Bigfoot vs Megalodon (2021)

Have you ever seen a movie and known it was one of the worst movies you’ve ever seen? I don’t mean your basic knee-jerk, gut reaction, embellishment. When most people say something is the worst movie of all time, they’re being hyperbolic. Film fans, or maybe just the internet, have made a habit of describing things as either the best or worst without any in between. That’s how they get engagement, particularly on social media. But those things aren’t typically the best or worst. They’re in that grey area in between that people kind of forget exists.

When I say that something I’ve seen is one of the worst movies ever, I mean it. I’ve seen enough bad movies in my time, many of which have been thanks to this blog, that I know a good movie from a bad movie from a great movie from a terrible movie. I’ve seen things that most people would consider the worst, that I would consider alright. That’s because my threshold for the worst is further down. I have experience with movies worse than their hyperbole. I’ve experienced movies worse than a lot of people’s worst movies. My idea of the worst movies is different than most.

I can say, with certainty, that this week’s movie was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s down there with movies like Hip Hop Locos, Empress Vampire, and The Last Movie. It’s not that the movies contained content that offended me. These weren’t movies like Chicks Dig Gay Guys or Sleepwalking Land where the stories were flawed to the point of me hating them. This week’s movie as well as the other three I would lump it into were offensive as movies through their being. They were offensive simply because they existed the way they did.

You’re probably asking at this point what movie I watched this week. If the title didn’t already give that away. Bigfoot vs Megalodon was an animated movie about a space war. Kali (Jennifer Fourteen) was a princess in charge of the last remaining humans, aboard a space vessel. At her side was Van Helsing (Marco Guzmán), a clone she was trying to have a child with. Also at her side was Bigfoot (Marco Guzmán again). Together, the three of them led the charge against an alien front that wanted nothing more than to see them wiped out.

The first thing that set me off about Bigfoot vs Megalodon being a terrible movie was that it had Bigfoot in the title. I’ve seen a handful of movies about Bigfoot or a sasquatch being. There is only one that I would say was even remotely good, and it was the one that didn’t put Bigfoot in the title. Harry and the Hendersons was a good movie, when I was a kid. I haven’t seen it in maybe twenty years. It might not hold up. I don’t know. But in my memory, it’s the one Bigfoot/sasquatch movie I’ve seen that wasn’t flat out terrible. Including Bigfoot vs Megalodon, however, there have been three Bigfoot movies that made it into my lowest rated movies on Letterboxd. I wrote about Bigfoot vs. Zombies a few years ago when I slogged my way through that one. I never wrote about The Asylum’s Bigfoot, but I’ve seen that, too, and it was just as bad. Bigfoot vs Megalodon really took the cake on poor quality, though. It was worse than either of those, and worse than the vast majority of movies I’ve seen.

Bigfoot vs Megalodon was an animated movie. I didn’t know that going into it. I thought it was going to be something that SyFy would air. You know, something like The Asylum would produce, only not by The Asylum. It wasn’t. It was… A poorly animated mess. Not all the animation was bad. When it came to closeups of robots or space suits, the animation looked pretty good. The movements were still garbage, but the metallic surfaces were well done for closeups. Outside of that, it was bad. Bigfoot, now a soldier working for the human alliance, looked terrible. The megalodon, a Street Sharks inspired monstrosity on the side of bad, looked even worse. And don’t even get me started on the princess.

Or maybe do, because I’m about to get into it. Through 90% of the movie, the princess was in her space gear and looked alright. There was one scene, though, where she was out of her suit. I kind of broke down during that scene. She stood there in some sort of brown undersuit, in a doorway, her body facing forward, one hand on her ass cheek, and her head looking backwards. It was what I can only assume was an attempt at sexy. She monologued the entire time, while in this pose. A full minute monologue about potentially having a child with Van Helsing, alone in this room, in a “sexy” pose. It felt like a video game cut scene by a horny developer from the 1990s. This was a very horny movie without being titillating in any way.

The animation got much worse when it came to Bigfoot, the aliens, and Megalodon. The effort had been put in to make metal and plastic look decent. In close ups, at least. That effort wasn’t there when it came to the creatures. This was where Bigfoot vs Megalodon started to look like it was produced by The Asylum. They looked cartoonish in what was supposed to be a rather realistic looking universe. Their mouths didn’t match anything that was being said. Not that what was being said was good. It was garbage. But it would have been nice for the sound to be synced in some way. None of their animation was appealing to look at.

The final bit of animation stuff I want to touch upon was the looping and repeating of shots. There were many shots in Bigfoot vs Megalodon that were repeated from earlier moments. The one that comes to mind immediately is a hallway shot of Kali, Van Helsing, and Bigfoot going from one room to another. It was a repeated shot used a few times in the movie, and it was looped each time to make the hallway feel longer. The characters would be walking. Close up of one, close up of the other, back to that same hallway shot played again. Close up on one character, and show the hallway shot again from the beginning. Because the shots involved Kali and Van Helsing talking while wearing masks, the filmmakers were able to repeat the shots without the movements feeling off. It’s just that repeating the same footage over and over again didn’t help things any, either. It was still noticeable reused footage.

Now, most of my complaints so far have been about the animation of Bigfoot vs Megalodon. I had other issues, too. There were two storylines driving the movie forward. I’m going to start with the relationship story between Kali and Van Helsing. She wanted children to keep the royal bloodline going. She was a princess, after all. He didn’t want any of it. Children were not his thing. He was okay with having a whole bunch of sex with Kali. He didn’t want any children to come of it. They made their differing stances abundantly clear throughout the movie in a series of increasingly obnoxious statements. One of them, after Kali went behind Van Helsing’s back to test his fertility with semen he had left on her stomach, resulted in dialogue where Van Helsing said he didn’t want her to “stab him in the dick” with a needle to get her pregnant.

It was also frequently mentioned that Van Helsing was a clone. He wasn’t the original Van Helsing, but only the latest in a long line of Van Helsing clones. When he died near the end of the movie, he was simply brought back to life through cloning. It obviously wasn’t the same exact Van Helsing. It was a new version of him. But he still had many of the same memories and connections. Or, at the very least, he could be reminded of them and slowly regain those memories. Somehow. The biggest difference between the clone that had been a major part of the movie and the new clone was that the new clone was no longer infertile. He could now give Kali the baby she wanted. If he was willing to. Consent is important. Maybe not to Kali, but it is.

My other major story issue had to do with the titular battle. The movie was called Bigfoot vs Megalodon, but there was never really a fight between the two creatures. The closest they came to duking it out was that Megalodon was captured and being held captive by the humans, and Kali, Van Helsing, and Bigfoot talked to it through the cell window. There was never a Bigfoot vs. Megalodon fight. It was Bigfoot vs. Aliens or Megalodon monologuing about wanting to kill humans. That’s all there was, which made the title a disappointing falsehood.

Every one of those aspects of Bigfoot vs Megalodon compounded to make the movie almost unbearable. I couldn’t stand it. I would also be lying if I said there wasn’t a single moment that I enjoyed. As much as I wouldn’t force this movie on my worst enemy, there was one moment, just one, where I thought that maybe the entire watch was worth it. Van Helsing, in all his male machismo bravado, declared that he had to go help the space fight. Kali ordered him not to, but he ignored her orders. He said something like “I’m no good behind a computer screen. I’m a clone, not a cuck. See you sweetheart.” He then saluted while the most epic possible music started playing and ran down the hall to a fighter space jet. I laughed my ass off during that moment and might end up going back to it time and time again. Not the whole movie. Never the whole movie. Just that one little bit. That one shining diamond in the rough.

Bigfoot vs Megalodon was a bad movie. It was downright terrible. If I were to list off the five worst movies I’ve ever seen, it would be in there. I haven’t felt this much disappointment, rage, and disgust about a movie in a long time. Especially when the movie didn’t have outright offensive content. It’s not like this movie was telling people to pretend to be gay to seduce women. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Chicks Dig Gay Guys. This was just an all around poorly made movie that didn’t live up to its name, a name that was simple to meet the criteria of. There were ten seconds of good and that was only because they went too far in their bad. Do not watch Bigfoot vs Megalodon.

I’m not a person who would easily say “This is one of the worst movies ever made.” I’ve seen enough movies that my concept of the worst sets the bar far below most other people. I’m not going to go out and call every blockbuster release the best or worst movie ever. I’ve gone off the beaten path. There are movies out there that aren’t the major theatrical releases that ended up being better or worse than the mass consumption projects. So, don’t take this post lightly. If I’m saying it’s one of the worst movies, it’s worse than the trendy worst movie. By far.

It's time that we get to some notes:

• Bigfoot vs Megalodon was suggested by @BreakABone, who also suggested Birdemic: Shock and Terror (week 100), Steel (week 127), Catwoman (week 174), I, Frankenstein (week 217), Jonah Hex (week 249), Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (week 280), and Holmes & Watson (week 486).
• I mentioned Chicks Dig Gay Guys (week 145) and Bigfoot vs. Zombies (week 218) in this post.
• Three other Bigfoot movies I watched were Bigfoot’s Wild Weekend (week 31), Suburban Sasquatch (week 254), and Pottersville (week 316).
• Have you seen Bigfoot vs Megalodon? I sure hope you haven’t. What did you think of it? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
• Are there any movies that you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies? Hit me up on Twitter to tell me what they are. Or you can drop them in the comments below.
• Make sure to visit Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
• Next week should be a little better than this one. I’ll be revisiting a series that I’ve enjoyed three other times for Sunday “Bad” Movies. There are women. There is action. And, most importantly, there is Andy Sidaris’s weird sense of what makes a good movie. I’ll be taking a trip to Savage Beach next week. I hope you’re ready to join me. See you then.

Ryan's Babe (2000)

It’s Canada Day weekend. It’s a time when the white majority of Canada celebrates how they conquered the territory, forcing the Indigenous peoples out of their homes. Most people seem to overlook that part when celebrating Canada, but that’s kind of what our country is and always has been. That’s not what this post is about though. This post is about a movie.

Seeing as it is Canada Day weekend, I thought it would be a good time to watch a Canadian movie. No, I didn’t watch Indian Horse. It’s a great movie about the residential school system and how utterly horrible that system was to Indigenous people as the church tried to wipe them out. But this is a blog about bad movies. I’m not going to use this blog to say that Indian Horse is an important movie and that everyone should watch it. I’m absolutely not going to say that because I’m not supposed to be discussing great movies. I’m going to write about a bad movie instead. A bad Canadian movie.

It might seem like a simple task to find a bad Canadian movie. Our film industry isn’t anything great. Well, we do have some shining spots. There are some diamonds in the rough. We’ve got some good documentaries, and we’ve got Indian Horse. We also have the work of Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg. Mostly, though, we produce middle-of-the-road movies about how great Canada is, how beautiful Canada is, or hockey. Every once in a while, there’s a movie much, much worse. This is a post about one of those movies.

Ryan’s Babe came out in 2000 and was thought to be a lost Canadian film until recently. It has been heralded as the Canadian equivalent of The Room. I didn’t quite understand at first, but I learned as the movie progressed that it was an accurate description. It wasn’t on exactly the same level as The Room, since that movie kind of exists on its own plane. Ryan’s Babe certainly approaches that same level of bad, maybe even surpassing it at times. It’s an experience.

Connie (Alix Hayden) was obsessed with Ryan (Bill LeVasseur). She always had been. Yet Ryan was indifferent to her. She made advances, he didn’t care. It boiled over when Ryan brushed Connie off one too many times, and she attempted suicide. This sent Ryan on a road trip as he avoided the barrel of Connie’s father’s gun. Ryan got involved with gangsters, was almost castrated, befriended an escort, and started stripping. It was a wild ride that helped him learn there was no place like home.

I might have just made it sound like Ryan’s Babe was a modern Canadian version of The Wizard of Oz or something. It wasn’t that at all. Ryan’s Babe was more of a fever dream of run-on sentences. Something would happen and then something would happen and then something would happen. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. There seemed to be no reason to the chaotic story progressions. It felt like writer/director Ray Ramayya knew where he wanted to go with his main character, but didn’t know how to get there. Much like my writing style for many of these posts.

Ryan’s Babe began with a woman being sexually abused in the woods, only to escape her abuser and make it to the road. She pointed a gun at the first car she saw. It was Ryan’s car. She got in and they began what would normally be a quirky dark comedy. You know the kind. A criminal and an unknowing normal guy stuck together in a car. Contentious relationship slowly becomes a real friendship. They have a few laughs along the way. Eventually the bad guy shows up and they work together to win. Nah. Not this movie. Ryan took her to the airport, and she was out of the movie about twenty minutes in.

That twenty minutes gave enough time for a flashback. After Ryan peed on the side of the road while the woman watched, they stopped at a rest stop and Ryan told her how he got to where he was. Connie was obsessed with him from a young age. In college (he may have still been in college in the present, but I’m not sure on the time of the present in the movie), she kept trying to go on dates with Ryan, even though he always had girlfriends. A flashback within the flashback (why???) showed that when his bike was ruined as a child, she got him a new one. He rode off as soon as he got it, leaving her in the dust. Present day, he blew her off again. As retaliation, Connie decided to commit suicide. That would show Ryan. She simply ended up in the hospital. It did set off her drunk father, though, who drove off with a gun to find and kill Ryan. Ryan hit the road after Connie’s dad found him while he was peeing, and that was when the woman got in his car.

And it was here that a new, quickly thrown together segue was placed into the movie. Ryan dropped the woman off at the airport. As he left, he passed someone who looked just like him. Next thing you know, Ryan was kidnapped by a crime gang who mistook him for the rival gang’s leader’s son. The rival gang leader knew it wasn’t his son, though, and ordered his men to attack the other gang’s house, the same house Ryan was being held captive in. Ryan was being watched by a man nicknamed Shakespeare, who quoted Shakespeare while watching Ryan pee (I promise this is the last peeing time in the movie). Ryan came up with a plan to escape. He said he needed to poop. While pretending to poop, he jumped out the window, got in a garbage truck, and escaped. It was good timing, too. The rival gang passed the garbage truck on the way in and started shooting.

This whole time, there was stuff going on at home. Connie’s dad was still drunk and angry. Ryan’s mom was telling him to ease up a bit. Ryan hadn’t done anything. Connie hadn’t died. The doctor said it was because she hadn’t actually tried to kill herself. There were no drugs in her system when she apparently overdosed. Any cuts on her wrists weren’t deep enough to harm her. She had simply been trying to get attention, and it had worked. On everyone except Ryan, that was. Connie spent most of the movie brooding because Ryan was gone. She hadn’t brought him closer in near death. It pushed him away.

Anyway, Ryan hopped out of the garbage truck and hitched a ride with a trucker. The trucker had some sort of nefarious plan, since he drugged Ryan with a drink. He never followed through with the plan. Instead, he dropped Ryan off and told Ryan to walk a mile or something to a restaurant and talk to Mike. Somehow, Ryan got a job at the restaurant. Mike also gave Ryan a place to stay… In an abandoned strip mall. While working at the restaurant, Ryan was recognized by three women as their friend’s abuser. They snuck into Ryan’s strip mall apartment late at night and drug him. They threatened to cut off his penis. For some reason, they were dressed as high school cheerleaders, even though they were all in their thirties. At least. Their friend soon showed up and pointed out that Ryan was the wrong person. His hair was much longer than her abuser’s, and it had only been two days. The hair couldn’t have grown that much in that short amount of time. The four women decided to dump Ryan in the mountains.

Segue again. Ryan woke up and he was in Phoenix. That was a long way from Saskatchewan, where he started his journey. Things didn’t slow down at this point. Ryan ran into someone from Canada, who offered him a job at a resort. He got an apartment and settled down for the time being. Another tenant in the apartment building was an escort with a young daughter. Ryan befriended them, and it seemed like the escort could end up as the titular babe. Only, she wasn’t. She was being abused by her ex-husband. Ryan came home one day to find out the woman and her daughter were in the hospital. Her ex-husband had shown up. The police arrived and killed him in a gunfight. Ryan went to the hospital to visit, but I guess the movie didn’t have a hospital setting in the budget because he just showed up at a hotel room saying he got their message at the hospital. He comforted his escort friend, gave her $20,000 and hit the road for home.

Every transition between Ryan’s locations felt random. He bumped into his doppelganger at the airport and ended up in a gang feud. He escaped in a garbage truck, hitchhiked with a truck driver, got drugged, then got left on the side of the road to walk to a diner. Some women drugged him and decided to dump him in the mountains. Now he was ditching his friend in her greatest time of need, after she and her daughter watched her ex-husband die by police gunfire. Ryan’s Babe was all about those random segues from one sequence to the next.

They weren’t stopping there, either. Somehow, while trying to go northeast to get home to Saskatchewan, Ryan ended up to the west in Las Vegas. He went to a bar and began drinking. The bartender offered Ryan a job stripping for a bachelorette party. He accepted. After seeing a guy strip while performing karate, and another strip while disco dancing, Ryan stepped onto the stage. He took his clothes off, leaving on just a cowboy hat and some Canada flag boxers. He did some grinding against a ceiling beam. One of the women came onto the stage and poured shot after shot down Ryan’s throat until she had to carry him off the stage. Next thing Ryan knew, he was in the bed of the mother of a famous former football player. She essentially raped him before dying of a heart attack in that same bed while Ryan slept. He awoke, saw her corpse, and quickly peaced out of town.

There’s only a little bit left, and here’s where the worlds of Ryan and Connie connected back up. Connie’s dad realized his wrongs. Connie realized her wrongs. Ryan had dreamt of Connie at some point during the Phoenix stuff, which was what made him realize he should return home. I don’t know why he stopped in Las Vegas, especially since it was out of the way. When Ryan was about an hour out from his Saskatchewan town, he called home and talked to Connie. He said he was coming. She was happy. But he wouldn’t make it.

Ryan picked up one more hitchhiker on his way home. It was a blonde woman who claimed to be an aspiring actress. She was going to Vancouver to work in movies and television. There was a report on the radio about some criminals that looked like Ryan and this woman. A police car showed up. Ryan pulled over. The officer arrested Ryan while the woman waved and said she loved him. Ryan smiled at her. The credits rolled.

I don’t know what the point of Ryan’s Babe was. I don’t know if Connie was supposed to be the babe. Maybe the woman at the end was the babe. She certainly seemed to get Ryan arrested for no reason. Ryan didn’t learn anything through his journey. He just lived a life and didn’t grow. He built relationships that he cut at the drop of a hat. If anything, Ryan felt like he had some sort of emotional detachment. I don’t know the exact term for it because it seemed like he made the connections. They just didn’t matter to him. I don’t know. There was no arc to the character, though. There was no emotional journey.

Aside from the story, or lack thereof, there were a few other things about Ryan’s Babe that didn’t quite work. The audio was off through the entire movie. Doing a bit of research, I was able to confirm what I already thought from watching it. A good deal of the dialogue was rerecorded after the fact. That explained why the tones of characters’ voices didn’t always fit with the body language they were giving off. People didn’t sound as angry as they looked or didn’t look as angry as they sounded. Things like that. Add to the dissonance that a bunch of characters had heavy Canadian accents and it made things sound goofy, too. I’m Canadian and I find that heavy stereotypical accent goofy when people are supposed to be tough gang thugs. Imagine the line “I’m gonna rip your fuckin’ guts and shove them in your fuckin’ mouth.” with the Canadian accent. It makes me laugh thinking about it, and I’m sure that wasn’t the intention.

When I went searching for a Canadian movie to watch for this Canada Day weekend post, I settled on Ryan’s Babe because of its reputation. People compared it to The Room. The Room is a classic in bad movie circles. It’s one of those movies that built a reputation over the years as something special. Ryan’s Babe could become one of those movies. It was poorly made in what seemed like a sincere way. There were ridiculously over-the-top story beats like the three cheerleader women who threatened to cut off his penis and hang it above him so he would wake up and see what happened. There were some overly dramatic, overacting emotional moments. Connie’s drunk father was a solid example of that. Ryan’s Babe had everything needed to become a cult classic bad movie. The only problem was it was Canadian, so it didn’t get the same attention as other movies.

So, yes, I agree that Ryan’s Babe might be the Canandian equivalent of The Room. They were completely different movies. One of them was a relationship drama while the other was a darkly comedic road movie. But they shared a certain x-factor that made them a special sort of bad movie. There was a sincerity to everything that ran just below the surface. Tommy Wiseau and Ray Ramayya share a certain love for what they made. They brought heart and determination to their work. They just fell short when it came to filmmaking skills.

When Canada Day rolls around next year, I’d highly recommend giving Ryan’s Babe a watch. I mean, it’s not as good or nearly as important as Indian Horse, a great Canadian film, but it is an experience you will never forget. So is Indian Horse. Get a few friends together. Have your barbecue. Toss Ryan’s Babe on the ole back yard projector and have a good weekend. As for this weekend, I’m out. That’s the post. Have a good one, and I’ll see you next week!

Wait, wait, wait. Hold up. I’ve got some notes:

• I mentioned The Room (week 25) a few times, so here’s the post for that one.
• Have you seen Ryan’s Babe? If you haven’t, you should. If you have, what did you think? Let me know in the comments or find me on Twitter and hit me up there.
• You can also use Twitter or the comments to tell me what movies I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’m open to any and all suggestions, though I might reject them if you say something like “You should cover Chinatown.” That’s a great movie. I shouldn’t cover it for a bad movie blog.
• Make sure to visit Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun. I promise to get back to using that frequently.
• I just double checked what I’ll be watching for next week’s post and groaned. It’s time to get around to another bigfoot movie. It’s been a few years since I checked out one of those and they’ve always been on the lower end of the Sunday “Bad” Movies spectrum. Anyway, it was a suggestion, so I tossed in into the schedule. I’ll be checking out Bigfoot vs. Megalodon. Let’s hope this goes well. See you in a week!