User reviews

A short (terrible) student film from the '60s is combined with some mid-'70s (also terrible) docudrama footage about Bigfoot and the result is this classic late-night insomniacs' favorite! The "monster" featured in the original flick is NOT Bigfoot, but rather some kind of mummy thing unearthed by a bunch of stupid teenagers digging in an Indian burial ground. A lot of very (unintentionally) funny dialogue and some of the worst acting ever committed to celluloid are highlights of the '60s footage, and make this sleep-inducing film worth watching.

A long-time standard on the tri-state area's WWOR tv, my friends and I first discovered this in the late seventies, and have been hooked since. Yes, it is every bit as wretched as you have heard, but it is simply so amazingly boring that it transcends it's own awfulness and becomes an object of perverse fascination! The endless stock footage of the logging industry that is meant to give insight into where Bigfoot hangs out, the bogus paper-mache monster at the beginning, the classroom full of obviously stoned (and bored) nonactors...I could go on and on. The thing that sends the movie into the nadir of bad movie hell is the point where it clearly turns into some unfinished zero-budgeter from the early sixties that features a Bigfoot that looks like some guy who covered himself in rubber cement and rolled around on a barbershop floor! My friends and I would tell our schoolmates about this for years, and we'd constantly hear "Aw,come on! No movie could be that bad!!!" Then they'd watch it and realize just how bad a movie can be. For years THE CURSE OF BIGFOOT stood as an excruciating rite of passage for bad movie buffs in Connecticut, but sadly it hasn't been seen on local TV since spring of '87. Thank God I taped it on that last night...Now I torture my unwary new friends with it. In fact, one of them summed it up thusly: "This isn't a movie. It's an endurance test!" It's still more entertaining than RAT RACE, though! But then again, so is jock itch...

THE CURSE OF BIGFOOT and TEENAGERS BATTLE THE THING are actually two different films. From what I can make out, TEENAGERS BATTLE THE THING was made in 1958. A VHS tape was released in 1997. It's in black and white and runs 60 minutes. I don't believe this version was ever released theatrically. THE CURSE OF BIGFOOT added newly-shot footage (some of it being needless padding) to the beginning and end of the film, leaving the TBTT footage basically intact in the middle. The new introductory scenes, shot over a decade later, use one of the actors from TBTT as a guest lecturer in a high school classroom. He recounts his amazing story of his encounter with Bigfoot. The TBTT scenes are then used as a flashback. Either version of the film is fun, although the new framing footage in BIGFOOT is a hilarious plus.

The Fields brothers... aka the "Flocker" brothers... Dave directed this thing, while james wrote the script. odd use of close-ups and wide shots. the "Team" goes rock climbing, and looks for the habitat of bigfoot. Ken Kloepler is "norman", who leads the team up the granite boulders. pretty lame all around. a mezza horror flick from the mid 1970s. story and acting are pretty inane, but we actually DO se the monster in this one, which was unusual for the time. filmed at vasquez rocks, north-east of Los Angeles. it's okay. not as bad as the ratings would indicate on imdb. lampooned on rifftrax. the summary says 59 minutes, but the version i saw was 1 hour 28 minutes. not so bad.

If you are a fan of drive-in movies, bad movies, camp, then then this movie is a MUST for your collection! This used to be shown on the Saturday Creature Features quite often and it must be seen to be believed. Plan 9 from Outer Space is Citizen Kane next to this film; it has it all: wooden acting, long long stretches of the "actors" walking through the forest (accompanied by a thrilling music score, as if something interesting is actually happening), a perfectly inane bigfoot costume, hilarious dialog. This was released in 1976 with new footage attached to an apparently older movie (mid 60's?)concerning some archaeological students disturbing an ancient desert tomb. They discover a mummy that comes to life as a bigfoot sort of creature! What is simply amazing is that they brought one of the actors from the older movie back to appear in the newer footage!! To this day my family jokes about having the urge for a bottle of pop!

Having grown up in Connecticut like a previous reviewer, I also underwent the late night initiation of this fun, campy "Curse of Bigfoot" film during the late 70s, "...over two million years ago...", so it seems.

And since then, "in the place of things", I've always held a perverse fascination with this humble little effort, perhaps now more so due to the classroom featured in the added 70s footage, culturally bearing striking resemblance to my classrooms during that era ( though the kids of the '63 footage looked like students appearing throughout my older siblings' yearbooks). It's an unusual and unique compilation, made interesting by the fact that an actor in the '63 footage was called again to appear in the newer footage 10-11 years later. Not even "They Saved Hitler's Brain", employing the same technique of combining old with new footage, had as much continuity and heart.

I respectfully digress with previous reviewers which regard "The Curse of Bigfoot" (a.k.a. Teenagers vs. the Thing") as displaying absolutely "no talent" behind its production! The compilation and blending of stock, Valentino production music used throughout the '63 footage is actually quite remarkable! A number of distinctive cues also appeared throughout other science fiction/horror films of the late 50s/early 60s era ("The Blob", "Terror from the Year 5000", etc.). But with "Curse of Bigfoot", in keeping with the southwestern setting of the story, the soundtrack editor's mix of "horror"/"suspense"/ "Indian"/"Prairie" cues is fantastic, and coordinated well with the action and scenery on the screen.

I wonder...I wonder ("young man!"), if this script used for the '63 footage, had originally began as a script for a radio program, and not designed by "some, - demented madman!" I strongly suspect the producers' main, prior experience was with radio shows. Anyone could follow this tale when only listening to it without actually watching it. It becomes an old time radio show.

Gosh, I could sure go for a bottle of pop. And a new deluxe edition of this classic film, cleaned, restored and released onto DVD.

"Curse of the Bigfoot: Or So You Want to Reconsider Becoming an Archaeologist" The Rifftrax comedians put it very succinctly: "This movie has more padding than a middle school locker room." The soundtrack has a very heavy responsibility, trying to create cinematic tension out of scenes of mind-numbing tedium; namely extended footage of people walking at a snail's pace, flatbed vehicles meandering through the countryside slower than a one-legged man hopping backwards, and people failing to make climbing rocks at a shallow incline look like a Herculean task. The only time anybody gets mauled in what is supposedly a horror movie, it all happens off-screen. This movie is punctuated by scenes of a teacher desperately trying to make cryptozoology sound fascinating to an uninterested high school class, and a guest speaker trying to pad his monotonous speech by using so many theatrical dramatic pauses, it would make William Shatner and Christopher Walken fall asleep. Also, it seems all B-rated monster movies portray experienced scientists as grizzled war veterans who snap at naive people like they have PTSD from their years gazing through microscopes and staring at mummies. Do all archaeologists carbon date the age of artifacts by simply looking at them, or just this dude? And the wooden acting? Rifftrax told it better here, too: "Sounds like a bunch of people being forced to act while their families are being held hostage." Oh, and there's an extended documentary of the logging industry for some barely-related reason. And was buying bottled soda back in the '50s seriously THAT complicated?

No, they don't show this one on late-night TV anymore, and it's a crying shame. If you can track a copy of this one down, buy it! Pay as much as anyone asks. Sell anything you own! No Bigfoot film enthusiast should miss this. It's better than "Night of the Demon."

One of the very worst of all the Bigfoot films, this one is a lot of fun--if it's your kind of thing. It was, as noted elsewhere, made in two sections, and is unique in that it features one main character who appears younger in the 60's footage, and older in the 70's footage. No aging makeup was necessary! The actor aged all by himself!

The Bigfoot costume appears to be made out of hair with a certain amount of twigs, nuts, and berries mixed in--it kind of resembles a heap of leaves someone has raked into a pile. Observe the ingenuity at work when the Bigfoot is set on fire--someone stuffed the suit full of newspapers or something, stuck it on a stake hammered into the ground, and attached wires to the arms, so that they could wave the arms about as the creature catches fire. And I'm sure they squirted a whole can of lighter fluid on the thing before they lit it, because it really flares up nicely. It appears to be smiling as it falls apart. Forget CG effects; trust me, this is cooler than anything!

One of my favorite scenes has the kids having a LONG discussion about how much change everyone gets back after bottles of soda, referred to as `pop,' are bought. It's all in the details--in this case, the profuse and unnecessary details. If you like movies as bad as you can get them, this one is for you.

Really good Sasquatch/Yeti movies are rarer than the legendary creatures themselves, Abominable (2006) being the only one I've seen that I would happily recommend to fellow horror fans (although 1980 gore-fest Night of the Demon is entertaining trash for those who enjoy a hefty dose of schlock). Up until today, I had The Legend of Bigfoot (1976) down as the worst example of the genre, but The Curse of Bigfoot is even more execrable—a dreadfully dull mish-mash of scenes from an old '50s flick clumsily edited together with newer footage from the '70s.

The film sees a group of teenage archaeology students discover the body of a mummified creature sealed in a cave for hundreds of thousands of years. The creature turns out to have been laying dormant for all that time, and wakes from its slumber to kill, leaving the students and local cops to try and lure the beast into the open so that they can set it on fire. With very little monster action, but lots of interminably dreary chit-chat and horribly wooden acting throughout, The Curse of Bigfoot makes other mediocre missing-link monster films like Shriek of the Mutilated (1974), The Werewolf and the Yeti (1975) and Snowbeast (1977) look like works of genius by comparison.

I can only sit here and wonder at what the people who appeared in this 'movie' are doing these days and whether they ever forgive themselves for participating in this festival of rancid vomit? Wiith that said...you've gotta watch it...it's one of the purest forms of rubbish I have ever seen...

Those Chiller Theater fans in Pittsburgh who stayed up for the special triple (as opposed to the usual double) feature on October 30 1976 were highly entertained by both "House of Frankenstein" and "House of Dracula." Ah, but the real Halloween 'trick' was this rickety home movie, shown in between the two Universal classics, which actually saw two repeat airings over the next 6 years (Aug 2 1980 and Jan 23 1982). With its classroom instructor discussing the shark in "Jaws," some of it at least appeared to be new, but by the time the flashbacks began, I noticed the late 50s vintage cars on display, and slowly began to realize that someone had decided to take an unreleasable 59 minute turkey of uncertain origin, add 29 minutes of 'new' footage, resulting in a full length feature that was truly a difficult sit. All I can say is that Larry Buchanan's Azaleas look like beloved works of art in comparison. The first half hour, set in a classroom, is interrupted by interminable stock footage of logging (!) and a slow crawl through the woods after a Bigfoot wannabe, seen for all of 10 seconds. Once the flashback begins, relating the original "Teenagers Battle the Thing," it fails to improve. By the time the excavation unearths an ancient mummy, it doesn't start walking until the last 23 minutes out of the 88 total, and is glimpsed for about 90 seconds (if that sounds like fun, be my guest). Bad movie buffs may find some entertainment value here, with no actual relation to Bigfoot (topical only during the 70s), I just hope that the updated version and additional footage did help the filmmakers turn a profit, since it has proved to be, in a sense, unforgettable, though for all the wrong reasons (just getting it shown must have been an achievement in itself).

User Comments: No talent, no direction, no rehearsing, no editing, no kidding (more)

they forgot no story no action no plot NO GOOD!

well, I've finally found it: the WORST movie ever made by far nothing else I've ever seen comes even remotely close

this movie is obscenely shamelessly insanely BAD!

The most hilarious thing about it is: twenty minutes OR MORE can go by where people are just climbing rocks or walking in lemon groves and the symphonic music sound-track rises and falls and rises to another climactic crescendo as if the most intense dramatic suspenseful action footage ever rendered is playing out on yer screen

BUT IT ISN'T BELIEVE ME

AS HOURS OF FOOTAGE OF BUSHES--OR PEOPLE WALKING... GO BY--THE SOUNDTRACK IS TRYING TO SAY "Suspense!--MIND WRENCHING, BUTT-CLENCHING Suspense!") :

stupidest dialog stupidest ending ever

I highly recommend it THIS you gotta see before you die (which event you will be longing for about five minutes in)

yes--paper mache' granny wig monster costume

with YES a ping pong ball with a hole in it as one of the eyes

and as soon as the monster sees a human he HAS to kill you

which he seems to accomplish by throwing his arms out to the side and falling on you

truly truly truly bad movie, folks

One of the funniest things (I thought):

they find an engraved stone--about two by two feet flat on the ground

they pry it up and there's a cave opening under it

so they get a rope and go down

and now it's a twenty by twenty foot opening

no explanation whatsoever

At some point in about 1962 a film was made which revolved around the misadventures of a group of high schoolers on a weekend field trip to Pahrump, Nevada searching for Indian artifacts. What they find is terror at the hands of an ancient mummy. Badly acted and shot poorly this film resembled a made-for-students travelogue. It moldered over the years as it sat unwatched and unappreciated in some vault somewhere. And then, like the Pahrump mummy it rose to terrorize us all again.

It would appear that the director of the previous footage asked the main player from that film to appear in the new film as his old character being asked to tell modern (70s) kids about his experiences with "The Great Man-Beast of North America," which he reluctantly does. The older film is used in its entirety as a flashback vehicle to the supposed Bigfoot encounter. But, of course the creature isn't a Bigfoot at all, it's just an Indian mummy.

This is a bizarre melange. Just for fun, check out the end of the film where all the students are standing around the bonfire, and note that they are all pretty much acting normally, then remember the words of Roger Mason, that, one of those students will have to spend the rest of her life in a mental institution!

Long live paper mache monsters!!