The Legend of Bigfoot

As any bigfoot movie aficionado can tell you there are two basic types of bigfoot movies. First, there are the purely narrative bigfoot flicks like the original "Bigfoot", "The Creature of Black Lake", "Shriek of the Mutilated" (kind of), the TV movie "Snowbeast", and the wonderfully gory "Night of the Demon" (you might also throw bigfoot-sex movies like "Beauties and the Beast" and "The Geek" in here as well). Then there are the bigfoot docudramas inspired by the seminal TV movie "Bigfoot- Monster or Myth" and the very successful theatrical film "The Legend of Boggy Creak". These latter movies combine supposedly real footage of bigfoot with "dramatic re-enactments" of supposed bigfoot encounters, along with often shameless amounts of padding. The regionally produced "Legend of Boggy Creek", for instance, contains lots of down-home Southern ballads and interviews with real, honest-to-god Southern "folk" which is often pretty peripheral to the bigfoot investigation. And "Sasquatch-the Legend of Bigfoot" and this movie, simply called "Legend of Bigfoot" have so much wildlife footage and cheesy voice-over narration, you often feel like you're the watching the old 1970's TV series "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom".

These bigfoot docudramas frankly have not aged very well. Even for people who still believe in bigfoot, they are kind of a gimmicky, phenomenon of their time like "The Blair Witch Project". If you are not a true bigfoot fan with fond childhood memories seeing these bigfoot flicks on the big and/or small screen, you will probably be pretty bored by any of these docudramas, but especially this one, which leaves out most of the drama until the very end. Personally though, I like to put this movie in the DVD player when I am very sleepy. I almost always fall asleep before they ever get to any of the bigfoot "footage", but I go to sleep bathed in the warm, gentle, nostalgic glow of bigfoot.

This movie is about 90% stock footage of animals with a really dull voice-over talking about Bigfoot. If I had a dollar for every time he said the name "Bigfoot" throughout this 92 minutes of coma inducing stock footage, I could take it and buy a decent movie. I like cheesy movies, but this isn't even remotely entertaining. By the one hour mark you will be praying for the sweet release of death. It took me not once, not twice but THREE different times before I could manage to watch this stinker all the way through. It became a challenge or a quest if you will, to watch this movie until the end without turning it off. At one point we are treated to a guy in a really cheap, and I do mean cheap suit hobbling around as a "wounded" Bigfoot. At the end of the movie (yay!!!) we get to see another shot of a guy in a suit splashing around in some water along with a young Bigfoot nearby. I was shocked and amazed that this was actually marketed as authentic footage back in 1976! Anybody that would believe this was actual footage of an undocumented, bipedal primate needs to get some serious help. If you want to waste 90 minutes of your life just save your dollar (thats what I paid) and go sit down outside and watch a blade of grass grow for that amount of time.

Imagine an episode of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom only instead of Marlin Perkins narrating you have an obsessive tracker who sees signs of bigfoot in all of the wildlife on film. That obsessive tracker is Ivan Marx and this is "The Legend of Bigfoot" a fictional documentary about a man that follows leads of the legendary apeman throughout the Northwest United States, Canada and Alaska. To say that he becomes a little fanatical is putting it lightly. After Marx captures some very questionable footage of what appears to be a guy in a gorilla suit skipping through the woods while waltzing with an imaginary partner he begins his pursuit of more "documentation" by stalking the creature all over the country. Where does this guy get his money from. It had to cost quite a bit to travel from state to state looking for bigfoot even in the seventies. Maybe its all the money he saved on gas by driving his red Volkswagen bug everywhere. Yeah, nothing says outdoorsman quite like a V.W. bug. Dork. Once he gets to a new location every natural act performed by the animals gives him insight into the creature. Geese arrive. Bigfoot must be migratory. Moose mate in the woods. Bigfoot must hunt here. A squirrel gets run over by a Buick. Bigfoot must have ties to the United Autoworkers. If Marx stumbled across a Snickers wrapper he would probably assume that bigfoot works in a chocolate factory. There's some other supposed footage of bigfoot that are just as silly and also appear to be just some stooge in a suit. Suffice to say this was as convincing as "Harry and the Hendersons" as far as lending credibility of bigfoot existing somewhere in the Pacific Northwest or anywhere else for that matter. Rumor has it Bigfoot's lawyer served Marx with stalking papers and he's now not able to come within 500 yards of him. I have the video to prove it.

Tracker Ivan Marx, who stars in and narrates The Legend of Bigfoot, purports this to be an authentic documentary on the search for Bigfoot, one that offers incontrovertible evidence of the creature's existence. Is his claim sincere? I doubt it, the supposedly genuine footage of Sasquatch being far from convincing. But even if if this is a bona fide attempt at proving the legend of Bigfoot to be true, the fact remains that it is a crushing bore, consisting primarily of crappy hand-held wildlife footage accompanied by Marx's terrible Disney-style voice-over.

As Marx's investigation leads him North to the supposed Bigfoot breeding ground in the Arctic Circle, viewers get to enjoy nature movie-making its most banal—young coyotes meddling with a skunk, ground squirrels in love, moose mating rituals—while the presenter prattles on about survival of the fittest and animal migration patterns. Marx also caters for history buffs, giving a brief lesson on ancient tribal art and the gold rush in the Yukon. Sadly, those looking forward to his 'unchallengable proof' of Bigfoot will be left seriously wanting, the film's only footage of the creature being a few minutes of shaky film, shot from a distance, of what could easily be a man in a gorilla fancy dress costume.

I got this film in the Mill Creek Drive-in 50-pack film collection. This is not a grand documentary but there is something fun about it to watch. What makes this film enjoyable is the narrator believe it or not.

Our narrator is very enthusiastic and narrates the story well. Believe it or not he is the highlight of this film. Almost comical to listen to him because he sounds overly crazy about finding Bigfoot but it's good!

This documentary has a lot of stock-footage and older photos as well as some quirky dramatization footage. There is some historical information about society and bit of information of historical information of Bigfoot (to take with the grain of salt).

If you are remotely interested in Bigfoot then I would recommend this film. It is actually entertaining.

5/10