Every day is a good day for a Sasquatch movie. But not every Sasquatch movie is top grade.
“Summoning the Spirit” from director and co-writer Jon Garcia is an admirable attempt to move the Bigfoot genre in a new, more up-to-date direction, beginning with making the two, young married leads, Carla (Krystal Millie Valdes) and Dean (Ernesto Reyes) a Latino couple, who often switch from English to Spanish when speaking alone together. These characters experience the tragic loss of their unborn child in the opening scenes.
Dean is a not very successful writer, working on his second book. Carla says she is a therapist. But the truth is, she also seems in need of one in this dire time. The recent loss and some apparent infidelity on Dean’s part casts a shadow over them and their future.
To make a new start just before the miscarriage, they take a house in the deep woods (the film was shot in Oregon). The weaknesses in the screenplay by Garcia and Zach Carter (“Spunk’s Not Dead”) are apparent from the start when grieving Carla picks up a hitchhiker on a logging road in the forest. It’s a don’t-go-in-the-basement moment for sure.
The hitchhiker is the super-friendly, wild child and obvious loony named Celeste (Isabelle Muthiah). Celeste introduces Carla, who is vulnerable to suggestion in her state, to Arlo (Jesse Tayeh), the leader by virtue of his Charles Manson/Jim Jones-like charisma and ego of the so-called “mountain people.”
When Carla later returns to the camp of the mountain people with Dean, they make an offering of marijuana-baked cookies, which is violently rejected by cult member Clear (Jasmine Sinclair), shouting, “We do not cloud our minds.”
About a minute later, the mountain people, who have a podcast (!), pass around jugs of “moonshine.” Consistency in narration is for the most part preferred, thank you. At regular intervals, we get shots of a seven-foot tall Sasquatch alone in the woods. The shots tend to diminish the creature’s frightfulness. In fact, “it” begins to resemble a lost-in-the-woods, first cousin of Chewbacca. Without revealing too much, I will say that this Sasquatch is an entirely new model.
“Summoning the Spirit” resembles an Ari Aster without the generous budget, intellectual rigor, first-rate acting and pervasive sense of bone-chilling evil.
Carla and Dean are not given enough emotional heft to be much more than victims in a how-we-met-the-Sasquatch-cult movie. Carla goes alone to the camp, drinks some apparent hallucinogen and ends up in a pile of sweaty mountain people in her SKIMS.
We keep hearing something about a “blue moon.” But there is no real payoff.
The final scenes oddly recall the beginning of “King Kong” with Carla made up as a dainty offering to the apparently carnivorous and human-flesh-feasting Sasquatch. I must say the final twist on this theme was unique, but not in a good way and very weirdly sentimental. I wish the tall and regal Robin Magdhalen, who plays a mountain person and local realtor, had more to do.
If you love Sasquatch movies you should take a look at “Summoning the Spirit.” If not, probably do not summon this “Spirit.”
(“Summoning the Spirit” contains violence and gruesome images)
Not Rated. On VOD and DVD. Grade: B-minus