PONDEROSA SPRINGS: The Bigfoot Jubilee

The story

Ponderosa Springs is a sun-bleached 1970s mountain resort town whose steaming hot springs and giant fiberglass Bigfoot statue haven't drawn a crowd in twenty years. Junie Tacket, night manager of the failing Ponderosa Springs Lodge, opens on empty parking lots, a foreclosure notice taped to the glass doors, and a single elderly guest. Desperate, she and her nephew Pip build enormous plywood Bigfoot feet in the lodge basement and stomp a trail of prints through the mud around the hot spring terrace, then leak a blurry photo. It works catastrophically well: RVs flood the switchback road, the town repaints its statue, and glamorous cryptid TV host Marguerite Voss arrives with a drone crew and a contract promising the Jubilee a national broadcast. Deputy Bo Pardue, sensing the career case of his life, patrols the pines with a net gun and a laminated evidence kit. Then the real thing turns up — Hobb, a shaggy, shy, enormous Sasquatch drawn down from the ridge by the smell of the lodge's continental breakfast, who begins methodically raiding coolers, laundry lines, and pie tables. Junie is the only one who sees him clearly, and the only one nobody believes, because everyone assumes she is still in the suit. The middle of the film is a widening spiral of near-misses: Hobb in a bathrobe passing through the lobby unnoticed, Bo netting a bear-shaped shrub, Marguerite's drones chasing Pip in the plywood feet across the fire road, a hot-spring soak that ends with forty tourists sprinting through steam. Junie's hoax unravels publicly when the plywood feet slide out of a laundry cart in front of the whole town, and the crowd turns; the broadcast deal collapses; Marguerite prepares to leave. Hunting Hobb into the woods to prove herself, Junie instead finds him snared in the Jubilee's banner rigging, terrified, and chooses to cut him free rather than film him. In the climax, Hobb repays her by wandering straight into the Jubilee parade at dusk, lifting the toppling fiberglass statue off a float and off a pinned Deputy Bo in front of ten thousand phones — then vanishing into the treeline before a single lens can focus. Nobody gets clean footage. Everyone gets a story. The film ends the following summer: the lodge is packed, the parking lot full, Marguerite hosts the Jubilee from the terrace, Bo directs traffic with enormous dignity, and Junie leaves a pie cooling on the back steps, where a huge hand quietly takes it.

Cast

• Junie Tacket Wants to save her family's lodge from foreclosure without becoming the town liar
• Pip Tacket Wants to be the one who proves monsters are real
• Deputy Bo Pardue Wants to be taken seriously as a real lawman by capturing the creature
• Marguerite Voss Wants one authenticated frame of footage to resurrect her cancelled TV show
• Hobb Wants to eat the lodge's breakfast buffet in peace and be left alone