I’m not really sure what your typical Bigfoot movie is, but if it’s anything like Harry and the Hendersons, I’m more down with that. Jay Delaney’s documentary Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie is little more than a tease of interest and an unsatisfying bore. It exists somewhere between your usual making fun of dumb, small-town folks kind of doc and your below-average sort of personal-interest, anybody and their mother can be a subject kind of doc. A few decent moments offer some promise, but the 62-minute film is just too terribly short to deliver the goods.

The focus is on Dallas Gilbert and Wayne Burton, two good old buddies (stress on the old and buddies) from Appalachian Ohio who seek and document Bigfoot in their spare time. Surprisingly these “researchers” are not out to locate the impossible find; their goal is not the elusive Loch Ness Monster. It’s the apparently very conspicuous Bigfoot. Dallas and Wayne have seen many Bigfoot creatures, at most 6 in a day. They’ve taken approximately 150 photos of the beasts, and claim they’re everywhere. Even “Vietnam got a Bigfoot.”

But don’t think you too can so easily be a Bigfoot researcher. Dallas has a special power; he can feel them nearby. And Wayne may have his own special sense. He claims to have an animal bone in his skull, and the DNA of sheep. Another younger researcher discusses the creatures during a Bigfoot Conference in Tennessee: they’re telepathic and can also float on air. That is his explanation for why they don’t always leave tracks in the snow.

All that may sound hilarious, but that’s about as far as the derisory humor goes. Which is fine, since there’s no real indication that Delaney is out to mock these guys. Audiences will easily find Dallas and Wayne ridiculous and easy to laugh at, but that’s because people typically find mirth in this sort of stranger. Sure, you could say that Delaney’s choice of clips to include in the documentary, which were selected out of 60 hours worth of shot footage, are evidence that the filmmaker means to poke some fun. But that isn’t his primary objective.

Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie is really supposed to be more generally about the American Dream than specifically about these two pursuers of that Dream. However, Delaney may have the American Dream confused with mere passion, or determination, or hobby. I guess Dallas and Wayne do see Bigfoot research as far more than stamp collecting and baseball cards, but it’s difficult to understand how. Or why, when they can’t seem to take a photo or video where they zoom in close enough to clearly identify a Bigfoot as a Bigfoot. These are guys with decent equipment and seemingly the worst ability. When they’re called out as having possibly doctored one of their photographs, I had to think: these guys just aren’t smart enough for that.

Where the film really gets interesting, though, is not in its attempted depiction of two men’s resilience. It’s in the lightly addressed idea that competitiveness, dissidence and internal strife can be found in even the smallest of would-be unified enterprises. See, there are a few other notable Bigfoot researchers out there, and sometimes they recognize and act cordially to Dallas and Wayne, but they’re out to find their own proof and fortune. It’s hard to totally understand what drives all these guys and why they can’t figure out how to work together more tightly and complimentarily, because Delaney seems to miss a lot of the important events in the story. Or at least he fails to show them to us. A film that only presents one-sixtieth of what was shot, and yet feels to be missing a lot of the pieces, one has to figure that the filmmakers were just wasting their time.

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