I saw this as an 8 yr old back in 1978 as part of a double feature with the Harrison Ford/Carl Weather's WWII flick "Force 10 from Navarone." I would discover later on that "Force 10" was considered by many critics to be one of the worst movies of 1978, but after watching it in tandem with "Sasquatch" I thought it was so much better than "Sasquatch." The thing is I was really excited about seeing "Sasquatch." It was the MAIN reason why my siblings and cousins went to the movies that day. So we were all surprised by how much more we enjoyed "Force 10" over "Sasquatch."
"Sasquatch" is cheesy. Even when I was 8 yrs old I realized that. A docudrama about a group of hippie dippie scientists and backwoods guides who are determined to capture a sasquatch. They put together an expedition with all their supplies loaded onto packhorses and head out to "bigfoot country." They keep referring to "bigfoot country" as a place marked out on a map. And when they find some bent over trees, they quickly point out that these are the borders of "bigfoot territory."
The thing I remember the most about this movie was that it was boring. The vast majority of this movie is like a poorly funded National Geographic special- lots of pretty shots of the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. In the end, the expedition sets up camp in some meadow in the heart of "bigfoot land" and then devise all sorts of outposts with tripwires to capture a bigfoot. Of course, the big hairy guy and a bunch of his friends are not so obliging. They attack the scientists by throwing paper mache boulders at them. These scenes are so phoney looking that even the most gullible child will be rolling his eyes at them.
The ONLY good thing about this movie are the retellings of the legends of bigfoot. The hippie scientists and guides sit around the campfire and tell stories and the film then recreates the story. An American Indian legend of the creature is portrayed by an Indian boy being chased by a bigfoot. The famous attack on a miners' cabin in Ape Canyon by several bigfoots is also recreated. And the best story- the eerie story of two trappers who unfortunately entered the valley of a particularly nasty bigfoot. In one scene a trapper is kneeling down examining strange footprints and all of a sudden a huge shadow looms over him. That actually was pretty creepy! However, these brief moments do not make up for what is mostly a pretty dull, cheesy movie.
