Curse of Bigfoot

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...

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.

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.

In the tradition of such celebrated anticlassics as THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN and VAMPIRE MEN OF THE LOST PLANET, this mongrel concoction haphazardly conjoins a barely released amateur monster movie of the early 60s(about a student archaeological field excavation besieged by a resurrected mummy monster) with a noticeably more recently filmed wraparound involving Sasquatch lore. The older material is modestly amusing in the praxis of regional horror schlock, but the add-on seems to be both a means of padding this garbage to fit TV time slots, as well as a feeble attempt to incorporate Bigfoot into the story(a wet squib topic highly marketable at the time).

A positively horrible Scotch tape and rubber-band mess, although the older part has a naive, campy charm...sadly, fate would decree its unfortunate metamorphosis as a component to this throwaway picture. 2.5/10

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...