Tuesday, May 19, 2026

The Badge, the Bible, and Bigfoot (2019) Ashley Hays Wright


I fell asleep with the TV on. Woke up some time later to find this playing, The Badge, the Bible, and Bigfoot. I backed it up to I could see the whole thing. It was 66 minutes. It had five actors playing six characters.

The mayor and police chief of a small coastal town go into the woods looking for three missing girls. There've been a lot of bigfoot sightings, so they naturally assume they were abducted by bigfoot.

Made by the Wright family, Ashley Hays Wright, David Owen Wright and their daughters, Jaina, Scout and Cadence. They've made over 60 movies in less than seven years, most of them filmed around their home in Texas. They took a trip to Maine, apparently. 

We see shots of the town of Eastport. They have a town council meeting which is just a close-up up the police chief as he hears it announced that the police department is being disbanded to give more money to the fire department. The sheriff will take over policing the town. 

The sheriff was played by David Owen Wright who also played the police chief, but all the shots of him as sheriff are either from the neck down or with the brim of a large hat hiding his face and he speaks in an odd cartoon-like voice. They could have avoided all that and it might have been better if the sheriff had been the police chief's estranged, perhaps evil twin brother. 

The bigfoot was one of them in a gorilla costume, which is perhaps ironic since they made an anti-Halloween movie.

It started out looking pretty good with shots of the town, old wooden and brick buildings. The locations later in the film were less interesting. The editing became choppy toward the end.

And, I'll give away the ending here. Don't read if you want to be surprised.

It ends with the couple in their living room. The husband had fallen asleep watching TV and dreamed the whole thing, He watches violent movies to help cope with his war trauma. He resolves to stop watching violent movies which seems reasonable. I don't know if it means anything that he dreamed he wasn't married and that his children were strangers to him.

I've seen only a small part of their body of work, but I would encourage the Wrights to take more trips. Airfare is going up with the war of aggression against Iran, but they could be European filmmakers. They could film in western Ukraine if they wanted. The other movie I saw of theirs, Exorcism in Amarillo, was just the five of them filmed around their house. It couldn't have cost anything. They could make a movie anywhere in the world for the cost of airfare and an Airbnb. 

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