‘The VICE Guide to Bigfoot’ is a fun-enough mockumentary about clickbait journalism [Chattanooga Film Fest Review]

A review of the horror-comedy, on the #ChattFilmFest now

From May 22nd to 25th, the Chattanooga Film Festival is streaming its lineup over the internet for cheap. I’ll be reviewing films from the fest all weekend!

Over the last decade, documentaries produced by VICE have taken over the Internet, run weekly on their own HBO show, and spawned an entire television channel. The newsmagazine has a recognizable shooting and editing style as well as particular interests and quirks, making it a format ripe for parody. And, indeed, the format has been used for horror before, most successfully in Ti West’s excellent found-footage cult film The Sacrament from 2013.

Now, first-time director Zach Lamplugh turns the VICE cameras on the world’s most famous cryptid, Bigfoot. Lamplugh plays himself as the film’s cameraman, alongside Brian Emond as the disgruntled VICE correspondent who’s frustrated with the assignments he’s been receiving from the company. He expected to be a serious journalist, but instead he finds himself traveling to war-torn Ukraine (but only to investigate the local craft brewing scene), or interviewing people who live in alleys and dumpsters and call…