By Geno McGahee
When I read the synopsis of POTTERSVILLE, I was immediately interested. A holiday movie with a bigfoot…that sounds hard to beat. It turned out it had more than I could ever have imagined and it made it one of the funniest holiday films that I have seen in some time.
Maynard (Michael Shannon) owns a family general store in Pottersville and is a really nice guy. He helps the townspeople as much as he can, including allowing them to keep ongoing tabs without much hope of being repaid. When Bart (Ian McShane) shows up and gives him some moonshine and steak, he makes a comment that hits home. He notes that life is short and he should be out there enjoying it, more or less. Maynard leaves the place in the hands of his employee, Parker (Judy Greer), and heads home to surprise his wife with the steak and some loving.
Now the movie gets pretty absurdly funny. Maynard gets home and hears dog noises and assumes that his wife purchased a puppy. He runs upstairs and finds his wife dressed as a rabbit and the Sheriff Jack (Ron Perlman) dressed like a wolf. They are furries and are part of a big furry sex club. Not enough movies have furries. This is such a hilarious scene and Michael Shannon’s delivery is fantastic.
Connie (Christina Hendricks), Maynard’s wife, goes off on her hubby about how bored she was and dumps him and turns his life upside down. Maynard drinks the entire bottle of moonshine and some wine and returns to his shop to speak Parker. He looks at her and says “can I ask you a serious question? Are you part of a furry sex club?” She turns around and leaves. It’s hilarious.
Totally drunk, Maynard is flipping out in his office at the general store, but then he creates a suit with a gorilla mask to show his wife that he can be a furry too. He storms out of the store and has a drunken night out on the town that he does not remember. When he awakens, Parker needs to show him something. There were a bunch of Bigfoot sightings overnight and Pottersville is now on the map and the people are flocking.
Brock Masterson (Thomas Lennon) comes to town in his helicopter to shoot a Sasquatch special and the people go crazy for him. Maynard brings his costume to the police station and hopes to confess to Sheriff Jack, but he’s pre-occupied talking about his furry habit and the current Bigfoot hysteria. Sheriff Jack says “we’re good right? We’re good.” It was very funny that he thought that they would be OK after he had an affair with his wife, more or less. Perlman was very funny and even funnier when he told Masterson that he was a big fan and gave him a huge smile. You can’t miss with Perlman.
When he sees the town hysteria, Maynard decides to be Bigfoot again and it’s a riot. He runs through the town screaming and flailing his arms. This gets Brock Masterson into high gear as he goes on his hunt. At one point, he finds a dead deer and insists that its broken leg is proof that there is a Sasquatch in Pottersville and it had to have broken its leg. This was such a funny look at those reality show Bigfoot hunter guys and an accurate one.
When Masterson has a close encounter with Bigfoot, he freaks out and gets exposed as a fraud. He enlists the help of Bart, a tracker, and Sheriff Jack, and they go out on a Bigfoot hunt. Masterson is such a fake and is not meant for the outdoors and the sheriff and Bart are having a great time at his expense. The three men get drunk on moonshine and Masterson starts talking Bigfoot theory and he mentions my absolute favorite one. He tells the sheriff and Bart that Bigfoot were dropped on earth by aliens because they were criminals and that earth is a prison planet. I love that theory and the “experts” that note that UFO activity is always reported when a Sasquatch sighting occurs. It makes sense. If I had the technology that aliens have, I would definitely abduct a bigfoot, especially if he was engaging in criminal activity.
Unfortunately, the game is up when Maynard is shot by a tranquilizer dart while masquerading as Sasquatch and he is brought into town and exposed to everyone, but they soon come to find out that the experience was a great thing and what Maynard really means to the town. I loved seeing the fate of Masterson as he is dragged out of the network building sobbing. Lennon did a great job here.
POTTERSVILLE is a great deal of fun and had me laughing a lot. The only thing that I would say needed some work was the holiday feel. This doesn’t feel like a Christmas movie, but other than that, this is an amazing comedy, cleverly written and very well cast. I highly recommend this one.
