Ripley from Alien? Check.

Vigilante mob who wants to storm the forest to kill the monster? Check.

Brassy, smart collegiate "expert" to clash with the dumb as a bag of hammers sheriff? Check.

It's as though the creative time behind this movie went out of their way to include every cliche character archetype from every horror movie ever in this movie. I am a fan of good "bad" horror movies. This isn't one of those. The biggest horror about this movie was that it was made, at all.