Bigfoot: Man or Beast? (1975) & The Mysterious Monsters (1976) & Manbeast! Myth or Monster? (1978)

          Notwithstanding the drive-in hit The Legend of Boggy Creek(1972), a fictional feature shamelessly marketed as a documentary, the entertaining cycle of nonfiction films exploring a certain mythical creature commenced with 1975’s Bigfoot: Man or Beast? Comprising simple reportage following Sasquatch enthusiast Robert W. Morgan as he searches the wilderness for signs of his elusive quarry, Bigfoot is rational but sluggish, mostly because Morgan lacks dynamism. Short, muscular, intense, and bald except for a jet-black goatee, Morgan affects a tough-guy persona complete with strident speeches about how the scientific community’s skepticism makes him “mad as hell.” As Bigfoot trudges along, writer-director Lawrence Crowley features interviews with people who claim to have seen creatures in the woods, plus long scenes of Morgan hiking through forests.

          Although Crowley never gooses the movie with fabricated scenes, he devotes considerable screen time to the infamous “Patterson footage” of an alleged California sighting; similarly, Crowley doesn’t challenge people who say things like, “If this footprint was faked, the person doing it had to be an absolute expert in human anatomy.” During the underwhelming climax, Morgan and TV actor Sam Melville (The Rookies) travel to a spot where a Bigfoot sighting is anticipated, but then a forest fire erupts and, according to Morgan, drives Sasquatch into another area. Convenient!

          The year after Crowley’s picture was released, the ’70s Bigfoot craze peaked. During 1976, Bigfoot was featured in a classic two-part episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, plus several movies—two of which, Harry Winer’s The Legend of Bigfoot and Ed Ragozzino’s Sasquatch, the Legend of the Bigfoot, were bogusly marketed as documentaries, Boggy Creek-style.

          Also in 1976, Mission: Impossible star Peter Graves hosted a feature-length doc titled The Mysterious Monsters. This one comes, naturally, from the titans of pseudoscientific docudrama, Sunn Classic Pictures. Essentially a filmed news report in the you-are-there vein, with Graves playing the role of an intrepid investigator, The Mysterious Monsters includes several vivid re-creations of Bigfoot sightings. Using performers in frightening Bigfoot costumes, writer-director Robert Guenette stages various spooky scenes; one vignette features a group of Boy Scouts sleeping in the woods until noises wake them, at which point the boys discover a hirsute intruder in their midst. Guenette crams a lot of data into 90 minutes, with Graves dramatically grouping eyewitness sightings, footprints, hair samples, and the like as “exhibits” proving Bigfoot’s existence. In a clever touch, Guenette grounds his argument by citing various modern discoveries that upended common beliefs (for example, the Komodo dragon), but the film’s logic strains when Guenette spends about 15 minutes “proving” the existence of the Loch Ness Monster.

          Nonetheless, the picture is so lively that it’s easy to go along for the facts-be-damned ride. At one point, Graves takes a box containing a plaster cast of a Sasqautch footprint to—well, let’s let him explain it. “I went to Peter Herkos, the world’s foremost psychic detective, at his home in Los Angeles,” Graves says, gravely. Then, once Herkos is holding the box, Graves asks: ”Can you psychometrize what is in here and tell me something about it?” So, while The Mysterious Monsters may not be defensible as journalism, it’s tremendous fun as a cheesy thriller.

          Bigfoot’s popularity continued in 1977—the creature returned to The Six Million Dollar Man and starred in his own Saturday-morning kiddie show, Bigfoot and Wildboy—but Sasquatch’s stardom began to dim in 1978, when yet another “documentary” was released. Discarding all pretense of truthfulness, Manbeast! Myth or Monster? features the usual inventory of creature sightings, framed by scenes of a narrator/host “leading” the inquiry. Considering that writer-director Nicholas Webster obviously scripted every line—the actors aren’t good enough to create verisimilitude—the movie feels pointless and tacky from start to finish. Hollywood makeup artist Rob Bottin (who later worked on John Carpenter’s The Thing) created elaborate Bigfoot costumes for vignettes of creatures hanging out in the forest, running from pursuers, and scaring those who stumble upon them. Whereas The Mysterious Monsters used this gimmick in moderation, however, Manbeast! shows its creatures far too often—so despite Webster’s low angles and moody lighting, the film somehow manages to make Bigfoot boring.

Bigfoot: Man or Beast: FUNKY

The Mysterious Monsters: GROOVY

Manbeast! Myth or Monster?: LAME

Snowbeast (1977)

          Bigfoot was so ubiquitous in mid-’70s pop culture, you can’t blame the guy for wanting to take a vacation. So instead of thumping around the forests of the Pacific Northwest, as he did in countless movies and TV shows during this period, the Artist Sometimes Known as Sasquatch spends Snowbeast chilling at a ski resort. Made for TV and running a brisk 86 minutes, this low-budget thriller boasts a coherent script by Joseph Stefano (who, in better times, wrote Psycho for Alfred Hitchcock), and features a handful of competent actors who keep things lively. Robert Logan, star of the Wilderness Family movies, plays Tony, the manager of a Colorado ski resort owned by his tough grandmother, Carrie (Sylvia Sidney). When a terrified skier reports an attack by a mysterious creature on a ski slope, Carrie (in true Jaws rip-off fashion) demands the incident be kept quiet so panic doesn’t derail the resort’s upcoming winter carnival. Tony starts to investigate the attack, but he’s distracted by the arrival of one-time Olympic skiing champ Gar (Bo Svenson) and Gar’s wife, investigative reporter Ellen (Yvette Mimieux). Cue the psychodrama!

          It turns out Tony once dated Ellen, and Gar has been gun-shy about skiing since his Olympic success. So, in addition to the usual business of a monster attack every 10 minutes or so and semi-suspenseful scenes of Our Heroes snowmobiling around the woods and looking for Bigfoot, Snowbeast features the type of contrived character interplay one usually finds in Irwin Allen disaster movies. The sheer number or events in Stefano’s script sorta makes up for the film’s lack of genuine terror, and even though Snowbeastfeels padded—a sequence of Mimieux snooping around the woods goes on far too long—Snowbeast basically delivers the B-movie goods by introducing archetypal characters and then keeping the audience guessing about who will survive. The monster stuff is disappointing, of course, but director Herb Wallerstein wisely limits our glimpses of the titular critter to flashes of claws and feet, plus one or two split-second peeks at the creature’s hairy face. This is cheesy stuff, without question, but by the low standards of ’70s Bigfoot cinema, Snowbeast is fairly entertaining.

Snowbeast: FUNKY

Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot (1977)

By using documentary-style elements such as a narration track filled with facts and figures, plus a linear storyline tracking the drudgery of a scientific exploration (think Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom), executive producer/story author Ronald D. Olson creates an immersive but unpersuasive illusion that Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot is a re-creation of something that actually happened. Presumably, this fakery was used to obfuscate the paucity of, for lack of a better word, “money shots”—Sasquatch only has about 10 minutes of screen time in the entire picture, most of it in flashbacks that Olson uses to illustrate old stories the movie’s characters share with each other while sitting around campfires. The bulk of this picture comprises dull footage of explorers venturing into the wilds of British Columbia to search for Bigfoot. Supervised by scientist Chuck Evans (George Lauris), the group of explorers includes such clichéd types as a gruff mountain man, a skeptical big-city reporter, and a stoic Native American. After meandering through pointless interludes—frolicking with raccoons, tussling with mountain lions—the group reaches a valley believed to be Sasquatch’s lair. Then, in the final scenes, the explorers set up surveillance equipment around the valley and endure a nighttime assault by an unknown number of creatures. Director Ed Ragozzino relies on quick cutting and silhouettes to create a low-grade sense of danger, and composer Al Capps provides a Jaws-style motif that rumbles on the soundtrack whenever Bigfoot appears. (The monster is primarily depicted through point-of-view shots, another rip-off from Jaws.) Getting to the climax requires a great deal of stamina on the viewer’s part, and the payoff isn’t nearly worth the trouble—because by the time the picture concludes with a silly theme song (“There in God’s country, he just wants to be left alone”), mediocrity has given way to monotony.

Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot: LAME

Shriek of the Mutilated (1974)

Ostensibly a Bigfoot flick but really just a psycho-killer/Satanic-cult gorefest made in the trashy Herschell Gordon Lewis style, Shriek of the Mutilated is completely devoid of redeeming qualities. The acting is atrocious, the storyline is moronic, and the thrills are nonexistent. The picture even fails as an excessive splatter movie, because the special makeup effects are amateurish. Following a few random vignettes that get the movie off to a disjointed, uninteresting start, the story proper begins when college professor Dr. Ernst Prell (Alan Brock) organizes a group of students for an expedition into the woods where a Yeti has allegedly been sighted. (Why a Yeti and not just Bigfoot, since the picture is set in America rather than Asia?) Prell loads a group of bland young adults into a van and schleps them to the remote home of his colleague, Dr. Karl Werner (Tawm Ellis). Karl’s a strange cat who’s balding on top but wears a graying ponytail, and he favors creepy ensembles of turtlenecks and way-too-tight pants. He’s also prone to florid lines like, “Your Yeti waits for you still, Ernst.” Before long, the college students start getting killed during attacks by a “monster” who’s really just a dude wearing a gorilla suit that seems like it’s made out of white shag carpeting, some pasty makeup, and a pair of dime-store Dracula fangs. It turns out the doctors are actually cultists who lure students to the woods, dress up like Yetis to scare them, and then kill the students for pagan rituals. This plot “justifies” close-ups of decapitated heads and dismembered limbs, none of which have any shock value—more like schlock value. Literally the only amusing moment in the whole movie is the scene during which one of the college students sits at the piano and croons a ditty he’s written about the situation: “On the prowl, hear him howl, here comes the Yeti now!”

Shriek of the Mutilated: SQUARE

The Capture of Bigfoot (1979)

Fungus scraped off the bottom of the Sasquatch-cinema barrel, The Capture of Bigfoot is a no-budget dud in which the redneck denizens of a small, snow-shrouded town blame a string of murders on something called “The Legendary Creature of Arak,” a white-haired Bigfoot/Yeti/whatever rumored by Native Americans to haunt the mountains surrounding the town. During this interminable movie, scheming entrepreneurs attempt to capture the monster for purposes of financial exploitation, while police officers try to determine whether the killings are the work of man or beast. Badly acted, incompetently filmed, lazily edited, and padded with meandering bits like pointless party scenes and unfunny “comedy” vignettes, this is one of those grade-Z creature features that only contains about 10 minutes of actual monster action, so trudging through the flick’s entire 92-minute sprawl is a monotonous chore none but the masochistic should attempt. Toward the end of the picture, once “The Legendary Creature of Arak” is finally captured, he/it is revealed to be a neatly groomed giant with a smooth white coat, a pointy head, and a scowling orange face; closely resembling the ridiculous “Mugatu” alien from the original Star Trek series, this critter ain’t the most formidable of beasties. Plus, the monster turns out to be quasi-benevolent, which makes all the previous scenes depicting the creature as a savage killer seem nonsensical in retrospect. And so it goes for the rest of this abomination, which offers nothing in the way of amusement, entertainment, novelty, or thrills.

The Capture of Bigfoot: SQUARE

Bigfoot (1970)

          My vote for the weirdest of the myriad ’70s movies about Sasquatch, this no-budget oddity transforms everyone’s favorite Pacific Northwest man-beast into an old-fashioned movie monster in the King Kong mold. When the disjointed flick begins, fast-talking drifter Jasper B. Hawks (John Carradine) drives through a forest with his idiot sidekick, Elmer Briggs (John Mitchum), while big-breasted blonde Joi (Joi Lansing) flies a small plane over the same area. Joi’s engine conks out, so she parachutes to safety. Arriving on the ground, she strips out of her flight suit into a mini-dress (!) and screams because Bigfoot has emerged from the woods to attack her. Then laconic biker Rick (Christopher Mitchum) rolls into the woods with his curvaceous girlfriend, Chris (Judy Jordan), who for no good reason is wearing a bikini (!). She stumbles onto a Bigfoot burial ground, and then screams because Bigfoot has emerged from the woods to attack her, too. Because, of course, smooth-skinned white chicks make Bigfoot’s blood boil.

          Rick seeks help, but only Jasper (remember him?) believes his story; Jasper offers aid because he plans to capture a Bigfoot for freak-show exhibition. Meanwhile, Peggy—still wearing her swimsuit and, of course, sporting perfect hair and makeup—wakes up tied to a tree beside Joi, who also has perfect hair and makeup. They’re being watched by three Bigfoot creatures (portrayed by actors in ridiculous monkey suits), so Joi and Peggy scream some more. Then Jasper, Elmer, and Rick trek through the woods, bickering all the way, until they reach the Bigfoot lair. Before long, more people get tied to stakes, more people scream, and Rick’s gang of hog-riding biker buddies arrives for a big brawl with a bunch of Bigfoot creatures. Oh, and it turns out the monsters who’ve been guarding the women are the hairy brides/sisters/whatever of the real Bigfoot, a giant ape-like dude.

          Bigfoot is a truly awful movie, combining a doofus storyline with shoddy production values and terrible acting, but it’s arresting in a fever-dream sort of way. Carradine’s supposed to be a formidable big-game hunter, but he’s an arthritic, emaciated senior dressed in a suit and tie. Christopher Mitchum, the son of screen legend Robert Mitchum, is supposed to be a tough-guy biker, but he’s a passive nebbish who politely refers to Carradine’s character as “Mr. Hawks.” Jordan and Lansing are so outrageously curvy—and so nonsensically underdressed—that their scenes feel as if they were guest-directed by Russ Meyer. The movie toggles back and forth between second-unit location shots showing actors full-figure from a distance and cheesy soundstage footage with the principal cast in close-up, so it’s like the flick drifts in and out of reality. Bigfoot creatures get more screen time here than in virtually any other ‘70s Sasquatch movie, which is not a good thing—prolonged exposure highlights the bad costumes. And we haven’t even talked about the upbeat honky-tonk music that plays during suspense scenes, or the incongruous surf-music cue that appears whenever the bikers are shown driving. Oh, and at one point, a lady Bigfoot wrestles a bear.

Bigfoot: FREAKY

The Legend of Bigfoot (1976)

          A certain shambling man-beast with oversized lower extremities was so prevalent in ’70s pop culture that he permeated not only fiction and nonfiction films, but also sensationalistic schlockumentaries that combined fabrications with facts. For instance, The Legend of Bigfootpurports to contain real footage of a Sasquatch, but the footage is so obviously juiced that only the most gullible viewers could be swayed. Presuming, of course, that anyviewers can stay awake long enough to see the money shots. Overall, The Legend of Bigfoot is a tedious compendium of G-rated animal sequences, tied together with florid narration by the man who shot the images, Ivan Marx. Marx explains that he was working as an animal-control specialist when he started hearing rumors about Sasquatch sightings. He then spent months trying to find the elusive monster. So, about 25 minutes into this interminable record of his search, Marx includes a blurry shot of a silhouetted shape moving behind a tree line.

          Emboldened to get an even closer look, Marx keeps investigating, eventually becoming annoyed at his own lack of results. Thus, we’re treated to the following petulant voiceover: “I took a job up in the wilderness near Vosburg, Washington. I had to photograph a cinnamon bear in its natural habitat. You want a bear? Here’s a bear. Piece of cake. I always got what I set after. Except bigfoot.” The shots of the cinnamon bear are crisp, and in fact all of the images except those of the actors pretending to be Sasquatch are fine; the problem is they belong in some Disney nature documentary, not this supposedly thrilling journey into the unknown.

          Director Harry Winer, tasked with shaping Marx’s underwhelming footage, clearly had no choice but to pad The Legend of Bigfoot with nonsense. (For instance, we spend several minutes watching cute fox cubs cavort around Marx’s ranch.) Eventually, Marx gets another eyeful of monsters during the movie’s lifeless climax, triggering this narration: “I began to shake all over. I could barely keep hold of my camera.” And what’s featured in the accompanying shot (which, it should be noted, is perfectly steady)? That would be two silhouetted actors in bigfoot costumes washing their bodies in a forest stream. Whatever, man.

The Legend of Bigfoot: SQUARE