Sieg Who? – a review of The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot

The_Man_Who_Killed_Hitler_and_Then_the_Bigfoot

The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot

Written, Directed, and Produced by Robert D. Krzykowski

Other Producers: Patrick Ewald, Shaked Berenson

Cast

Sam Elliott … Calvin Barr

Aidan Turner … Calvin Barr

Caitlin FitzGerald … Maxine

Ron Livingston … Flag Pin

Rizwan Manji … Maple Leaf

Sean Bridgers … Mr. Gardner

Larry Miller … Ed Barr

Ellar Coltrane … The Clerk

Mark Steger … The Bigfoot

Anastasia Tsikhanava … Ed’s Daughter

Kelley Curran … Mrs. Gardner

Silas Archer Gustav … Young Calvin Barr’s dog (Ralph)

Nikolai Tsankov … Russian Officer

Alton Fitzgerald White … George

Kristen Anne Ferraro … Concentration Camp Prisoner

The plot line of the movie is every bit as goofy as the title suggests. It is about a man, Calvin Barr (played in respective eras by Aidan Turner and Sam Elliot), who is sent on a secret mission by the US Army during World War II to get into Nazi headquarters and kill Hitler.

He is successful. He assassinates Hitler. Unfortunately it is a secret mission, and it turns out that neither side want to disclose the story of the successful offing of The Big Sieg Heil. But the Germans have spares, stand-ins who can fill in as Der Fuhrer, and the Americans aren’t talking because they want to maintain the illusion that they’re going to kill Hitler. So Calvin comes back, pretends to be a normal non-com as the war wages on and learns later that Hitler #4 was a coward and offed himself off with his own service revolver. Tch. You just can’t get good Hitlers any more.

We catch up with Calvin some 35 or 40 years later. He’s happily retired, and lives with his dog in a nice old home in a nice old part of town in one of those tidy small towns New England excels at.

We learn, in rapid succession, that despite his white hair and advanced age, it’s really not a good idea to mug him, and that shady government agents are following him around.

Governments, actually. One, identified only as “Flag Pin” is an American, and “Maple Leaf” is a Canadian, easily distinguished by his Parisian accent and Calcutta features. And there’s nothing creepy about them at all, even if they do follow an old duffer around town for several days and watch placidly as a bunch of toughs try to mug the old boy. Really, they’re just patriots, out to save the world.

And the world is in peril. There is a Big Foot on the loose in central Quebec (thus the Canadian) and while normally this would be of minimal concern because central Quebec, this particular Big Foot is patient zero for a horrible plague that is threatening to wipe out millions of people. And the Americans secretly know that Calvin has form on killing monsters that threaten to kill millions of people.

Help us, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re our only hope.

So he ends up going up to Quebec and killing Bigfoot. And no, that’s not a spoiler—it’s right there in the fricking title.

If the plot sounds ridiculous, that’s probably because it is. So whyfore should you be watching this?

The movie is a small miracle of great story telling. The tone, the cadence, the characterizations, the timing, the setting…everything is done very nearly perfectly. Robert D. Krzykowski wrote, directed and produced the whole thing, and it is clearly a labor of love. The viewer gets swept up in the magic of the storytelling in a way only a master storyteller can bring about.