Ungeheuer!

Peter Graves sonorously narrates Sunn Classics uproarious Bigfoot documentary with all of the authority of Captain Crunch. The film is best remembered in my circle for a genuinely hair raising segment where Bigfoot rummages through the belongings of a group of "Boy Scouts" out camping without adult supervision. Attention is also given to the Loch Ness Monster and indeed, Graves is able to conclude with authority that it is a population of aquatic dinosaurs who have somehow escaped the ravages of time. He also concludes that Bigfoot is actually a population of 200 or more bipedal creatures who exist at one with nature, and have only come to our attention as mankind has cruelly encroached on their habitat with all our unwelcome riot & clamor.

The same approach is found in Sunn Classic's "In Search of Noah's Ark", which taught us that the Ark split in two and rests half submerged in a glacier on Mount Ararat, just waiting for earnest Christians to free it from the ice. Sunn's "The Lincoln Conspiracy" also finds in favor of a complex conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln centered around super spy / traitor Union Colonel Lafayette Baker, who would have made Oliver Stone blush with embarrassment for his ham-fisted script for "JFK". And the overlooked "The Bermuda Triangle", which posits with authority that ships, airplanes and whole civilizations have been sucked into the very bowels of the Earth itself by a misfired Atlantean particle beam accelerator, lost somewhere off the coast of Bimini.

The films are classic Americana, made with working class families who went to the movies two or three times a year in mind, demanding otherwise wholesome G-rated fare suitable for all-ages and fueled by a bizarre zeal to have it all be true even when flying in the face of common sense. "Mysterious Monsters" succeeds admirably, cashing in early on the Bigfoot craze that even "The Six Million Dollar Man" got caught up in and demanding our acceptance by appealing to our conscience rather than science. Forty years later there's still no hide or bones to study and it's to my personal disappointment that garbage films like this sort of got shoved under the carpet as people realized how stupid it all was. It is the right of earlier eras to be as slack-jawed and backward as they like. I for one marvel at garbage such as this film, celebrating with forthright authority man's unending quest to sucker each other out of a couple dollars — In this case, movie tickets, and it worked brilliantly. These movies all made gobs of money with almost nothing up front, though don't sell the talents of the filmmakers short. They knew exactly what they were doing just like the guy at the carnival sideshow knows what he is doing. It's called show business.

The results are actually highly entertaining, the one slow spot in the film being a sequence where a "psychiatrist" is shown "hypnotizing" his "patient", who relates a tale so filled with mystery as to sound not just poorly scripted, but unrehearsed. Yet that's half the fun. Not just marveling at how bad, dumb or outrageously idiotic the movie is, but in knowing that it was the best they could manage under the circumstances. Which means there's hope for the rest of us, or at least those of us who refuse to stop believing in Bigfoot and the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs or "Ancient Aliens". Take your pick, spark up and just enjoy being smarter than the dimwits who paid money to see this, ate it up whole, and went home wanting more. Now that's funny.

Sunn Classic Pictures made some wonderful documentaries and this is by far the best. It is absolutely fascinating and i'm amazed at all they managed to cover about Bigfoot and Nessie in one film. The reenactments of the various sightings are very well done but may frighten kids. They frightened me when I was a kid and saw this film. I think the scariest scene was the one where the women is alone in her living room and Bigfoots shadow comes by and his hand crashes thru the window and then her husband opens the door and hes standing right there. This is the only documentary I have seen that includes a really inteligent detailed analysis of Roger Patterson's film of Bigfoot. Next to the Zapruder film, its the most famous home movie ever taken. Its also the only film I have seen that show's Patterson's film in its entirity. The only thing is that when the film talks about the Loch Ness Monster they show the famous "Surgeon's photo" of the head and neck of Nessie. In 1994, there was an old Englishman who confessed on his deathbed that picture was a hoax! Oh well, its still worth a look when it shows up on tv. Peter Graves is an excellent narrator.

...if you do a little research on the dying Brit, you soon discover that he was himself a hoaxer, while the man who made the "Surgeon's photo" was actually a very sober and upstanding gynecologist... and never given to hoaxes. Many Ness researchers don't believe the photo anyway, but not because it's ever been proven to be a hoax.

It has not been.

The "Loch Ness hoax" rumor is itself an urban legend, much like the so-called debunking of the Patterson Bigfoot film from 1967. A little research shows you that not only did the man (John Chambers) who was supposed to have faked the Bigfoot deny it to his grave, but the primary person who says he did it is filmmaker John Landis -- a known expert on simians, primates, and prehistoric humanoids... er, not quite. (Though he did make SCHLOCK.) Frankly, you only have to compare the Bigfoot material you get in something like MYSTERIOUS MONSTERS with the monkey suits on display in episodes of STAR TREK or KORG 70,000 BC from the same general timeframe to know that there's just no way any makeup artist from the time *could* have faked the suit! (Even the so-called "zipper" on the suit doesn't stand up to rigorous computer analysis. It's just a tuft of fur.)

All this by way of saying: Watch THE MYSTERIOUS MONSTERS and don't be too quick to believe every dying British con artist you read about, or every B-movie director who insists they can analyze film better than naturalists.

I vividly remember seeing this as a 10 year old in the theatre and just recently rewatched it. Yes, it's a cheap production with non actors and no budget it couldn't help but bring me back to that theatre in a wave of nostalgia. Laugh now but remember this cheesy "documentary" scared the &$#* out of me and every other kid in that theatre in 1975. It wasn't what you were watching that scared you but WHAT IF what you were watching actually happened that terrified you. I can't begin to tell you how many times my friends and I scattered when so much as a squirrel would rustle the leaves at night when we were out walking in the woods after dark. Bigfoot was always there in the back of our minds and we had TWO cheezy 70's flicks to blame for it. This and the LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK. I'd give anything to be living back in that age of innocence again...

Well, this film came out when I was 7 and bigfoot, Nessie, Yeti, Bermuda Triangle, UFOs and all that kind of stuff was big. I remember seeing this flick at the theater and it scared the hell out of me, especially when bigfoot's shadow goes by the window while the lady sits there eating popcorn, and then her husband opens the door to see the creature standing there! Of course it has a lot of cheesy scenes of hypnosis and bad witnesses and the old "computer" technology that is so laughable today. But despite lack of evidence of any primate evolution in North America, and the recent conclusion that Roger Patterson's film was most likely a hoax, there is still a fact that disturbs: Native Americans and Himalayan natives matter-of-fact acceptance of these creatures' existence. And what is really making ALL those footprints?? A film worth seeing as both period piece and to get many of the sightings and "facts" up to that time.