The Only Reality TV You Need To Watch Hunts Monsters, Stream It Now
Mountain Monsters is currently available to stream on Max, and this is a Bigfoot-hunting reality TV show unlike anything else you’ve seen. As the show traverses the Appalachian Mountains, your jaw will drop to the floor and remain affixed to the carpeting as you watch a band of self-proclaimed expert trappers repeatedly try and fail to catch various cryptids that are never actually shown on camera.
Boasting your typical reality TV formula, Mountain Monsters follows the Appalachian Investigators of Mysterious Sightings (A.I.M.S.) team and their quest to find cryptids like Bigfoot, The Grassman of Perry County, the Lizard Demon of Wood County, and the Kentucky Hellhound, to name a few. The A.I.M.S. team is comprised of Trapper, Buck, Huckleberry, Jeff, Willy, and Wild Bill. Each team member has their own area of expertise, from building traps to tracking and calling various mysterious cryptid creatures of the night.
But what makes Mountain Monsters so special is how the team executes each mission. After gathering eyewitness accounts from locals who always have comically poor-quality video footage of the cryptid in question, the gang quickly gets to work setting up traps so they can capture and kill whatever mythical beast they’re searching for. Using folksy non-sequiturs of no known origin as their primary means of communication, the A.I.M.S. team quickly gets the lay of the land, loads up their weapons, and heads to the woods.
The traps in Mountain Monster are often elaborate contraptions that resemble something from the imagination of Wile E. Coyote. The Looney Tunes comparison is fitting because the traps often fail to work or epically backfire. But as comical as all of this sounds, the team plays it straight, and it’s not totally clear whether they’re completely delusional or in on the joke.
It goes without saying that much care goes into the traps in Mountain Monsters. The A.I.M.S. team’s self-proclaimed hillbilly ingenuity manifests in the form of giant bug zappers made out of fencing scraps, catapults, and bamboo cages with trap doors. Some of the best moments in the series involve Wild Bill falling out of trees trying to gather wood while Willy stares in disbelief at his partner for acting so carelessly in such dangerous situations.
Marketed as a reality show, Mountain Monsters is likely a scripted series, but it’s the improvisation that really brings it home. Though some of the creatures in question seem to be fabricated, and the lore made up on the spot, each episode is jam-packed with folksy one-liners like “I ain’t seen this many body parts all over the place since I was at an orgy in the ‘70s,” and “I like those one-syllable words like yonder.”
As the series progresses on Max, it becomes clear that the A.I.M.S. team is severely ill-equipped to bag the mountain monsters they’re hunting, but they’ll show up armed to the teeth with rifles, knives, and thermal cameras whenever duty calls. As ridiculous as Mountain Monsters sounds, it’s inherently engaging television because each trapper is 100 percent devoted to tracking, catching, and killing whatever creature is featured in each episode. Whenever the gang piles into their all-terrain vehicles to pursue creatures like the Death Cat of Cherokee County, their hollering becomes so infectious you can’t look away.
In other words, you’ll find yourself streaming Mountain Monsters, not because you think a mission will be successful but for the thrill of the hunt.
