Bigfoot (1970)

Best movie ever!

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

BIGFOOT is a trashy Z-flick that manages to cash in on or rip off all kinds of popular trends from the period. The main thrust of the story, about a family of Bigfoot creatures living out in the forests who kidnap young women for procreation, has obviously been inspired by the supposedly genuine Roger Patterson Bigfoot footage that was shot in 1967 and released to much notoriety. This film even stages a homage in which one of the Bigfoot creatures strolls across open woodland just like in the movie. This flick becomes even more intriguing when watching, as it transpires that the director was responsible for a couple of shoddy biker flicks before he made this and, sure enough, a 'biker gang' are soon involved in the proceedings, although it has to be said that these bikers look more like university students! The idea of bikers vs. Bigfoot is a good one but this film ruins it through shocking execution. The biggest problem is that the scant running time is padded out with endless upon endless scenes of bikers riding through the woods, cars driving through the woods, sometimes just landscape shots of the woods itself. There's about one few second scene of Bigfoot 'action' and the rest of the running time is made up of talking, which is boring. The characters are paper-thin and the actors are all poor, despite the presence of a few notables including John Carradine, hamming it up in a monster flick as only he knew how; brothers Christopher and John Mitchum, both sons of Robert with none of his ability; Joi Lansing, a cheesecake starlet who strips down to a flimsy dress early on and stays that way throughout; Bing Crosby's son Lindsay, who makes no impression whatsoever; even an ex-western star, Ken Maynard, severely down on his luck.The cast alone and cheese factor saved this from the list of 'very worst films' I've amassed, but there isn't much to get excited about here. I thought things might pick up with the introduction of dynamite and a one-armed Bigfoot hunter, but I was wrong. The creatures – for there are a whole host of them running about in the murk – look like a cross between 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY's apes and those cavemen brothers from the cartoon series WACKY RACES. Needless to say that the costumes are tatty beyond belief and the multiple references to KING KONG only serve as a reminder of what trash this is. BIGFOOT crashes and burns from the very beginning and is a total waste of time.

Don't let all the naysayers sway you. This is a little gem of a bad movie. By the best guess of many this is probably the very first flick to deal with the notion that the American wilderness was home to a large, unknown primate species. Back in the primitive '70's the legend was just starting to get noticed and there was not a lot of information around concerning the supposed nature and habits of the creature. This left writer-director Robert Slatzer plenty of room to let his imagination run wild, and run wild it did. In his vision, Sasquatch is not merely a wild animal afoot in the pacific Northwest, it is a full blown cave man! According to him they have a language, make stone tools, know how to tie knots and bury their dead. Naturally they are also completely beguiled by sexy white women in the best King Kong tradition, which leads them to kidnap several young ladies, one from the ranks of a biker gang. This sets the plot into motion as a group of unlikely allies sets out to locate the ladies and rescue them from the lecherous monsters. That preceding description might have you thinking that it might not be a half bad flick. Don't get carried away. Slatzer may have a wild imagination but he's also completely clueless on how to tell a story cinematically. Suspense, pacing, believable dialogue, etc. are all well beyond his feeble abilities. There is a hilarious scene where the two beauties are bound to poles and at the mercy of the bigfeet. you might imagine that the ladies would be scared out of their wits at this point, but no. Slatzer has them calmly discuss the morphology of their captors. One girl even surmises that the child- like creature in the group is a Sasquatch-human hybrid! Ridiculous!John Carradine and John Mitchum are completely wasted in their roles as the avaricious traveling salesmen who hope to capture one of the critters and make a fortune. Location footage is mixed with cheesy sets that are easily distinguished from the real thing. No doubt Slatzer hoped nobody would be able to tell the difference. I had hoped that the climax of the film was going to be an unintentionally hilarious rumble between the bikers and the Bigfeet, but no such luck. That would have probably taken days to film and Slatzer couldn't afford to rent the camera that long. Instead one of the creatures flees into a cave and a biker tosses in a bundle of dynamite. There is a lame excuse for an explosion and we are assured that we have just seen the end of the naughty Bigfoot, but then a cryptic message appears on the screen: "Or Is It??" As it turns out, yes it is. If Slatzer was planning a sequel it does not seem to have materialized and the world was able to get on with the understandable task of ignoring this guy's movies.

This movie was just plain awful. I've seen worse acting but this was just bad. But the acting wasn't really the problem. The problem was this movie was boring. Nothing even really happens. It felt like I was watching a 3 hour movie, but that's probably because I kept stopping it. I had to because it was so awful I couldn't take it all in one sitting. Only scary part that made me jump was when the girl in the green underwear and her boyfriend bump into one of the ape creatures. That was the only good part. Everything else just sucked. I was praying that the ape looking creatures would kill off or at least torture the blonde woman. Her constant screaming made my ears bleed. Even when I turned the volume down her screams (and I'm not kidding), got more piercing! Over and over again she kept screaming whenever she spotted the damn apes. It was unbelievable how this bimbo wasted time screaming at the top of her lungs instead of trying to find a way to get the hell out of there! She was the most annoying character and it sucks that she didn't even die....just to shut her up.

There's a vastly superior movie out there called The Ninth Configuration, written and directed by William Peter Blatty. In that movie about an insane asylum dwells a character named Frankie Reno who feels compelled to do an all dog production of Shakespeare. Now, should Frankie ever film the fruits of his labor, I'm convinced it would yield a better movie than Bigfoot.We're talking about a film whose production appears to consists of "whatever can fit in the back of a pickup truck" filmed at what I'm assuming was a breakneck pace to get a product in the can and distributed to America's drive-in theaters (maybe 'drive-thru' is a more appropriate term.) What I'm trying to say is, I hope minimal time and resources were dedicated to this movie because the technical merits are so abysmal that the clearly deteriorating print from which the incorrectly framed DVD was made may actually be an improvement to the original projection over 30 years ago. I wish I were exaggerating.Seriously, it defeats the purpose of a serious critical analysis (want proof, check out the cheesy DVD cover art). Instead, dear reader, I present the "fun" aspect of Bigfoot.I enjoyed how Joi Lansing piloted a plane that, not surprisingly, crashes … but not before a leisurely conversation with air traffic control while grips stand outside the obviously grounded plane and shake it back and forth to simulate mid-air turbulence. I giggled with condescending glee seeing this pilot parachute out, descend, and then cut to her on the ground wrapping up her chute (my guess is the budget couldn't afford the ladder to simulate a landing.) Let's not forget the masterful camera-work of the motorcycle gang riding through the woods – shots designed to instill an uneasy, slightly nauseating sensation, by vigorously shaking the frame as if … as if … the cameraman was sitting in the bed of a truck that had no shocks! And there's a brilliant moment in the "party" montage where it looked like someone dropped the camera.What brilliant economical editing too! Why show the plane taking off? Crashing? Or Joi landing? And the quick cuts showing the editorial equivalent of nothing to show the plane going down (I guess). Oh, and when Bigfoot's henchmen (littlefoots?) kidnap the pilot and the bikini-clad girl (what's her name?) – these two women are tied to barely visible saplings, so their surprisingly calm conversation comes across as two high-school broads hanging around the cafeteria gossiping. "So, which of the furry guys who kidnapped us do you think is the cutest?" Wait, it gets better, the bikini clad-babe (maybe it was the pilot in her … whatever the hell that outfit's supposed to be) gives us a quasi-scientific run down of what these creatures are.A little bit later, glorified monkeys checkmate the rescue party in a battle of wits, the rescue party is tied to saplings next to the girls where they all uncannily resemble disgruntled company lay-offs waiting in line at a soup kitchen.How 'bout John Carradine's car which the hare could outrun even if the tortoise gave him cement shoes and broke his legs. What am I saying? The tortoise could take an ice-pick to the hare, push the corpse down a hill and the dead body could outrun that car (not to mention require less maintenance to keep running.) Speaking of John Carradine, I hope you like ham and cheese with your turkey.And I learned a very valuable lesson from Bigfoot: contrary to popular myth, dynamite does not actually require a fuse. It only requires a moron to throw it and boom! I have a theory that films like Bigfoot are made as a self-help tool to make suicidal filmmakers feel better about their work. Even the most talentless hacks can watch it with the comfort of knowing, "well, I can do better than that. Maybe life is worth living."