The Legend of Bigfoot

I got this movie in a blister pack for a dollar with another movie. Being a armchair detective about Sasquatch, Yowie and Alma I was interested in what this was about. I never heard of Marx, but I did see once the footage of the "limping" or sometimes pegged "waltzing" bigfoot. Even then I thought it was odd. It did in fact looked like someone in a cheesy gorilla suit waltzing about.

Most of the footage in the film was dull and as everyone else here has posted "way off course of the topic." But one has to remember that when you are hunting something that is hard to find Nature is going to come with it. In some respects this reminded me of "Legend of Boggy Creek." Thank god there was not crooner singing "Hey Travis Crabtree......." But again lets remember if the movie used strictly his footage, the movie would be only about 20 minutes long.

The last bit of footage has me raising an eyebrow with some interest. Having seen not 1 but 4 of these beings and a hell of a lot closer than probably Marx would have wanted, I always get a cold chill when I look at filmed footage or listen to its cries. While the supposed young one does nothing at all for me, the supposed older bigfoot gave me some severe cold chills. The younger one looked too thin and his acts too rehearsed or fact. The older one was massive in size. so I am at odds that the footage of the younger bigfoot maybe fake along with the waltzing bigfoot. If the waltzing/limping bigfoot film is real then one need to consider: 1) Could such a creature so lame survive? And if so how much more or less elusive can he be compared to a healthy creature? Sure such a lame creature would not find it easy to get away from hunters and others.

2) That the creature is not JUST lame but deformed, as his one arm was always on his chest and looked stiff and his one leg looks like its stiff all the way up to the hip.

My last statement is directed to Marx' comment about Sasquatch eating habits. Front evidence collected all over North America, it seems these creature have a huge diet and many rancher and farmers have found cattle, goats, pigs, chickens, fish, dogs, deer and other animals half eaten. Remember in the film, it all starts off with the killing of cattle and a bear???? Oh yeah in one report a roaming bigfoot was even treated to peanut-butter sandwiches which it seemed to enjoy.

Not a bad film. A lot better than Boggy Creek if you ask me.

It is extremely unlikely that a filmmaker today would make a movie like "The Legend Of Bigfoot". Even if by miracle it happened, there is no way a film distributor would try to release it to theaters. And all that unlikelihood is a good thing, if you ask me. If you are looking for proof of Bigfoot or at least a serious examination of the theory, you would best look elsewhere. I don't know who Ivan Marx is (or was), but he sure doesn't come across as an authority on the subject of Bigfoot. When he uncovers the few moments of "proof" in the movie, he says that authorities (who he never specifically identifies) back up his claims. But most of the movie is not a serious look one way or another to Bigfoot's existence. In fact, the movie plays like they took a number of wildlife home movies with Marx, added a few minutes of linking footage as well as a lot of boring and unconvincing narration, and waited for the audience to fork over its bucks. I am sure people who saw this movie back in 1976, even those that were kids, were really let down by this documentary. Don't join them.

I have watched many a bad movie, but never one in which there is no acting, or even dialogue spoken. This entire film is narrated, and is part of the old Bigfoot craze of the seventies, which includes such weird arse films as 'The Capture of Bigfoot', 'Creature of Black Lake', 'Legend of Boggy Creek' and 'Night of the Demon' (see that one now).

This one involves a tracker called Ivan and his wife Peggy starting off all sceptical about the old Bigfoot and eventually becoming fanatics about the whole thing. You get lots of footage of Ivan walking around, looking at bear corpses, watching Caribou get it on, and hiding in bushes knocking one out while watching Bigfoot wander around.

I can't give this one a bad marking because I could not take my eyes of the screen. This film is seriously strange. Wait until you see the bit with the squirrel being run over and the many, many questions that bit raises. Or the bit where the film goes back in time to a mining town where a Bigfoot appears, speaking in the voice of a dead woman. You don't get to see that, mind. The narrator just takes you through that, as he does with everything here.

Truly bizarre, and worth watching. I can't believe there are comments on here that actually allude to the authors being genuine Bigfoot hunters. That just adds to the madness.

Imagine an episode of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom only instead of Marlin Perkins narrating you have an obsessive tracker who sees signs of bigfoot in all of the wildlife on film. That obsessive tracker is Ivan Marx and this is "The Legend of Bigfoot" a fictional documentary about a man that follows leads of the legendary apeman throughout the Northwest United States, Canada and Alaska. To say that he becomes a little fanatical is putting it lightly. After Marx captures some very questionable footage of what appears to be a guy in a gorilla suit skipping through the woods while waltzing with an imaginary partner he begins his pursuit of more "documentation" by stalking the creature all over the country. Where does this guy get his money from. It had to cost quite a bit to travel from state to state looking for bigfoot even in the seventies. Maybe its all the money he saved on gas by driving his red Volkswagen bug everywhere. Yeah, nothing says outdoorsman quite like a V.W. bug. Dork. Once he gets to a new location every natural act performed by the animals gives him insight into the creature. Geese arrive. Bigfoot must be migratory. Moose mate in the woods. Bigfoot must hunt here. A squirrel gets run over by a Buick. Bigfoot must have ties to the United Autoworkers. If Marx stumbled across a Snickers wrapper he would probably assume that bigfoot works in a chocolate factory. There's some other supposed footage of bigfoot that are just as silly and also appear to be just some stooge in a suit. Suffice to say this was as convincing as "Harry and the Hendersons" as far as lending credibility of bigfoot existing somewhere in the Pacific Northwest or anywhere else for that matter. Rumor has it Bigfoot's lawyer served Marx with stalking papers and he's now not able to come within 500 yards of him. I have the video to prove it.

As any bigfoot movie aficionado can tell you there are two basic types of bigfoot movies. First, there are the purely narrative bigfoot flicks like the original "Bigfoot", "The Creature of Black Lake", "Shriek of the Mutilated" (kind of), the TV movie "Snowbeast", and the wonderfully gory "Night of the Demon" (you might also throw bigfoot-sex movies like "Beauties and the Beast" and "The Geek" in here as well). Then there are the bigfoot docudramas inspired by the seminal TV movie "Bigfoot- Monster or Myth" and the very successful theatrical film "The Legend of Boggy Creak". These latter movies combine supposedly real footage of bigfoot with "dramatic re-enactments" of supposed bigfoot encounters, along with often shameless amounts of padding. The regionally produced "Legend of Boggy Creek", for instance, contains lots of down-home Southern ballads and interviews with real, honest-to-god Southern "folk" which is often pretty peripheral to the bigfoot investigation. And "Sasquatch-the Legend of Bigfoot" and this movie, simply called "Legend of Bigfoot" have so much wildlife footage and cheesy voice-over narration, you often feel like you're the watching the old 1970's TV series "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom".

These bigfoot docudramas frankly have not aged very well. Even for people who still believe in bigfoot, they are kind of a gimmicky, phenomenon of their time like "The Blair Witch Project". If you are not a true bigfoot fan with fond childhood memories seeing these bigfoot flicks on the big and/or small screen, you will probably be pretty bored by any of these docudramas, but especially this one, which leaves out most of the drama until the very end. Personally though, I like to put this movie in the DVD player when I am very sleepy. I almost always fall asleep before they ever get to any of the bigfoot "footage", but I go to sleep bathed in the warm, gentle, nostalgic glow of bigfoot.