Exists

It's difficult to fathom how a found-footage saga from The Blair Witch Project director Eduardo Sánchez about kids being pursued in the woods by Bigfoot isn't a parody. Yet against all good sense, Exists plays its material straight, possibly proving itself the year's most laughably derivative and dreary film.

At a remote East Texas cabin, three featureless guys and two nondescript girls are hunted by the famed Sasquatch, who moans and wails off in the distance, all while one of the men documents everything on a camcorder that he's incapable of holding steady, and with which he utterly fails to capture the legendary monster for more than a blurry split second. Given its resemblance to Blair Witch, the action -- which involve lots of screaming, crying, and running about in the dark -- seems to demand a healthy measure of jokey self-referentiality. Inexplicably, though, the director instead goes for suspense, which fails to materialize thanks to the tedious familiarity of these forested supernatural shenanigans.

Bigfoot eventually emerges as some sort of maternal ape-man beast with a thirst for revenge, but the creature is as dull as the film itself, which turns out to be a shaky-cam retread incapable of justifying its own existence.