Bigfoot (1970)

My short and sweet plot summary: A young man named Rick (Christopher Mitchum) goes in search of his girlfriend who has been abducted by the worst looking Bigfoot ever put on film. The local sheriff won't help, so Rick turns to a traveling huckster named Jasper B Hawks (John Carradine) for assistance. What a complete load of garbage! Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, about Bigfoot is wretched. The movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel - it turns the barrel upside down to get at the poo stuck to the underside. Dull, boring, horribly acted, with some of the absolute worst special effects anyone has ever seen - that' what you'll find in Bigfoot. Carradine may have been a decent actor at one time, but by 1970, he was appearing in just about anything offered. As much as I enjoyed some other films with Christopher Mitchum (Ricco and Summertime Killer to name just two), he proves here how bad an actor he could be without a solid script. It's all so awful it's really not worth saying much more.After watching this movie, I think I need to revisit some of the other films I've rated 1/10. I think I've done some of those movie a disservice. On IMDb, of the 2,932 films I've rated, 63 received a 1/10. Some of these movies (Dead Men Walk, Sinbad of the Seven Seas, Night of the Sharks, Diamond Connection, Barbarian Queen II, ROTOR, The Adventures of Hercules, or The Swarm for example) have to better, or at least more enjoyable, than Bigfoot.

A very enjoyable film for me, as I love Bigfoot B-movies.John Carradine is a great actor and the Bigfoot creatures look more human-like than animal like. The music is also great, especially during the credits in the beginning of the film.The style really fits in well with the other Bigfoot horror movies from the 70's like "The Legend Of Boggy Creek". Another thing I enjoyed about this movie is that the filmmakers actually shot some of the scenes in isolated California mountains were real sightings take place. Unlike more of the 70's Bigfoot movies this one was more of a fantasy or fiction than a docudrama like "Sasquatch: The Legend Of Bigfoot", considering that a group of Bigfoot capture men and women and tie them to trees. If you like Bigfoot movies, this is a must-see!

There is no excuse for a movie this bad. Absolutely no excuse whatsoever. Not merely the fact that it has some good quality cast names in it (John Carradine, John Mitchum) but because it is completely treacherous not only to the industry and the art form, but to the filmmakers themselves. Making a movie like "Bigfoot" is like constructing the Empire State Building out of cardboard and expecting people to work in it every day without ever hearing a shred of complaint. It would also be astonishing that anybody even let you get that far. It's astonishing here, too.We all know the cult legend of the Americas' simian wonder. Well, as this movie would like us to believe, there is not just one Sasquatch, but dozens of them. And even though they are described (in the film) as being nine feet tall, in reality they're just stubby, man-sized fuzzballs who carry around clubs and sticks and tie people to trees with...I'm not sure what that was or how they got it. And I don't want to waste my precious brain cells pondering over it.Anyway, whatever. You've got a fashion model (played by real life fashion model Joi Lansing) who crashes her plane in the wilderness and is kidnapped by some lecherous Sasquatches. Then you have some rowdy bikers. One of their girls, while wandering about the woods in nothing but her bra and panties, is kidnapped by another. Her boyfriend sees the big ape and recruits a pair of goofball con men and they all embark on a mission to rescue their girls from the men in ape suits.The con men are played by John Carradine and John Mitchum, of all people. These two marvelous talents who were so wonderful in so many movies are the only ones involved in this treacherous production who act like professionals. Though they could have easily just hammed their way through (and nobdoy would have blamed them) they stick through to the end, even though they can't come within a lightyear of saving the movie."Bigfoot" looks and sounds as if it were made by a group of bottom feeders who had never seen a movie before in their lives. The photography is grainy and amateur and the audio on the soundtrack is so poorly assembled and recorded that you find yourself constantly adjusting the volume on your TV set. The screenplay is just the same set of words and phrases being repeated over and over again and the editing is absolutely horrendous. There is a horrible shot where Joi Lansing is on the run from a Sasquatch. She runs past us in the foreground and keeps on running until she's against the horizon. Then the Sasquatch appears to follow her. Between that point and the first one, we never cut away or adjust camera speed. Add to the fact that Joi Lansing was apparently trying to imitate Fay Wray in her screams and coming across as irksome. And the scene where she crashes her plane is missing not one, but several key shots so that we don't even get the whole picture of what has happened.I don't think I even need to touch on the special effects.This is one of the worst, most unremittingly agonizing and horrible movies ever made. As a person who has been and worked on a movie set and knows the pain and pressures that go into making a film, I find it absolutely appalling that anybody would even proceed and suffer their way through the production of something like this. The business isn't even that much of a money-maker for the cast and crew. It's the executives who really get the dough. So why bother unless you're at least going to put up an effort? There are other jobs out there. Other careers.

Well, that was the quote on my video box by someone from THE POST. So, judging by that rather anonymous endorsement, I knew I was in for a real treat. Not to mention the box artwork, which features a large, vaguely ape-like creature tossing a motorcycle (yay! a hybrid biker/monster flick!) Toss in John Carradine, and the blurb "America's abominable snowman... breeds with anything!", and you've got yourself an epoch du frommage. The uncomfortably long (and silent) travelling scenes, the paper mache sets, the unbelievably bad bigfoot makeup(or shall I say BigFEET?), the dinner-theatre-style acting, wonderfully inane script - all a testiment to the ultra-low budget that this "classic" drive-in flick flaunts in spades. Demands repeated viewings.