Possessed by Unreason

A trio of films from '60s Yugoslavia are dizzy with free love; "Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie" is dizzy with delusion.

A true documentary, if one that is finally elusive in its own way, Jay Delaney’s “Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie” (2008) isn’t about the cryptid in question, and not even the dubious effort to find one. Specifically, it focuses on a pair of late-middle-age losers who have devoted their autumn years to documenting their non-sightings, as well as to each other. Dallas Gilbert and Wayne Burton are two southern Ohio boys — one retired, the other working at a car wash — and both are dedicated to becoming the “top men” in what is apparently a small but impassioned and, it seems, near-psychotic American subculture, a network of web sites and clubs and teams and retreats intent on establishing proof of Sasquatch’s existence.

Gilbert is the big dreamer in this two-man operation, while Burton is the self-pitying follower; one sees himself as a pioneer, the other as an abject failure, for whom the pursuit of a mythical beast might bring justification. These people talk about the look in Bigfoot’s eyes and take scores of utterly empty photographs and venture out into the woods making whooping “calls” to attract the creatures, and though their self-delusions are hard to measure, they remains pretty scary/funny. But Delaney never shows his hand, and in the end, we’re left with a classic case of the need for faith in the unearthly run amok, and the friendship between two nowhere men, ordinary and poor but righteously possessed by unreason.

”Dušan Makavejev: Free Radical” (Criterion Collection – Eclipse Series) and “Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie” (Oscilloscope Laboratories) are now available on DVD.

[Additional photo: Dragoljub Aleksic in "Innocence Unprotected," Avala Film, 1968]

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