If you were near the Ramble in Central Park on Thursday afternoon, you might have thought you were in a “Planet of the Apes”-themed episode of “What Would You Do?”
Because you may have witnessed a 6-foot-7 longhaired sasquatch slowly traversing tall rocks and promenading through thickets, grunting at the sky and scaring children and dogs silly.
But what you saw wasn’t Bigfoot. It was a big gimmick.
The sasquatch sighting was a gorilla — sorry, guerrilla — publicity effort for “Sasquatch Sunset,” a new film directed by the brothers David and Nathan Zellner that opens in New York on April 12.
Conceptually, the promotional shenanigans in Central Park were in line with the film’s irreverent sensibility. A mix of bro comedy, National Geographic documentary and emotional family drama, it stars Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg as members of a pack of kind-eyed sasquatches who brave life and death in the wilderness.
Nathan Zellner, who plays the male alpha, was the human underneath the hairy suit on Thursday. A natural grunter, he was greeted by big laughs and phones aloft the moment he stepped out of a van across from the American Museum of Natural History.
Inside the park, Trey Hope stopped to gawk and take a snapshot. What was it and why was it there? He wasn’t sure.
“It’s a guy having a great time, I guess?” said Hope, who was visiting from South Carolina. “That or we just found sasquatch in the middle of Central Park.”
Steve Karas slowly lifted a hand to his décolletage and opened his mouth in awe when he first spotted the sasquatch.
“My sense of identity and self-expression is very beast-inspired,” said Karas, watching his hairiness lounge on a rock. “I like that he’s humanoid but not really. This is bringing sci-fi alien, but very earthlike.”
A sasquatch wasn’t the only creature recently on the streets of New York to promote a movie. Last month, giant bucktoothed beavers greeted people outside the IFC Center, part of a national tour in support of the new comedy “Hundreds of Beavers.”
With no signage or fliers to explain the sasquatch sighting, the effort was more about building viral hype than selling tickets. But the “Sasquatch Sunset” trailer has already made an impression. Ally Carey said Zellner’s costume looked identical to the one in the film’s trailer. (It is.)
“I love when they bring the movie art into the real world and make it interactive,” she said.
During a break for water and rest — the suit weighs about 40 pounds, including platform-style shoes — Zellner shied away from calling the event a publicity stunt, instead referring to it as a “good social experiment” with no expectations beyond fun. Try telling that to the cadre that followed him around, including his co-director brother and a camera crew that captured his antics for the film’s social media channels.
While the R-rated “Sasquatch Sunset” isn’t necessarily a family film, it has a new fan in Vito Cuk. The 8-year-old and his parents were visiting New York from Zagreb, Croatia.
“I’m scared,” said Vito, a wide, toothy smile on his face as he jumped up and down, eyeballing the sasquatch from afar. “It’s excited scary.”
