The Beauties and the Beast

The legendary Bigfoot monster does his usual...erm...Bigfooting around some woods where a couple of vacationing young lovelies and a communal household of rather irritating hippies(oh Gawd....that folk song...)spend their time in various states of undress. The titular "beast" is a pretty shoddy man-in-a-gorilla-suit mess with what appears to be a cro-magnon head mask. Our Bigfoot carries unsuspecting girlies to a cave, where he keeps them captive for future(implied sexual)activities.

This rock-bottom crud has everything trash film mongers crave...it's astoundingly cheap, with more nudity than you might expect of it(full-frontal, both male and female....the Bigfoot, however, is devoid of any obvious genitalia....perhaps the monster is of the lesbian persuasion?) Pisspoor editing abounds....either the video I bought is badly cut, or several key issues are left entirely unresolved. Who cares, though? You're watching this to see boobs and cheesy monster mayhem, and that's just what you get.

Ten filthy little stars....now go buy yourself a copy.

It's a wonder this film is not available from Something Weird Video. Some movies wait until the end to show the monsters. Not this one. Bigfoot is grabbing women from the get go. At the end we never even find out what happened to the women in his cave! Who cares about the loose ends. What matters is that there were sex scenes with hairy males... and Bigfoot gets to do some molestin' too. A couple of the girls are beautiful. The film teases for a while, cutting away several times right before showing nudity below the belt. Be patient. I had to be very patient since my VHS tape did not play on the first two VCR's I tried it on. A mostly silly movie with even sillier music plus one brutal rape attempt. See it.

Usually bigfoot movies and sexploitation are a winning combination whether they're arty ("La Bete"), cheesy ("Monster at Camp Sunshine"), or somewhere in between ("Tanya's Island"). This movie, however, is just boring. Actually, it's really two different boring movies with only the most tenuous connection between them. In one movie a ridiculous bigfoot-type creature kidnaps naked women. But all he does is seal them in his cave (if you're looking for some bestiality here, forget it). In the second movie, a bunch of hippie campers sit around talking endlessly, playing godawful guitar music, and having a lot of sex. And even the latter is boring because the incompetent filmmakers always managed to find the most unappealing angle from which to shoot the action and then held the same shot practically forever. It's hard to believe a movie like this that is barely more than an hour long (and at least half of which is devoted to sex scenes) could seem to drag on forever, but it does. Some of the more rabid Russ Meyer fans might appreciate the appearance of the top-heavy (if otherwise totally untalented) Uschi Digart. I really wouldn't recommend this to anyone else though.

Possibly the worst film ever made, if you are looking for any cinematic quality, whether it be direction or editing or continuity or acting, you will not find it here. The film is a take on Bigfoot but the monster here is a man in a gorilla suit that is terrible even by Halloween standards. He kidnaps young women and takes them to his cave but for what purpose we never find out - nothing happens and the girls just disappear from the film.

Of course in any monster film we have got to have nudity and some lesbianism and on those counts the film delivers. A nice scene in which two cuties undress and climb into bed is OK. There are also some hippy campers who seem to have found some hidden loot which a couple of crooks are after is some sort of diversion but overall the film is just awful. There is a 71 minute R-rated version and an 84 minute Unrated version together with Hollywood Babylon available on a single disc from Retromedia Entertainment but unless you are into terrible films, then give this one a miss.

I love how this movie opens with an sincere on screen narration about scientific facts, examples of newspaper clippings and alleged factual sightings of an American Sasquatch monster, and then stupidly continues by saying "the story you're about to see COULD be true…". Well of course it could be true! Stuff like this happens all the time! Not a week goes by or I read something in the papers about lewd and nakedly parading around wenches getting abducted in the woods by Sasquatch himself! "Beauties and the Beast", like the title implies, is a rancid and utterly nonsensical sexploitation product of the early 70's; simultaneously cashing in on the Bigfoot hype in horror cinema at that time as well as benefiting from the always popular concept of voluptuous girls practicing the Free Love principles. It's Big-foot meeting Big-boobs, as Russ Meyer regular Uschi Digard (with her lovely Scandinavian accent and her even lovelier triple-D balcony) and her friend drive up to a remote cabin in the woods where a big and perverted guy in an ape suit resides. In earlier sequences we already witnessed how he collects scarcely dressed girls and stores them in a cave without even sexually harassing them. Now, that is weird! I personally expected at least one repulsive monstrous rape-sequence, to be honest. Anyway, the girls encounter a bunch of hippies (who have been there since 8 months but never spotted the Yeti…) and subsequently some thugs in search of golden coins, so the monster never really has a proper chance to demonstrate to Uschi what a hot date he is. "Beauties and the Beast" is a pretty lousy but undeniably entertaining piece of trash, with a large amount of unintentionally hilarious sequences (for example the guy running away naked upon spotting the Sasquatch; leaving his girlfriend behind) and harmlessly tame sexual footage. The last fifteen minutes are quite strange. It feels as if, after a whole movie of redundant sex images and pointless padding, the story suddenly becomes ambitious and eventful. There's violence and rape, new characters and the titular beast actually becomes the day-saving hero! In the end, they all live happily ever after in harmony, and nobody even bothers anymore about the Yeti's first victims, who are mostly likely still entrapped in the cave.