Curse of Bigfoot

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.

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!!

My brother and I also enjoyed making fun of how bad this film was back when channel 9 showed it every two months or so in the mid to late seventies. Remember the incredible delivery of the girl talking to her dog, reminiscent of that "What? Sandwiches again?" commercial about learning to drive a tractor-trailer? I mainly recall the moment when they pull the plate covering the ancient tomb off and gas spurts out, with the leader of the expedition a full thirty seconds later surmising that the gas might be coming from a hole. I wonder if that scene was in any way an inspiration for Steven Spielberg in the equivalent scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" when ... never mind.

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...

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.