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Well, an opening bit cutting between semi-hectic shaky-cam footage and our lead apologizing to the camera lets us know that things probably don’t end well. A documentary crew heads to the harsh awfulness that is the Florida Everglades to dig into the legend of an especially smelly cryptid. Missing folks has their curiosity piqued and locals have various ideas of what the hell has been going on. Sarah (a solid performance from Lauren Crandall) and her two-man team look into the disappearance of several young girls with some people thinking murder, some people thinking human trafficking and some people pointing towards a Bigfoot-type wild man roaming the woods. There’s a skunk-ape-tracker/conspiracy-nut by the name of Dale who believes a bunch of crazy shit, has a tendency to frequently purchase shovels and rope and has the build of someone who could definitely snatch up young women. Interviews and speculation can only get you so far and when they hook up with scenery-chewing Dale himself, he offers to take them out to the woods and see the beast for themselves. Sarah is gung-ho for the idea but her two partners need some convincing. Some ignorant dinks (it’s Florida, remember) threaten them to get the hell out of town but this just makes Sarah think she’s onto something big. So into the wetlands they go and it doesn’t take long for them to realize there is definitely something out there. They make it through the night in one piece and decide to return to the woods and get their damn footage. They encounter the beast but it doesn’t take long after that for them to uncover a deep conspiracy… the kind of conspiracy that people in power are willing to kill to keep a secret. One of their number goes missing and a fire is lit under the ass of our documentarian. A couple “free thinkers” are willing to help the filmmakers get inside a top secret facility and right into answers they’re not prepared to handle… and a mustachioed Michael Paré shows up. The performances that kinda fail are somehow charming and the bits of comedy that make it in actually had me snickering. The fact that they’re editing as they go allows them to make shit look like a Netflix special and they ape the style well. It also keeps things interesting by going a route that isn’t expected as it races to the end and taking the POV from several different cameras to showcase a skunk ape on a rampage. It doesn’t ever become as exciting as it should but that just may be because the budget isn’t what was needed and it cheats with camerawork which is a bit of a bummer… it’s still more entertaining than I thought it would be because it aimed outside of the comfort zone. It even throws in that “we’re the real monsters” message I’ve loved hearing since the 1950s.
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