The Legend Of Bigfoot

Last night's Atomic Midnight Horror Show was a craptacular little gem called "The Legend Of Bigfoot". After a couple of classic trailers and an "Intermission Time" short I have seen so many times, I can recite it in my sleep, we got a nice bit of humor from the hosts and then into the movie.

Oh. Your. God.

The "story" purports to be a documentary about a tracker who becomes obsessed with Bigfoot after a run-in with the beast, and we get a year's worth of footage and stories about him tracking the beast from Southern California to its mating grounds above the arctic circle. This is a hook to hang about an hour and a half of stock wilderness footage on, with probably less than 15 minutes of film actually shot for the movie itself of the narrator showing off his house, asking people about Bigfoot and, of course, the Bigfoot footage itself. I watched the movie the way I usually do, laughing, making comments as if I was Crow T Robot and marveling that this movie was made and put in theaters. Early in the movie, there is a sequence that presages "The Blair Witch Project" by the camera whipping back and forth to the point of theatrical nausea so severe I had to close my eyes to keep from throwing up. I've only had that reaction a few times in a movie theater: During the operation footage in "Super Size Me", watching the movie "Flashdance"...

Anyway, the movie then has some footage that purports to show Ivan's first spotting of a Bigfoot. It's too bad he didn't have a lot of money while making the movie, since it's painfully clear that the "Bigfoot"'s fur doesn't completely cover its leg, and you can see the human feet sticking out of a modified gorilla costume.

We then get a sequence where Marx talks about animals falling in love: It shows two squirrels dancing around each other and light grooming that appears to be kissing while he talks about how the animals were so in love, they weren't paying attention to the world around them. We then cut to a Jeep driving down a road, and then cut to one of the two squirrels laying in the road, still and unmoving. The other squirrel keeps trying to drag the still squirrel away (and all through this, we see footage of animals who are "watching the horrifying scene with fear in their eyes"). The audience went silent, and I eventually said, "This is the saddest nature film EVER", breaking the spell....and then we started chanting for the squirrel to succeed in moving their mate off the road. We then get cuts of grainy stock footage of a hawk circling as the injured squirrel slops toward a hole and hides itself.

It was really disturbing and didn't fit the movie at all.

Then, back to stock footage and stories about Bigfoot. There was another disturbing sequence of hunter gutting Elk that struck me as just plain strange, and the narrator talks about how he got angry at the hunters while lovingly lingering on the carcasses.

Then, the final Bigfoot Reveal. What we've been waiting for.

More footage of someone in an ape suit, blurry, and hopping around as if Curly was in the suit reacting to Moe slapping him upside the head.

Movies like this were all over when I was a kid, purporting to reveal the truth behind the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, the assassination of Kennedy and the like. They'd get TONS of ads on TV, play only on weekend afternoons in movies theaters, and any kid who saw it would talk about how they were THE GREATEST MOVIES EVER!!!

All in all, it was fun, but afterward, as we chatted about the movie, I heard stories of how the man who made the movie was well-known for taking people on "Bigfoot Expeditions", and in the 70's cut a deal with a big film company over the Bigfoot footage used int he movie, only to have it fall through when he realized they would be able to see it was faked, so he and his wife took off as the movie company came out to his house for the footage after he got the first payment. I also read where his wife and kids pulled the same thing on Coast To Coast AM to try and get people interested in their scam, and there was a group of three families who were doing that sort of thing all through the 70's who knew each other or worked together at some point, all while claiming they had never heard of the the other groups.

Next week? Vampire Hookers.

With a title like that, the movies doesn't HAVE to be any good.