Night Claws (2012)

Studio: Midnight Releasing

DVD Release: December 11th, 2012

Rating: UnRated!

Directed by David A. Prior

Review by Craig Sorensen

OK, I’ve got a confession to make.  I love Bigfoot movies.  I don’t know why exactly.  Very rarely do they ever turn out good.  At worst, they’re boring.  At best, they’re laughable.  But I love them regardless.  I also like Reb Brown.  He’s never been the most talented of actors but he does have a certain screen presence.  At his best he has a kind of awe-shucks-I-can’t-believe-I’m-making-movies charm that’s sort of hard to hate.  So the producers of Night Claws have cast Reb Brown in a bigfoot movie and I hate it.  It’s terrible.  Why?  It should have been so simple.  You got Reb Brown and you have him fight some bigfeet, that’s it.  No one wants to see anything else.  No one wants to watch pretend gangsters wander around in the woods with their wives.  NO ONE.  NOT ONE PERSON.

 So Brown (Strike Commando) plays a small town sheriff who is after a killer bigfoot who is slashing up the boring townspeople.  A “scientist” from “The President’s Board for the Discovery of New Species” (Leilani Sarelle of Neon Maniacs) shows up to help Brown track the beast down with his girlfriend deputy (Sherrie Rose of Killer Crocodile) and another deputy that looks like a cross between Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka and Richard Belzner.  While this is going on we are treated to the antics of a survivalist (Tara Kleinpeter of a bunch of shorts I guess) and two annoying couples from the city, two annoying tough guys and their mostly characterless wives.  Why?  I don’t know exactly.  It goes on for quite a while so they aren’t exactly cannon fodder (that’s what random teens are for).  ALSO, there’s some kind of mercenary/hunter (David Campbell of Deadly Prey) with his idiot sons out hunting the Sasquatch for some reason (you’ll find out later if you watch this).  Also Frank Stallone shows up at the end and calls someone a ‘fuck’.

So this is a completely overstuffed film and director David Prior is no Robert Altman so you can imagine what watching this is like.  All the desperate threads barely come together, but they do I suppose.  It still doesn’t make much sense and surprisingly Bigfoot doesn’t really play into the climax.  The film is I guess an enjoyable late night B-movie when it focuses on Reb Brown.  He constantly has a kind of flummoxed expression.  I can’t tell if that’s an intentional character choice or Reb’s natural reaction to the script.  Either way it works.  He constantly looks like he’s going to start laughing, which is how I imagine I would probably act in this caliber of film.  Now, whenever the film cuts from his story to any of the other stories, its unwatchable.  I do appreciate that the cast seems to be made up of older actors though.  I’m so tired of watching teenagers (or twenty year olds playing teenagers).  It’s nice to have some goddamn variety.

 

[Rating: 2 Stars] One whole star for Reb Brown.

[caption id="attachment_7521" align="aligncenter" width="501"] This is Frank Stallone in the darkest day-for-night shot ever.[/caption]