Peter Graves sonorously narrates Sunn Classics uproarious Bigfoot documentary with all of the authority of Captain Crunch. The film is best remembered in my circle for a genuinely hair raising segment where Bigfoot rummages through the belongings of a group of "Boy Scouts" out camping without adult supervision. Attention is also given to the Loch Ness Monster and indeed, Graves is able to conclude with authority that it is a population of aquatic dinosaurs who have somehow escaped the ravages of time. He also concludes that Bigfoot is actually a population of 200 or more bipedal creatures who exist at one with nature, and have only come to our attention as mankind has cruelly encroached on their habitat with all our unwelcome riot & clamor.
The same approach is found in Sunn Classic's "In Search of Noah's Ark", which taught us that the Ark split in two and rests half submerged in a glacier on Mount Ararat, just waiting for earnest Christians to free it from the ice. Sunn's "The Lincoln Conspiracy" also finds in favor of a complex conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln centered around super spy / traitor Union Colonel Lafayette Baker, who would have made Oliver Stone blush with embarrassment for his ham-fisted script for "JFK". And the overlooked "The Bermuda Triangle", which posits with authority that ships, airplanes and whole civilizations have been sucked into the very bowels of the Earth itself by a misfired Atlantean particle beam accelerator, lost somewhere off the coast of Bimini.
The films are classic Americana, made with working class families who went to the movies two or three times a year in mind, demanding otherwise wholesome G-rated fare suitable for all-ages and fueled by a bizarre zeal to have it all be true even when flying in the face of common sense. "Mysterious Monsters" succeeds admirably, cashing in early on the Bigfoot craze that even "The Six Million Dollar Man" got caught up in and demanding our acceptance by appealing to our conscience rather than science. Forty years later there's still no hide or bones to study and it's to my personal disappointment that garbage films like this sort of got shoved under the carpet as people realized how stupid it all was. It is the right of earlier eras to be as slack-jawed and backward as they like. I for one marvel at garbage such as this film, celebrating with forthright authority man's unending quest to sucker each other out of a couple dollars — In this case, movie tickets, and it worked brilliantly. These movies all made gobs of money with almost nothing up front, though don't sell the talents of the filmmakers short. They knew exactly what they were doing just like the guy at the carnival sideshow knows what he is doing. It's called show business.
The results are actually highly entertaining, the one slow spot in the film being a sequence where a "psychiatrist" is shown "hypnotizing" his "patient", who relates a tale so filled with mystery as to sound not just poorly scripted, but unrehearsed. Yet that's half the fun. Not just marveling at how bad, dumb or outrageously idiotic the movie is, but in knowing that it was the best they could manage under the circumstances. Which means there's hope for the rest of us, or at least those of us who refuse to stop believing in Bigfoot and the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs or "Ancient Aliens". Take your pick, spark up and just enjoy being smarter than the dimwits who paid money to see this, ate it up whole, and went home wanting more. Now that's funny.
