Bigfoot

Well, that was the quote on my video box by someone from THE POST. So, judging by that rather anonymous endorsement, I knew I was in for a real treat. Not to mention the box artwork, which features a large, vaguely ape-like creature tossing a motorcycle (yay! a hybrid biker/monster flick!) Toss in John Carradine, and the blurb "America's abominable snowman... breeds with anything!", and you've got yourself an epoch du frommage. The uncomfortably long (and silent) travelling scenes, the paper mache sets, the unbelievably bad bigfoot makeup(or shall I say BigFEET?), the dinner-theatre-style acting, wonderfully inane script - all a testiment to the ultra-low budget that this "classic" drive-in flick flaunts in spades. Demands repeated viewings.

When pilot, Joi Landis (Joi Lansing) has engine trouble, she's forced to parachute into the deep woods. Unbeknownst to Joi, she's landed in BIGFOOT country, and is quickly abducted by the creature.

Simultaneously, a bunch of bikers have arrived, looking for a place to party.

Oh dear!

A bikini-clad biker babe is nabbed by the beast, after she and her boyfriend disturb a yeti burial mound! We soon discover that there's a whole tribe of bigfoots -bigfeet?- and they're looking for love! Can the bikers, along with a local junk dealer named Jasper (John Carradine) rescue the women before the hairy horrors do the unthinkable?

THIS MOVIE CONTAINS: #1- Sex-starved sasquatches! #2- A biker called "Dum Dum"! #3- A lackadaisical bigfoot vs. Bear battle! #4- Ms. Lansing running around in her awesome outfit! #5- A forest ranger played by none other than intergalactic omni-star, Doodles Weaver! #6- Awe-inspiring bigfoot costumes (aka: men dressed as goggle-eyed piles of lint)! Toss in some twangy music, complete with bongo drums, and you know you're watching a divine spectacle!

EXTRA POINTS IF: You can count how many times Ms. Lansing screams her beautiful head off!...

There's a vastly superior movie out there called The Ninth Configuration, written and directed by William Peter Blatty. In that movie about an insane asylum dwells a character named Frankie Reno who feels compelled to do an all dog production of Shakespeare. Now, should Frankie ever film the fruits of his labor, I'm convinced it would yield a better movie than Bigfoot.

We're talking about a film whose production appears to consists of "whatever can fit in the back of a pickup truck" filmed at what I'm assuming was a breakneck pace to get a product in the can and distributed to America's drive-in theaters (maybe 'drive-thru' is a more appropriate term.) What I'm trying to say is, I hope minimal time and resources were dedicated to this movie because the technical merits are so abysmal that the clearly deteriorating print from which the incorrectly framed DVD was made may actually be an improvement to the original projection over 30 years ago. I wish I were exaggerating.

Seriously, it defeats the purpose of a serious critical analysis (want proof, check out the cheesy DVD cover art). Instead, dear reader, I present the "fun" aspect of Bigfoot.

I enjoyed how Joi Lansing piloted a plane that, not surprisingly, crashes … but not before a leisurely conversation with air traffic control while grips stand outside the obviously grounded plane and shake it back and forth to simulate mid-air turbulence. I giggled with condescending glee seeing this pilot parachute out, descend, and then cut to her on the ground wrapping up her chute (my guess is the budget couldn't afford the ladder to simulate a landing.)

Let's not forget the masterful camera-work of the motorcycle gang riding through the woods – shots designed to instill an uneasy, slightly nauseating sensation, by vigorously shaking the frame as if … as if … the cameraman was sitting in the bed of a truck that had no shocks! And there's a brilliant moment in the "party" montage where it looked like someone dropped the camera.

What brilliant economical editing too! Why show the plane taking off? Crashing? Or Joi landing? And the quick cuts showing the editorial equivalent of nothing to show the plane going down (I guess).

Oh, and when Bigfoot's henchmen (littlefoots?) kidnap the pilot and the bikini-clad girl (what's her name?) – these two women are tied to barely visible saplings, so their surprisingly calm conversation comes across as two high-school broads hanging around the cafeteria gossiping. "So, which of the furry guys who kidnapped us do you think is the cutest?" Wait, it gets better, the bikini clad-babe (maybe it was the pilot in her … whatever the hell that outfit's supposed to be) gives us a quasi-scientific run down of what these creatures are.

A little bit later, glorified monkeys checkmate the rescue party in a battle of wits, the rescue party is tied to saplings next to the girls where they all uncannily resemble disgruntled company lay-offs waiting in line at a soup kitchen.

How 'bout John Carradine's car which the hare could outrun even if the tortoise gave him cement shoes and broke his legs. What am I saying? The tortoise could take an ice-pick to the hare, push the corpse down a hill and the dead body could outrun that car (not to mention require less maintenance to keep running.) Speaking of John Carradine, I hope you like ham and cheese with your turkey.

And I learned a very valuable lesson from Bigfoot: contrary to popular myth, dynamite does not actually require a fuse. It only requires a moron to throw it and boom!

I have a theory that films like Bigfoot are made as a self-help tool to make suicidal filmmakers feel better about their work. Even the most talentless hacks can watch it with the comfort of knowing, "well, I can do better than that. Maybe life is worth living."

My dad had a pair of Cinemacanica 35mm projectors and he bought this film. If he paid more than a nickel for it he was over charged. Then again, this movie was so bad that he decreed that if my brothers or myself acted out of line, then the perpetrator would be sentenced to watch this film.

Needless to say I watched this film many times and my father wore out the print. Maybe he did get his money's worth out of it. Heck! I bet my dad would gladly have paid a thousand dollars for this as much as he made me watch it.

By the way, this movie caused terrible trauma for me. I've never been able to watch another movie with Christopher Mitchum. He has to be the worst actor of all time.

If you list John Carradine's films in order of IMDb rating, Bigfoot ranks second to last. This is a guy who starred in films titled Hillbillys in a Haunted House, Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, Vampire Hookers, Satan's Cheerleaders and Sex Kittens Go to College, among many, many others. A gaggle of sasquatches are out looking for women to mate with in this extremely low budget flick that looks like it was filmed on spare sets from Hee Haw. John Carradine is the biggest star, but you also have big breasted Joi Lansing and two kids of famous Hollywood actors, Chris Mitchum and Lindsay Crosby. Robert Mitchum's brother, John, is also in it. Oh, and Jerry Marren, aka the green-shirted Munchkin from the Lollipop Guild (as well as, I believe, the only Munchkin who survives to this day) dons the costume of the child bigfoot. Anyway, a biker chick and a downed female pilot get captured by bigfeet, and Carradine and his bud John Mitchum join the gang, hoping to make money by capturing a live bigfoot. This is really cruddy, and pretty boring. It's rated at a dismal 1.4 on IMDb. I laughed at it enough, and it's short enough, where I'll rate it a tad higher. After all, the awesome poster of this film has decorated my wall for a few years ago (with the tagline "breeds with anything..."). This was the first time I ever watched an entire film on Youtube. That's certainly not preferable (a drive-in would be ideal), but it was the only way to see it.