Horror fans are a fickle lot. Serve them something with some "fava beans and a nice Chianti," and they'll clean their plates, only to then whine about what they've just wolfed down. Yet they're also film's most category-loyal bunch, always returning to the table in an attempt to quell an insatiable blood lust. It now seems those genre junkies may have found their perfect three-act meal in director Matt Allen's creature feature "Hoax" - an engrossing refresh of the Bigfoot vehicle, and a candidate for instant cult classic.
In the nocturnal mountains of Colorado, young campers congregate around the fire as troop leader Alex (actress Ryan Lee) ominously reacquaints the group with the legend of the mighty Sasquatch. Within moments, the team meets with a brutal demise. Bear attack? Hunter ambush? Only a washed-up TV producer has the desperate wherewithal to exploit our culture's lust for sensationalism by taking a production team deep into the woods to monetize the carnage. Played by Ben Browder of "Farscape" fame with the knowing male ditziness and contrived machismo of a slow-cracking soap star, Browder's Rick Paxton is hell-bent on pinning the unsolved crime on the always-elusive monster - after all, what better to drive ratings and stave off Paxton's own mounting irrelevance? It's a premise one would think must have been tapped within the Bigfoot subgenre as many times as a dorsal fin has been spotted within the shark flick template, and yet it's tough to cite any preceding 'Squatch tale that fires on all of "Hoax's" unique cylinders. In fact, Allen does draw mightily on the 'delayed reveal' device Steven Spielberg used in "Jaws," as "Hoax" only hints at the hairy brute long before allowing us to stare into its (allegedly-red) eyes. It's an exercise in great restraint, and heightens the sensory storytelling of the film's beast-tracking scenes in particular: Breathtaking aerial shots of gorgeous Colorado mountain terrain establish the vastness of the Wookiee progenitor's indigenous kingdom, and as the group canvases the dark thicket, we're fed all the wonderfully thick fog and refractory lighting we demand from our forested horror tropes. Truth be told, there's very little blood spilled at all up to and through the second act of "Hoax." Allen knows you want it, yet knows better than to give you too much too soon. So when it does arrive, late-stage, it rains down like the finale of a fireworks display, culminating with a mondo bizarro and intensely queasy finishing move that has us suddenly feeling like we're watching "Deliverance" on bad acid.
Engrained in the DNA of "Hoax" is a campy sense of humor too easily missed in early reviews. Case in point, the casting here shrewdly marries the veneered over-acting of b-movie cheese merchants like Browder and Brian Thompson ("The X-Files") with compelling straight-line performances from Cheryl Texiera, Lauren Ashlyn O'Brien, Brian Landis Folkins, and the aforementioned Lee. The net result is a wonderfully counterpointed, realism-be-damned marriage between "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Melrose Place," and viewers would do well to note that aspirational intentionality. Similarly, the costuming provided to our 'Squatch knowingly eschews any true creep factor and instead pays giddy homage to 1933's original "King Kong." Laud it or loathe it, it feels like horror fans are about to consume "Hoax" in hordes, because that's what they do. Here's hoping the feeding frenzy buys this production team its next (and well-deserved) big opportunity.
