The Legend of Bigfoot

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.

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.

I got this film in the Mill Creek Drive-in 50-pack film collection. This is not a grand documentary but there is something fun about it to watch. What makes this film enjoyable is the narrator believe it or not.

Our narrator is very enthusiastic and narrates the story well. Believe it or not he is the highlight of this film. Almost comical to listen to him because he sounds overly crazy about finding Bigfoot but it's good!

This documentary has a lot of stock-footage and older photos as well as some quirky dramatization footage. There is some historical information about society and bit of information of historical information of Bigfoot (to take with the grain of salt).

If you are remotely interested in Bigfoot then I would recommend this film. It is actually entertaining.

5/10

This weird hybrid of nature footage, first-person narrative and fictive content is unimaginable as a theatrical release today--but such oddball packages (mostly from "Sunn Classics"), and many Bigfoot-themed features, managed to get fairly wide release in the 70s.

People dislike this cuz it's mostly the narrator's phony reminiscences (re-enacted on screen as if they were shot while happening) of his career as a naturist eventually obsessed with that rarest of alleged critters, Bigfoot. We only glimpse the latter in climactic footage of what very much looks like a tall guy in an ape suit. (The famous raw footage of an alleged Bigfoot is much more convincing, if not entirely so.) It's like an especially crudely-crafted episode of "Wild Kingdom," plus a couple actors in fuzzy focus and hairy suits.

This is an oddity, but hardly a fascinating one. Indeed, it's a bit of a slog, with no real payoff. There are better Bigfoot movies. If that's what you're into.

...I mean, empirically, this film is a disaster- grainy stock footage, utterly no useful information about the Bigfoot legend, oddly tangential narration...but my fiancée and I had an absolutely great time watching the thing. It's utterly bazonko portrait of a cranky, loony obsessive old coot making the most tenuous points in pursuit of his lifelong obsession is worthy of the full-on MST3k treatment. I mean, sure, they've already done the Bigfoot-y 'Legend of Boggy Creek 2', but this 'documentary' offers comic possibilities aplenty. There's the 'critchety old man' angle, the 'discursive, seemingly completely-unrelated stock footage to fill up running time' thread. The possibilities are endless. This came included with one of the invaluable Mill Creek 50 Movie value packs, and, if the other 49 films included turn out to be total nothings, I feel like I'll have gotten my money's worth on this one alone. I'll give it a '4', just because we're walking around with big, goofy smiles right now...