User reviews

If you list John Carradine's films in order of IMDb rating, Bigfoot ranks second to last. This is a guy who starred in films titled Hillbillys in a Haunted House, Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, Vampire Hookers, Satan's Cheerleaders and Sex Kittens Go to College, among many, many others. A gaggle of sasquatches are out looking for women to mate with in this extremely low budget flick that looks like it was filmed on spare sets from Hee Haw. John Carradine is the biggest star, but you also have big breasted Joi Lansing and two kids of famous Hollywood actors, Chris Mitchum and Lindsay Crosby. Robert Mitchum's brother, John, is also in it. Oh, and Jerry Marren, aka the green-shirted Munchkin from the Lollipop Guild (as well as, I believe, the only Munchkin who survives to this day) dons the costume of the child bigfoot. Anyway, a biker chick and a downed female pilot get captured by bigfeet, and Carradine and his bud John Mitchum join the gang, hoping to make money by capturing a live bigfoot. This is really cruddy, and pretty boring. It's rated at a dismal 1.4 on IMDb. I laughed at it enough, and it's short enough, where I'll rate it a tad higher. After all, the awesome poster of this film has decorated my wall for a few years ago (with the tagline "breeds with anything..."). This was the first time I ever watched an entire film on Youtube. That's certainly not preferable (a drive-in would be ideal), but it was the only way to see it.

Released in 1970, "Bigfoot" was one of the first quasi-horror films devoted to the legendary beast-man, if not THE first. It relays the story of a couple of girls kidnapped by some bigfoot creatures and the mixed posse of country police & bikers who seek to find them.

Unfortunately, this is Grade C filmmaking all the way. For instance, the opening credits don't appear until almost the 10-minute mark. Most the scenes leading up to this are overlong time-wasters, like Joi Lansing walking up to her small plane and entering. Totally pointless! I guess they had to pad this turkey somehow, which is only 83 minutes long as it is. Also, most of the "acting" is laughable, and I mean that literally.

For me, the film's worthwhile for three reasons only: (1.) The gorgeous Judy Jordan in a bikini, mostly tied up to a tree (also check her out in 1973's underrated Western "The Gatling Gun"); (2.) the cool hippie-era score; and (3.) the nostalgic badness of it all, which is sort of entertaining.

The movie was shot at Big Bear Lake and San Bernardino National Forest.

GRADE: D

Well, that was the quote on my video box by someone from THE POST. So, judging by that rather anonymous endorsement, I knew I was in for a real treat. Not to mention the box artwork, which features a large, vaguely ape-like creature tossing a motorcycle (yay! a hybrid biker/monster flick!) Toss in John Carradine, and the blurb "America's abominable snowman... breeds with anything!", and you've got yourself an epoch du frommage. The uncomfortably long (and silent) travelling scenes, the paper mache sets, the unbelievably bad bigfoot makeup(or shall I say BigFEET?), the dinner-theatre-style acting, wonderfully inane script - all a testiment to the ultra-low budget that this "classic" drive-in flick flaunts in spades. Demands repeated viewings.

Classic 70's drive-in rubbish. Rubbish script, rubbish acting, rubbish costume, rubbish cinematography... and then there's Joi Lansing. Joi is what gets this movie a star...not for her acting though. She gets a star for being an absolutely delicious movie babe. They don't make 'em like Joi anymore...

My dad had a pair of Cinemacanica 35mm projectors and he bought this film. If he paid more than a nickel for it he was over charged. Then again, this movie was so bad that he decreed that if my brothers or myself acted out of line, then the perpetrator would be sentenced to watch this film.

Needless to say I watched this film many times and my father wore out the print. Maybe he did get his money's worth out of it. Heck! I bet my dad would gladly have paid a thousand dollars for this as much as he made me watch it.

By the way, this movie caused terrible trauma for me. I've never been able to watch another movie with Christopher Mitchum. He has to be the worst actor of all time.

Very cheesy drive in fun with John Carradine (Jasper) and John Mitchum (Elmer) hamming it up just a little too much. Ol' Jasper and Elmer had to fill in the blanks with Chris Mitchum (Rick) having never seemed to have woken up for what could have been a fun role.Sorry to say he was terrible.

Joi Lansing (Joi) did all she could and carried much of the story line. She was quite wholesomely sexy and beautiful in her role. All in all, not to bad for a "B" movie with poor Lindsay Crosby (Wheels) trying to act like a leader of a dirt bike gang. Tennis anyone.

My short and sweet plot summary: A young man named Rick (Christopher Mitchum) goes in search of his girlfriend who has been abducted by the worst looking Bigfoot ever put on film. The local sheriff won't help, so Rick turns to a traveling huckster named Jasper B Hawks (John Carradine) for assistance.

What a complete load of garbage! Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, about Bigfoot is wretched. The movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel - it turns the barrel upside down to get at the poo stuck to the underside. Dull, boring, horribly acted, with some of the absolute worst special effects anyone has ever seen - that' what you'll find in Bigfoot. Carradine may have been a decent actor at one time, but by 1970, he was appearing in just about anything offered. As much as I enjoyed some other films with Christopher Mitchum (Ricco and Summertime Killer to name just two), he proves here how bad an actor he could be without a solid script. It's all so awful it's really not worth saying much more.

After watching this movie, I think I need to revisit some of the other films I've rated 1/10. I think I've done some of those movie a disservice. On IMDb, of the 2,932 films I've rated, 63 received a 1/10. Some of these movies (Dead Men Walk, Sinbad of the Seven Seas, Night of the Sharks, Diamond Connection, Barbarian Queen II, ROTOR, The Adventures of Hercules, or The Swarm for example) have to better, or at least more enjoyable, than Bigfoot.

There is no excuse for a movie this bad. Absolutely no excuse whatsoever. Not merely the fact that it has some good quality cast names in it (John Carradine, John Mitchum) but because it is completely treacherous not only to the industry and the art form, but to the filmmakers themselves. Making a movie like "Bigfoot" is like constructing the Empire State Building out of cardboard and expecting people to work in it every day without ever hearing a shred of complaint. It would also be astonishing that anybody even let you get that far. It's astonishing here, too.

We all know the cult legend of the Americas' simian wonder. Well, as this movie would like us to believe, there is not just one Sasquatch, but dozens of them. And even though they are described (in the film) as being nine feet tall, in reality they're just stubby, man-sized fuzzballs who carry around clubs and sticks and tie people to trees with...I'm not sure what that was or how they got it. And I don't want to waste my precious brain cells pondering over it.

Anyway, whatever. You've got a fashion model (played by real life fashion model Joi Lansing) who crashes her plane in the wilderness and is kidnapped by some lecherous Sasquatches. Then you have some rowdy bikers. One of their girls, while wandering about the woods in nothing but her bra and panties, is kidnapped by another. Her boyfriend sees the big ape and recruits a pair of goofball con men and they all embark on a mission to rescue their girls from the men in ape suits.

The con men are played by John Carradine and John Mitchum, of all people. These two marvelous talents who were so wonderful in so many movies are the only ones involved in this treacherous production who act like professionals. Though they could have easily just hammed their way through (and nobdoy would have blamed them) they stick through to the end, even though they can't come within a lightyear of saving the movie.

"Bigfoot" looks and sounds as if it were made by a group of bottom feeders who had never seen a movie before in their lives. The photography is grainy and amateur and the audio on the soundtrack is so poorly assembled and recorded that you find yourself constantly adjusting the volume on your TV set. The screenplay is just the same set of words and phrases being repeated over and over again and the editing is absolutely horrendous. There is a horrible shot where Joi Lansing is on the run from a Sasquatch. She runs past us in the foreground and keeps on running until she's against the horizon. Then the Sasquatch appears to follow her. Between that point and the first one, we never cut away or adjust camera speed. Add to the fact that Joi Lansing was apparently trying to imitate Fay Wray in her screams and coming across as irksome. And the scene where she crashes her plane is missing not one, but several key shots so that we don't even get the whole picture of what has happened.

I don't think I even need to touch on the special effects.

This is one of the worst, most unremittingly agonizing and horrible movies ever made. As a person who has been and worked on a movie set and knows the pain and pressures that go into making a film, I find it absolutely appalling that anybody would even proceed and suffer their way through the production of something like this. The business isn't even that much of a money-maker for the cast and crew. It's the executives who really get the dough. So why bother unless you're at least going to put up an effort? There are other jobs out there. Other careers.

I saw this movie when I was 6 and I've searched a long time for it I an what people would call a connoisseur of cheesy flicks and as a kid i enjoyed it and probably will again I spend a lot of time searching for these types of movies because I think because it drove my mom crazy. I look for the worst films I can find because they are so campy.Thats the fun of movies I find that the campier the better because they take my mind of things that bother me and relieve things on me even if its just for a short time but I loved the movie Bigfoot what I can remember about it and have recently found it on disc and ordered it as to have more fun watching it and having my memories of that age relived and hoping to find more of them like that to add to my collection

There's a vastly superior movie out there called The Ninth Configuration, written and directed by William Peter Blatty. In that movie about an insane asylum dwells a character named Frankie Reno who feels compelled to do an all dog production of Shakespeare. Now, should Frankie ever film the fruits of his labor, I'm convinced it would yield a better movie than Bigfoot.

We're talking about a film whose production appears to consists of "whatever can fit in the back of a pickup truck" filmed at what I'm assuming was a breakneck pace to get a product in the can and distributed to America's drive-in theaters (maybe 'drive-thru' is a more appropriate term.) What I'm trying to say is, I hope minimal time and resources were dedicated to this movie because the technical merits are so abysmal that the clearly deteriorating print from which the incorrectly framed DVD was made may actually be an improvement to the original projection over 30 years ago. I wish I were exaggerating.

Seriously, it defeats the purpose of a serious critical analysis (want proof, check out the cheesy DVD cover art). Instead, dear reader, I present the "fun" aspect of Bigfoot.

I enjoyed how Joi Lansing piloted a plane that, not surprisingly, crashes … but not before a leisurely conversation with air traffic control while grips stand outside the obviously grounded plane and shake it back and forth to simulate mid-air turbulence. I giggled with condescending glee seeing this pilot parachute out, descend, and then cut to her on the ground wrapping up her chute (my guess is the budget couldn't afford the ladder to simulate a landing.)

Let's not forget the masterful camera-work of the motorcycle gang riding through the woods – shots designed to instill an uneasy, slightly nauseating sensation, by vigorously shaking the frame as if … as if … the cameraman was sitting in the bed of a truck that had no shocks! And there's a brilliant moment in the "party" montage where it looked like someone dropped the camera.

What brilliant economical editing too! Why show the plane taking off? Crashing? Or Joi landing? And the quick cuts showing the editorial equivalent of nothing to show the plane going down (I guess).

Oh, and when Bigfoot's henchmen (littlefoots?) kidnap the pilot and the bikini-clad girl (what's her name?) – these two women are tied to barely visible saplings, so their surprisingly calm conversation comes across as two high-school broads hanging around the cafeteria gossiping. "So, which of the furry guys who kidnapped us do you think is the cutest?" Wait, it gets better, the bikini clad-babe (maybe it was the pilot in her … whatever the hell that outfit's supposed to be) gives us a quasi-scientific run down of what these creatures are.

A little bit later, glorified monkeys checkmate the rescue party in a battle of wits, the rescue party is tied to saplings next to the girls where they all uncannily resemble disgruntled company lay-offs waiting in line at a soup kitchen.

How 'bout John Carradine's car which the hare could outrun even if the tortoise gave him cement shoes and broke his legs. What am I saying? The tortoise could take an ice-pick to the hare, push the corpse down a hill and the dead body could outrun that car (not to mention require less maintenance to keep running.) Speaking of John Carradine, I hope you like ham and cheese with your turkey.

And I learned a very valuable lesson from Bigfoot: contrary to popular myth, dynamite does not actually require a fuse. It only requires a moron to throw it and boom!

I have a theory that films like Bigfoot are made as a self-help tool to make suicidal filmmakers feel better about their work. Even the most talentless hacks can watch it with the comfort of knowing, "well, I can do better than that. Maybe life is worth living."

If producers had put together enough money to convince the gorgeous and buxom Joi Lansing to strip naked and finally show the world her true talents, I and many others would recommend watching this dumpster fire. Or at least hire some hot extras willing to do it like other horror films at that time.

But as it is, this no-budget clunker is a total waste of celluloid and effort for the actors, production crew, and the audience. It isn't even bad in a cheesy entertaining way. It's just bad. Period. And cheap looking.

Skip this and go watch other drive-in monster flicks released around that period. One that's funny and/or creepy. And includes naked women. Lots of them.

After watching "Bigfoot", it confused me. Not that the film itself was confusing, but rather some of the decisions behind it. You wanna make a Bigfoot movie? Go right ahead. A Bigfoot movie in a forested setting doesn't even sound that bad. The problem with this film is that Slatzer decided to make the plot centered around multiple bigfoots kidnapping women to mate with them. But this weird plot isn't the worst thing about "Bigfoot". It's far, far, far from the worst thing.

The film is bad on so many levels. Carradine, though better than the most of the cast, stumbles through the woods yelling about "his critter", Lansing runs around in a skimpy outfit screaming her head off, the Bigfoot costumes were awful, their roars and growls made them laughable, the sound effects were bad, the soundtrack is bad, the cinematography is bad, the script sucks, and most of the film just boring. It's hard to find a positive thing about. Not even the motorcycle action was entertaining.

Even though It seems like I'm ripping into the film, It's at least not as bad as films like "Manos" or "Monster a Go-Go". This film falls flat on its face, but those films fell flat on their faces and through the floor.

Of course, this is just my opinion, and I could completely understand why someone else would like this.

Overall, dumb plot and awful execution. 1.5/10.

When I saw the poster for this movie I wanted to see it, Bigfoot is holding up a motorcycle while a cop shoots at him with a tommy gun! It looked awesome, but then I watched it and found myself trying to stay awake within the first 10 minutes. There's a five minute scene where the main characters drive to a gas station! Nothing exciting happens in this movie, even when Bigfoot shows up and starts kidnapping girls him and his family don't do anything. Most of the acting sucks and the Bigfoot's just look like regular people with some hair on them. Screw this movie! I HATE IT!!! Words cannot describe my hatred for this movie. Then when the characters go out to find the family of Bigfoot's all they do is walk around for 20 minutes! I would rather mutilate myself then watching this! And what makes this movie worse is that it has John Carradine in it. He did not deserve this. I could make a better movie than this, I'd rather watch the Andy Worhol film Empire! You know, the movie that's nothing than an eight hour shot of the Empire State Building. By comparison THAT looks like a masterpiece! SCREW THIS MOVIE!

Only John Carradine can get me to like this film just a tiny bit. His presence gives me the only reason to watch the movie and even then it's pretty bad. His performance is quite a funny one here.

The film is severely campy and that helps to create some of the pleasure out of viewing it. We have a man running around in an ape suit, a throwback to the 30s and 40s eras of the apes in films craze in a way.

The further along this film goes, the better it gets. It is in no way a good film, but it's stupidly campy enough to get a few giggle out of it. I find it one of those films you watch in the afternoon or to fall asleep by. Nothing special.

4/10

Bigfoot (1970)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Various women are being kidnapped and it turns out Bigfoot and his clan are behind it. Apparently their race is dying off so they're needing women to have more creatures with. Jasper B. Hawks (John Carradine) gets the idea of capturing one for the money while a biker gang goes after the creature to get their women back.

Bigfoot was always my favorite mythical monster when I was a kid and I was always disappointed because there really aren't too many good movies about him. I continue to watch movies on Bigfoot yet they continue to get worse and worse. This film doesn't have the greatest reputation around but it's certainly a real hoot and a rather fun film as long as you don't take it too serious.

I mean, just take a look at the sequence where the three hot ladies are tied up talking about why they have been captured. This here alone shows that the film wasn't supposed to be taken serious and then you throw in a biker gang and you've got pure drive-in madness. There are some really nutty scenes throughout this movie but the greatest thing about it is the fact that they don't keep the monsters off screen. Nope, the monsters are constantly on the screen and there are multiple ones as well as children!

The cast is also a lot of fun as we get Joi Lansing as one of the victims, Chris and John Mitchum and even Ken Maynard has a small role. Then there's Carradine who eats up the picture just like it was a big bowl of spaghetti. He's really a lot of fun here as he adds in the camp as this redneck looking to make a quick buck. His final line delivery, ripping off the KING KONG ending, is pure joy.

As I said, BIGFOOT isn't a masterpiece and it's not even a really good movie but if you enjoy these low-budget monster movies then there's plenty here to enjoy.

Joi Lansing parachutes into her final role screaming and bikinied. Not one, but two Mitchums and big John Carradine burbling words through a moustache and wrinkles. With that much talent cramming the screen, who has room for a plot? You can barely fit in the half-man, half-ladies man 'BIGFOOT' that just wants to demonstrate why he's the "8th Wonder of the World". Nope, no time. Have to pad the whole second act with motorcyclists whipping around in a forest, because we gotta have some character willing to shove sticks of dynamite down their pants? Anyway. 60's chicks tied to trees. Thumbs up. Doodles Weaver just gets a crap cameo. Boo!

When pilot, Joi Landis (Joi Lansing) has engine trouble, she's forced to parachute into the deep woods. Unbeknownst to Joi, she's landed in BIGFOOT country, and is quickly abducted by the creature.

Simultaneously, a bunch of bikers have arrived, looking for a place to party.

Oh dear!

A bikini-clad biker babe is nabbed by the beast, after she and her boyfriend disturb a yeti burial mound! We soon discover that there's a whole tribe of bigfoots -bigfeet?- and they're looking for love! Can the bikers, along with a local junk dealer named Jasper (John Carradine) rescue the women before the hairy horrors do the unthinkable?

THIS MOVIE CONTAINS: #1- Sex-starved sasquatches! #2- A biker called "Dum Dum"! #3- A lackadaisical bigfoot vs. Bear battle! #4- Ms. Lansing running around in her awesome outfit! #5- A forest ranger played by none other than intergalactic omni-star, Doodles Weaver! #6- Awe-inspiring bigfoot costumes (aka: men dressed as goggle-eyed piles of lint)! Toss in some twangy music, complete with bongo drums, and you know you're watching a divine spectacle!

EXTRA POINTS IF: You can count how many times Ms. Lansing screams her beautiful head off!...