We knew why my uncle never let anyone come out to this place. We just didn't believe him.
From Eduardo Sánchez, one of the directors of The Blair Witch Project, and Jamie Nash, writer of a number of the films he's made in the decade and a half since (including his segment of V/H/S/2, which gets a callback), comes Exists, the second found-footage Bigfoot film I've seen in as many years. In this one, a quintet of dopey kids head into the woods with their bikes and an assload of GoPro cameras to make "the best YouTube video ever," but on the way to their secluded cabin they hit a Sasquatch with their car. Happily, all they have to do is clean the hair and blood off the bumper and they can go on with their carefree, pot-and-sex-infused lives.
I'm kidding, of course. What actually happens is a Sasquatch disables their car and kills them one by one while the GoPros they brought with them capture their death throes for the viewer's edification. Huzzah!
In the interest of keeping the running time down (to about 76 minutes without credits), Sánchez and Nash invest their characters with the absolute bare minimum of character traits. The main camera guy (who needs to be told more than once to put it down) is Brian (Chris Osborn), who's also the fifth wheel since his brother Matt (Samuel Davis) and their black friend Todd (Roger Edwards) are paired off (but not with each other, alas). Damningly, their lady friends are such nonentities that it's ages before we even learn their names -- for the record, Matt's girlfriend is Dora (Dora Madison Burge) and Todd's is Elizabeth (Denise Williamson) -- and when the 'squatch hits the fan the only thing they seem to be good for is screaming and cowering in fear. (Meanwhile, the men respond by shooting it -- with a camera and a gun they find on the premises.)
If Exists has anything going for it, it's Sánchez's willingness to show his creature more and more clearly in the back half of the film, starting with the sequence where Matt takes off on a GoPro-laden bike (shades of V/H/S/2's "A Ride in the Park") in search of cell reception and has an uncomfortably close encounter with it. There's also at least one intentional laugh line when Todd finds the gun and, when asked if he knows how to use it, replies, "I play paintball. How different can it be?" Any and all pluses are canceled out by the number of times the characters say "dude," "man," "yo," and "bro," though. (I counted at least two dozen instances of the last one, making this the most bro-tastic Sasquatch film ever.) At least when they're confronted with Bigfoot, none of them says "Don't kill me, bro!" That would have been grounds for immediate abandonment.