Admittedly, Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot is a pretty obscure television show. So obscure that it isn’t even listed on Epguides, and it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. Everything has a Wikipedia page these days.

Nevertheless, it’s right up my alley and odds are someone might stumble upon these reviews and give it a look — or give it a pass — as a result. Either way, here we go.

The second episode of Finding Bigfoot finds us in Florida, home to the infamous Skunk Ape (which, incidentally, does have its own Wikipedia page).

Now the so-called Skunk Ape is something particularly interesting to Bigfooters. While Bigfoot sightings in the Pacific Northwest remain reasonably consistent, so too do the sightings of the Skunk Ape in the Florida Everglades—but the two, together, don’t match. Instead, the Skunk Ape is thought to be something of a cousin to the vanilla Bigfoot. Shorter, redder, and accompanied by a pungent methane odor that gives it its name. Still, like Bigfoot, the Skunk Ape has passed from Native American legend into modern times and Finding Bigfoot is about to dig up all they can on the creature.

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I like Bigfoot. In fact, I like a lot of weird things, like the paranormal, aliens, and cryptoids but Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, tops them all. Weird, I know. But you can imagine my interest when I heard about a new show on Animal Planet called Finding Bigfoot. I had to check it out.

Now if you’re into these sorts of shows then let me lay out the field for you. Finding Bigfoot falls somewhere in between a show like MonsterQuest and a show like Ghost Hunters. For those of you that don’t follow these kinds of shows  let me put it to you this way. Finding Bigfoot falls in the spectrum between a show featuring tenured academics weighing in on strange creatures and unusual happenings, and a show featuring a bunch of guys running around hunting ghosts with night-vision cameras.

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Catfish is the kind of movie that you can’t say a lot about without giving away some serious spoilers.

The film is a documentary, but unfolds like one of the best psychological thrillers this year. It follows a designer, Nev Schulman, and his relationship with a young artist, Abby, and her family. Nev’s brother Ariel and a mutual friend Henry follow Nev as his relationship with this young painter, her mother, and then her older sister develops and blossoms into something serious. As Nev and Abby’s sister Megan get more serious, things get a little strange and doubts begin to creep into the picture about the authenticity of Megan and, in turn, everything he’s been told by this family to date.

Throughout the course of the film we follow Nev, Ariel, and Henry in the most casual of ways. We’re sitting in the hotel room after a long day of work. We’re waking up in the morning. We’re following a GPS. The first-person perspective of the whole movie, the sense that we’re just another friend in the car along for the ride, goes a long way to make the whole thing feel more engaging and honest and emotional. It’s great, and the pay-off in the end of the film is pretty huge.

Catfish is a great film that’s really outside of the box. It’s refreshing, it’s interesting, and it’s definitely worth your time.

Maria, my brilliant wife, summed up District Nine in this way: there were ten nominations for Best Picture this year at the Oscars. And that pretty much hits the nail right on the head.

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