Dillon Brown and Michael Rock bring another round of bigfoot found footage horror with Tahoe Joe 2: The Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Conspiracy.
A few films deep into this year’s Unnamed Footage Festival, and I’m getting a much clearer idea of what does and doesn’t work for me found footage and its various offshoots. Tahoe Joe 2 is evidence of that because very little works for me, but why is that?
Well, before getting into that, let’s get into what Tahoe Joe 2 is. It’s the meta follow-up to docufiction found footage hybrid to Tahoe Joe, the story of a filmmaker (Dillon Brown) and a wilderness expert (Michael Rock) who attempt to find a missing person in the woods of Lake Tahoe. What they do find is a sasquatch, and things don’t go all that well, of course.
For Tahoe Joe 2, reality bleeds into the narrative just a bit more, with the first film being acknowledged as a thing that actually came out and was in theaters. The directors take some cheeky swipes at critical responses, including plastering a scathing review from someone on Letterboxd (and yes, it’s real, I checked). The duo are living separate lives again after the ”true” events of the first film and are now reunited after a social media influencer who goes looking for the titular sasquatch ends up missing. With the public not convinced about the encounter with a Bigfoot and a sense of responsibility for the missing girl, they set out to the same stomping grounds in the hopes of finding both the missing woman and the cryptid.
Now, the meta nature of setting up this sequel did intrigue me, and I do think there is something done well in how they address the shortcomings of the first film, but the execution is not followed through.
The big one is that people rightly criticized the quality of the bigfoot reveal in Tahoe Joe, especially with a lengthy buildup to it, and there’s an attempt to explain that within the narrative in Tahoe Joe 2, but that is then almost immediately fumbled with another poorly constructed reveal of the creature this time around.
An earnest attempt to not start off slow by showing us the footage from the social media influencer is a good move, but it settles right into a long, drawn-out ride toward the action-packed finale. I’ve seen some damn impressive found footage movies where much of the runtime is dedicated to the padding, and the last 15 minutes are the payoff (Horror in the High Desert, for example), but there has to feel like there’s a meaningful connection with the slow ride up the track before the narrative rollercoaster plummets into terror and chaos. Tahoe Joe 2’s promising start recounting what’s happened since the last time soon evaporates into a procession of pedestrian scenes that get us to where we want to be.
Then you have the payoff. The acting wasn’t all that earlier in the film, but it at least felt normal. The finale feels overstated in performance terms, with Brown and Rock a bit too easygoing about the situation they’re in. Sure, the events here are understandably chaotic, and there’s been many a film in this wheelhouse that discombobulated with folk running about in the dark huffing and puffing, but Tahoe Joe 2 is especially sloppy.
There should be tension in these moments. After all, a vicious monster is showing its brutal strength. Unfortunately, there were some bizarre decisions made that just left me increasingly disinterested and more than a little annoyed by the wasted potential.
Tahoe Joe 2 has some good ideas; there’s no doubt about that, but they don’t get the full attention they need. The movie is too preoccupied with delivering its gleeful meta aspect and going big for the finale when it might have been better served by something smaller scale and more visceral. At some point, it stops being a found footage-style docufiction and simply becomes a dull, low-grade first-person horror game.
Score: 4/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 4 equates to ”Poor.” The negatives outweigh the positive aspects, making it a struggle to get through.
Tahoe Joe 2 screened as part of the Unnamed Footage Festival.
