Nothing guarantees reality TV stardom like big hair.
“Big” used to mean big hair on small Jersey drunks, but sometime in the last couple of years, big hair migrated down South along with reality show locales.
Now it’s all beards all the time (think “Duck Dynasty”). And those tight tanks on tight ’roid- bodies were replaced in our hearts with loose, dirty fatigues over giant Appalachian bellies.
The newest crowd shooting (literally) for Appalachian reality show stardom are four mountain men who are loaded for bear with beards. Calling themselves “Appalachian Investigators of Mysterious Sightings” (AIMS), these guys spend a great deal of time tracking and presumably killing mountain monsters.
On tonight’s opener, we meet the four AIMS, led by John “Trapper” Tice and his band of merry large guys, including Wild Bill, trap builder, researcher Jeff, and rookie Buck, who seems to lack of actual skills, but is morbidly obese.
Tonight they go searching for the Kentucky Wolfman, a giant wolf that allegedly walks upright, is 7 feet tall and weighs maybe 500 pounds.
What do they want to do? Trap the legendary creature for scientific research or kill the thing?
They’re constantly saying things like, “I want that up on my wall!”
The mountain men hunt Wolfman for days, using a baby goat for bait.
They set up a remote camera at the trap site and a giant Wolfman monster, is seemingly caught on infrared camera — or a big white moving blob moves right in front of their remote camera bypassing the trap.
Truthfully, Wolfman looks very “Trog” (a great “B” monster movie in which Joan Crawford takes gorilla man Trog out for a nice picnic lunch — I swear.)
Anyway, you’d think that the actual footage the AIMS guys get of the Wolfman/trog monster would encourage the mountain men to stay until they actually trap it?
But alas, no. In fact, they pack up and leave, saying, bizarrely, “Looks like he plumb outsmarted us.”
What? That’s it? Yessiree — that’s it. Like SyFy’s “Ghost Hunters,” which doesn’t ever seem to deliver on ghosts, “Mountain Monsters” doesn’t deliver on, well, mountain monsters.
I’m told no monsters were killed in the filming of the show, which is a relief, seeing as how all they seem to want to do is blow the beast away — even though it might be the only one on earth.
Better to take him on a picnic.