Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot

I was 6 years old when my parents took me to see this movie. This hands down was the scariest movie I ever saw, period. Granted I was only 6, it scared the living daylights out of me. I ended up sleeping between my parents for literally a week after I saw it. It aired again roughly 3 years later on a Saturday afternoon matinée on our local NBC affiliate. I watched it again and thought it was a masterpiece (as bigfoot movies go that is). It is by far and away the best bigfoot movie ever made and should be enjoyed by anyone who has interest in this centuries old mystery. I searched for roughly 22 years until I found a copy of this extremely hard to find movie. I watched it again for the first time with my parents and it didn't disappoint! It holds a special place in my collection and will always be a favorite whether I was 6, 16, or 60!

I saw this as an 8 yr old back in 1978 as part of a double feature with the Harrison Ford/Carl Weather's WWII flick "Force 10 from Navarone." I would discover later on that "Force 10" was considered by many critics to be one of the worst movies of 1978, but after watching it in tandem with "Sasquatch" I thought it was so much better than "Sasquatch." The thing is I was really excited about seeing "Sasquatch." It was the MAIN reason why my siblings and cousins went to the movies that day. So we were all surprised by how much more we enjoyed "Force 10" over "Sasquatch."

"Sasquatch" is cheesy. Even when I was 8 yrs old I realized that. A docudrama about a group of hippie dippie scientists and backwoods guides who are determined to capture a sasquatch. They put together an expedition with all their supplies loaded onto packhorses and head out to "bigfoot country." They keep referring to "bigfoot country" as a place marked out on a map. And when they find some bent over trees, they quickly point out that these are the borders of "bigfoot territory."

The thing I remember the most about this movie was that it was boring. The vast majority of this movie is like a poorly funded National Geographic special- lots of pretty shots of the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. In the end, the expedition sets up camp in some meadow in the heart of "bigfoot land" and then devise all sorts of outposts with tripwires to capture a bigfoot. Of course, the big hairy guy and a bunch of his friends are not so obliging. They attack the scientists by throwing paper mache boulders at them. These scenes are so phoney looking that even the most gullible child will be rolling his eyes at them.

The ONLY good thing about this movie are the retellings of the legends of bigfoot. The hippie scientists and guides sit around the campfire and tell stories and the film then recreates the story. An American Indian legend of the creature is portrayed by an Indian boy being chased by a bigfoot. The famous attack on a miners' cabin in Ape Canyon by several bigfoots is also recreated. And the best story- the eerie story of two trappers who unfortunately entered the valley of a particularly nasty bigfoot. In one scene a trapper is kneeling down examining strange footprints and all of a sudden a huge shadow looms over him. That actually was pretty creepy! However, these brief moments do not make up for what is mostly a pretty dull, cheesy movie.

I saw this film back in Fairmont West Virginia in 1979 as a ten year old who had a typical little kid's fascination with Bigfoot. I guess I still do as a matter of fact. This film follows a fictional expedition into the woods to find this legendary creature and put a homing device on its neck so they can track its habitat (there is actually a law on the books providing a heavy fine and a jail term to anyone who kills a Sasquatch believe it or not!). The film opens with beautiful shots of the woods, the best you will ever see outside those wonderful National Geographic specials) THEN! this spooky Jaws like music starts playing and you hear HIM creeping thru the woods and the animals start to panic and run away and you hear this blood curdling call and you see the shadow of the Sasquatch. This is the Holy Grail of Bigfoot films, the best I have ever seen next to Sunn Classic's The Mysterious Monsters. The guys in this expedition are not the best actors in the world and its kind of funny watching them. I particularly remember this camp cook who was real clumsy and this old fart who was the last of the mountain men. The film is really scary in some parts. It gives you the feeling that the expedition is being followed as rocks keep raining down on them. The best parts of the film is where they go over actual historical sighting of Bigfoot. They even show the famous Roger Patterson film of the creature. There is a story in there that was written by President Teddy Roosevelt in a book he wrote about his days as a cowboy. He heard this from an old trapper named Bauman about how he and another man ran into a pretty mean Bigfoot and this other man was killed (this is the only case I have ever read where a Bigfoot showed a really mean nature, I have always wondered if maybe another person did it!). They also tell the famous Mount Saint Helens story about the miners in 1924 who were attacked in their cabin by a tribe of Bigfeet. The attack is pretty scary especially when one of the miners looks out the window and finds hes staring one of the monsters right in the face! I remember seeing this is the theatrical version of the film I saw but its not on the video version I bought. It was the part that scared me the most as a kid. It shows a little Indian brave out hunting alone and you see a Bigfoot stalking him. He comes face to face with the monster and it begins to chase him. It was horrifying to watch and maybe thats why they took it out of the film. The final scene in the film where they set up the trip wires and the Sasquatch attack is very well done even while the Bigfoot costumes look more like Chewbacca from Star Wars. This is a good film to watch on a dark night when you are all alone.

Interesting docudrama of an expedition deep into the virgin wilderness of British Columbia beyond, what the local Indians call, the Peckatoe River into the fabled and mysterious Valley of the Bigfoot. I don't really know for sure if the movie is based on real events but what is undoubtedly the highlight of the docudrama "Sasquatch the legend of Bigfoot"has to be the showing of what is probably the most graphic and convincing piece of evidence of Bigfoots or Sasquatchs existence. The October 20, 1967 Roger Patterson 16mm home-movie of a Bigfoot walking along the heavily wooded Bluff Creek Valley in Northern California that has never been dis-proved to be anything other then what's it's said to be: an authentic flesh and blood Sasquatch.

Since Paterson's death in 1972 a man named Bob Heironimus has come forwarded saying that it was him in a gorilla suit, that Patterson supposedly paid for, not a so-called Sasquatch that's really in that famous movie, to the delight of the many skeptics who for years have been unable to disprove that the film is a fake. All we have is Heironimus' word without any proof whatsoever. Heironimus did put on a gorilla suit in his attempt to show how he faked the distinct and very difficult if not impossible walk,that even the best Hollywood stunt-men couldn't duplicate, that the Sasquacth had in the film but it doesn't faintly correspond to the Patterson movie. There's no explanation from him, as well as the vast army of anti-Bigfoot skeptics, at all in how he could have made a number of footprints that had to have been made by someone weighing at least 800 pounds which were discovered at the sight just after the Patterson movie was filmed?

The movie "Sasquatch: legend of Bigfoot" has a group of people involved in finding and if possible capturing a Bgfoot, or Sasquatch, lead by Chuck Evens and his Indian guide Techka Blackhawk. The group travels some 300 miles into Bigfoot country which takes over four months. The expedition suffers a number of near-fatal attacks by mountain lions or pumas and grizzly bears, as well as running into a number of annoying and dangerous mosquito infestations, along the way to reach what is called by the native Indians the Meadow of the Three Valleys, Bigfoot Country. It's there where they make camp setting up an electric barrier of trip wires to alert Evens' & Co. if any Bigfoot had penetrated the woods around the perimeter of their campsite.

The Bigfoots who up until then were doing everything that they could to avoid the members of the Evens' Expeditionery team suddenly came out into the open after their home grounds were violated and invaded. In the dead of night the Bigfoots attacked the campsite with rocks boulders tree branches as well as with their brute strength demolishing it and wounding a number of the campers. The Bigfoots attack on the camp was so effective that the expeditionary team that had marksmen assigned to it didn't even have a chance to bring down even one of them with either a tranquilizer gun or rifle with live ammunition.

Were told at the end of the movie that there will be other expeditionary teams sent into the uncharted wilderness beyond the Peckatoe River in the years to come to capture and bring back, dead or alive, a Bigfoot. Now with almost 30 years having gone by since the movie was made, in 1977, there's still no news of a Bigfoot being either captured alive or shot and killed by any of the latter groups of Bigfoot hunters who traveled into the wilds of British Columbia in order to find one.

Interesting movie that has recently been re-released on DVD with a number of new and updated features, that includes the two Bigfoot-like movies "Snowbeast" and "The Snow Creature". The film will more then ever keep the controversy alive of the existence of a gigantic man-like, 10 foot tall 1,000 pound, humanoid or gorilla being on the loose in the dense and uncharted forests in the great American and Canadian North-West.

"Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigoot" (1978) is a quasi-documentary about a fake Bigfoot expedition deep in the wilderness of British Columbia, although it was filmed entirely in Oregon (Deshutes National Forest and Willamette National Forest). I've heard it referred to as 'the Holy Grail of Bigfoot films' and I can see why since most of the notables of the Bigfoot mythos are detailed, including the Roger Patterson footage and the 1924 Ape Canyon, WA, incident where a handful of miners were harassed most of the night by Bigfeet throwing rocks at their cabin and pounding on the walls. Regardless, it's more of a nature flick than anything else, featuring some great footage of North American wildlife highlighted by a fight between two grizzlies. It's worthwhile for Bigfoot aficionados but laid back and kinda boring, so brace yourself and remember it's from the 70s.

GRADE: C+