Click here to see the French poster.
"Discover a new force of nature."
— Tagline
The Son of Bigfoot (a.k.a. Bigfoot Junior) is a 2017 Belgian-French Dramedy directed by and Ben Stassen and Jeremy Degruson. It was released on August 16 in France, and on August 17 in Belgium.
Adam Harrison finds out his father is still alive, which his mother had been hiding from him, and goes on a quest to find him. He does, but also finds out he is none other than Bigfoot.
Ben Stassen confirmed a sequel, titled Bigfoot Superstar (or Bigfoot Family in some countries), which was released on Netflix on February 26, 2021.
The movie contains examples of:
- Adam and/or Eve: The girl who has a crush on Adam is named Eva, which is a variant of the name Eve.
- Bears Are Bad News: Wilbur the bear can be quite threatening towards anyone that endangers him and his friends. However...
- Beary Friendly: ... towards friends he's quite a nice guy.
- Big Bad: Wallace Eastman, CEO of HairCo, a megacorporation specialized in improving people's hair. He's bent on finding Dr. Harrison (a.k.a. Bigfoot) in order to conduct experiments on his mutated DNA.
- Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: In this universe, Bigfoot is actually a mutated human.
- The Bully: Tony, Dale, and Garcia. A trio of kids who are always bullying Adam.
- Calling the Old Man Out: Adam does this to his mom early on, when he discovers the many letters she and Bigfoot send each other, and thus realizes that his dad is alive, still in contact and clearly on good terms with his mom, and she deliberately kept all this secret from him.
- Chase Scene: At one point, when Adam encounters the bullies once again while coming home from school.
- Cell Phones Are Useless: A trucker manages to snap footage of Bigfoot rescuing Adam, but his phone has no reception so he has to drive to a gas station first before he can send it to anyone.
- Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Dr. Harrison had gone into hiding due to Eastman wanting to experiment on his DNA.
- Disappeared Dad: Bigfoot left his wife and son when the latter was just 6 months old.
- Disney Death: Bigfoot seemingly dies when he falls from a great height, but Adam saves him with his Healing Hands.
- Disney Villain Death: Averted; after the destruction of his company, Wallace Eastman falls off the remains of a bridge, but he survives unscratched and shows up to threaten Adam and Bigfoot one more time.
- Dodgy Toupee: After Eastman is sedated with a tranquilizer dart, Trapper finds that his hair was a wig.
- Fastball Special: Wilbur does this with Tina twice. The second time, she's holding a taser and uses it on the guards she was thrown at.
- Frying Pan of Doom: Adam's mom takes out one of the HairCo guards that is keeping her trapped in her house this way. The other one overpowers her before she can get to him as well.
- Funny Background Event: While the Principal is busy with his secretary, Adam sneaks a piece of candy behind his back. Then a fistful. Then the entire bowl.
- Hartman Hips: Shelly has noticeably wide hips.
- Healing Hands: Bigfoot can heal the injuries of others, and does this to heal Adam's leg after they first meet. In the climax, Adam discovers he has this power too and uses it to heal his dad.
- Kid Hero: Adam Harrison.
- Light Is Not Good: Eastman is blond and wears white.
- Living MacGuffin: Dr. Harrison (a.k.a. Bigfoot) has special mutated DNA that Eastman wants to get his hands on for experiments.
- Lured into a Trap: How Eastman captures Bigfoot. He has his henchmen light an area of the forest on fire, then gives the car Adam is in a push to make it end up where the fire is. This drove Bigfoot to go and save Adam, but Eastman was prepared and shot him with a tranq dart right after he got Adam out of the car.Eastman: So predictable...
- Never My Fault: The bullies love to gang up and beat Adam, but whenever they’re punished, they demean Adam as a “snitch” and continue their abuse on him. Never mind the glaring facts that it’s because of their bullying that led to their punishments.
- Nobody Here but Us Statues: When infiltrating HairCo to rescue Bigfoot, Tina the Red Squirrel at one point freezes and poses as a statue/stuffed toy so the guards will ignore her.
- Off-into-the-Distance Ending: The movie ends with Adam and Eva walking together to school.
- One Dose Fits All: Averted; the guards at HairCo use tranquilizer darts to fight back against Adam and the animals, but while the smaller animals go down after just one or two shots, Wilbur the bear takes close to a dozen darts before the sedative finally kicks in.
- One-Note Cook: Adam's mom always prepares him meatloaf for lunch, which he hates. At the end of the movie, he insists that his dad will take care of the cooking from now on.
- Prefers Going Barefoot: Both Adam and Bigfoot go through this throughout the film. Although, in Adam's case, his feet keep growing out of his shoes until he forgoes them. And he apparently sticks with it by the end of the movie.
- Pursued Protagonist: The movie opens with Dr. Harrison being chased through the forest by Eastman's men.
- Rapid Hair Growth: Another trait of the mutated DNA that makes Bigfoot, which is exactly why Eastman wants it for his splicing experiments at HairCo. Adam tries cutting his rapidly growing wild hair off and not only does it immediately grow back, the clippings also start growing in his trash bin.
- The Runaway: Adam runs away from home to find his dad.
- Running Gag: The HairCo. intern asking to have his volunteer paper signed.
- Scenery Porn: The various shots of the wilderness.
- Speaks Fluent Animal: Bigfoot can do this. Adam can too, once he listens slowly and carefully to the animals' sounds.
- Super-Senses: Bigfoot has supersonic hearing. Adam develops this too, eventually.
- Super-Speed: One of Bigfoot's abilities, which Adam eventually develops too.note
- Wanted a Son Instead: Trapper the Racoon's wife is pregnant, and he can't wait to finally get some sons. However, she ends up giving birth to only daughters. He takes it in strides however.
- Woodland Creatures: The animals Dr. Harrison befriends in the forest include a squirrel, a bear, a woodpecker and a family of raccoons.
The sequel contains examples of:
- Caught on Tape: Adam catches Connor Mandrake's rant about his true goal.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Connor Mandrake is an oil tycoon who falsely claims to have found a way to extract oil without damaging the environment and is willing to kill people to hide the truth.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: Being isolated in a forest for years made Dr. Harrison so outdated regarding technology that a comment about a video of his going viral makes him think he infected a computer with a virus.
- Ghost Town: The story takes place near the ruins of a town that lost its main source of revenue when people stopped mining the area.
- The Mole: Arlo Woodstock turns out to be a spy working for Mandrake.
- Nature Hero: After becoming a celebrity of sorts, Dr. Harrison decides to become an environmentalist activist. His first action is protesting Connor Mandrake's oil drilling.
- Not What I Signed on For: Upon being ordered to kill the Harrisons, one of Mandrake's employees produces his contract to point out he didn't agree to kill.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Unlike the animals he's befriended for years, the animals Dr. Harrison meets in a new location are as hostile to him as any unfamiliar animal would be. There's a threatening wolf and an aggressive, territorial moose that become problems for him at two points.
