The Legend of Bigfoot

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.

Tracker Ivan Marx, who stars in and narrates The Legend of Bigfoot, purports this to be an authentic documentary on the search for Bigfoot, one that offers incontrovertible evidence of the creature's existence. Is his claim sincere? I doubt it, the supposedly genuine footage of Sasquatch being far from convincing. But even if if this is a bona fide attempt at proving the legend of Bigfoot to be true, the fact remains that it is a crushing bore, consisting primarily of crappy hand-held wildlife footage accompanied by Marx's terrible Disney-style voice-over.

As Marx's investigation leads him North to the supposed Bigfoot breeding ground in the Arctic Circle, viewers get to enjoy nature movie-making its most banal—young coyotes meddling with a skunk, ground squirrels in love, moose mating rituals—while the presenter prattles on about survival of the fittest and animal migration patterns. Marx also caters for history buffs, giving a brief lesson on ancient tribal art and the gold rush in the Yukon. Sadly, those looking forward to his 'unchallengable proof' of Bigfoot will be left seriously wanting, the film's only footage of the creature being a few minutes of shaky film, shot from a distance, of what could easily be a man in a gorilla fancy dress costume.

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.

This movie is about 90% stock footage of animals with a really dull voice-over talking about Bigfoot. If I had a dollar for every time he said the name "Bigfoot" throughout this 92 minutes of coma inducing stock footage, I could take it and buy a decent movie. I like cheesy movies, but this isn't even remotely entertaining. By the one hour mark you will be praying for the sweet release of death. It took me not once, not twice but THREE different times before I could manage to watch this stinker all the way through. It became a challenge or a quest if you will, to watch this movie until the end without turning it off. At one point we are treated to a guy in a really cheap, and I do mean cheap suit hobbling around as a "wounded" Bigfoot. At the end of the movie (yay!!!) we get to see another shot of a guy in a suit splashing around in some water along with a young Bigfoot nearby. I was shocked and amazed that this was actually marketed as authentic footage back in 1976! Anybody that would believe this was actual footage of an undocumented, bipedal primate needs to get some serious help. If you want to waste 90 minutes of your life just save your dollar (thats what I paid) and go sit down outside and watch a blade of grass grow for that amount of time.

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.