The Legend of Bigfoot

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.

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.

...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...

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.

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.