Curse of Bigfoot

A long-time standard on the tri-state area's WWOR tv, my friends and I first discovered this in the late seventies, and have been hooked since. Yes, it is every bit as wretched as you have heard, but it is simply so amazingly boring that it transcends it's own awfulness and becomes an object of perverse fascination! The endless stock footage of the logging industry that is meant to give insight into where Bigfoot hangs out, the bogus paper-mache monster at the beginning, the classroom full of obviously stoned (and bored) nonactors...I could go on and on. The thing that sends the movie into the nadir of bad movie hell is the point where it clearly turns into some unfinished zero-budgeter from the early sixties that features a Bigfoot that looks like some guy who covered himself in rubber cement and rolled around on a barbershop floor! My friends and I would tell our schoolmates about this for years, and we'd constantly hear "Aw,come on! No movie could be that bad!!!" Then they'd watch it and realize just how bad a movie can be. For years THE CURSE OF BIGFOOT stood as an excruciating rite of passage for bad movie buffs in Connecticut, but sadly it hasn't been seen on local TV since spring of '87. Thank God I taped it on that last night...Now I torture my unwary new friends with it. In fact, one of them summed it up thusly: "This isn't a movie. It's an endurance test!" It's still more entertaining than RAT RACE, though! But then again, so is jock itch...

How does one even begin to describe a movie this awful? I'd first seen Curse of Bigfoot one Saturday afternoon way back in the late 70's with some of my brothers and friends . Even as a dopey teenager I realized that this movie was somehow VERY different than all the other "Godzilla" and "Creature Feature" movies we would make fun of and add our own dialogue to (yes, we WERE Mystery Science Theater 3000 before it ever existed). It was just SO HORRIBLY bad that it actually left an impression on you.......like a Mack truck does when it runs over your face. I did a Google search and couldn't believe I could now own this wretched movie.

I sat down with my wife (whom I excitedly told over and over again how bad/ funny this movie was) and for the first time in more than 25 years "experienced" Curse of Bigfoot. Just as I remembered, it was the most boring piece of garbage ever put on film.

First of all, imagine a film where they don't hire an editor. It seems that EVERY piece of film shot for this movie (including outtakes, flubs, and any other time the camera might have been accidentally left in the "on" position) was stitched together, in sequential order or not."Don't worry Jimmy if you have a temporary case of dyslexia with that line, just keep going. We'll use it somewhere in the picture!" Obviously the director thought (in his own mind, sadly) that he was creating SUCH an "every frame could be a postcard" cinematic achievement that he didn't want to see any valuable frames left on the cutting room floor. Everything moves at a super slow motion speed, also. The few motor vehicles shown NEVER go more than 5 mph. I think the gear boxes were ripped out the night before just so it would be impossible to go faster than "idle".....and to not give any of the "amateur hour" actors a means of escape off the set of this ticking time bomb of boredom.

Now imagine an entire cast, and no doubt crew, who look like they don't even want to have anything to do with this film. Almost as if being there were the raw end of a losing wager, or maybe the final humiliating prank before joining a fraternity. The acting (more like "bad cue card reading") is also a thing of beauty. "Method" acting? Try Methadone acting. No emotion, no feeling, and barely any eye contact. It seems as if everyone just wants to say their lines like a robot and get the heck home.

And being a serious amateur photographer myself, let me tell you about the fine cinematography. They probably had only a week to shoot this entire movie (before word got out to the authorities / film reviewers/ investors about how REALLY awful this disaster was turning out ) so there are plenty of "let's squeeze every ounce out of daylight we can and just keep shooting no matter what" type scenes scattered all over this thing, including those super cheap "let's shoot this night scene in broad daylight and just add a dark blue filter over the lens to fool our way less sophisticated than us audience into thinking it's really dark" visual tricks. It's a miracle anyone actually remembered to take their sunglasses off. And how many shots of looking up at the top of trees, or slowly panning through bushes (trying to maybe remotely cause some accidental suspense) can one movie have!?! If these scenes alone were cut the movie would probably be only 15 or 20 minutes long.

The background music, or whatever that sound is keeping you awake through this exercise of unending visual and mental torture, has all the rhythm and snappy beat of a machine gun firing at close range over your head. It's about as memorable as verses 62 and 61 of "99 Bottles of Beer".

You're probably wondering if there are any Special Effects in Curse of Bigfoot. If using someone else's stock footage of 45 or so logs rolling into the water, one after the other, after the other, after the other, after the other, is what you call "special" then march right into the boss's office and demand a raise because this IS your lucky day! And how about earth moving vehicles? Have you waited all your life to see a Bigfoot movie with earth moving vehicles in it!? Pinch yourself......hard, because you're NOT dreaming. Watch them going into a ravine about 10 or 20 stories deep. Maybe it's a mass grave for all those who had anything to do with this film (including all original negatives and prints).It's at about this point in the film that the normal person would start cursing up a blue streak, wanting to know exactly what the heck they're supposed to be watching. Maybe this is where the "Curse" in Curse of Bigfoot comes from. Maybe the original title was simply "Bigfoot".

And what about the actual bigfoot itself? Imagine a drunken homeless guy sprawling around from scene to scene, dressed in an old Halloween paper mache mask looking for a handout. Tape on some of grandma's old wigs to a hockey mask, plop in a ping pong ball in one of the eye sockets for a "creepy" bulging eye, spray paint everything sorta black and red, and you have one the most embarrassing attempts at horror since the Kerry-Edwards ticket.

A movie like this is so fascinating to watch because it dawns on you (in those rare fleeting moments of lucidity) that someone thought they were actually making a GOOD movie. One that people might want to tell everyone they knew to go see, and maybe see over and over again. This IS one of those movies, but sadly not for the reasons they'd hoped for.

No, they don't show this one on late-night TV anymore, and it's a crying shame. If you can track a copy of this one down, buy it! Pay as much as anyone asks. Sell anything you own! No Bigfoot film enthusiast should miss this. It's better than "Night of the Demon."

One of the very worst of all the Bigfoot films, this one is a lot of fun--if it's your kind of thing. It was, as noted elsewhere, made in two sections, and is unique in that it features one main character who appears younger in the 60's footage, and older in the 70's footage. No aging makeup was necessary! The actor aged all by himself!

The Bigfoot costume appears to be made out of hair with a certain amount of twigs, nuts, and berries mixed in--it kind of resembles a heap of leaves someone has raked into a pile. Observe the ingenuity at work when the Bigfoot is set on fire--someone stuffed the suit full of newspapers or something, stuck it on a stake hammered into the ground, and attached wires to the arms, so that they could wave the arms about as the creature catches fire. And I'm sure they squirted a whole can of lighter fluid on the thing before they lit it, because it really flares up nicely. It appears to be smiling as it falls apart. Forget CG effects; trust me, this is cooler than anything!

One of my favorite scenes has the kids having a LONG discussion about how much change everyone gets back after bottles of soda, referred to as `pop,' are bought. It's all in the details--in this case, the profuse and unnecessary details. If you like movies as bad as you can get them, this one is for you.

At some point in about 1962 a film was made which revolved around the misadventures of a group of high schoolers on a weekend field trip to Pahrump, Nevada searching for Indian artifacts. What they find is terror at the hands of an ancient mummy. Badly acted and shot poorly this film resembled a made-for-students travelogue. It moldered over the years as it sat unwatched and unappreciated in some vault somewhere. And then, like the Pahrump mummy it rose to terrorize us all again.

It would appear that the director of the previous footage asked the main player from that film to appear in the new film as his old character being asked to tell modern (70s) kids about his experiences with "The Great Man-Beast of North America," which he reluctantly does. The older film is used in its entirety as a flashback vehicle to the supposed Bigfoot encounter. But, of course the creature isn't a Bigfoot at all, it's just an Indian mummy.

This is a bizarre melange. Just for fun, check out the end of the film where all the students are standing around the bonfire, and note that they are all pretty much acting normally, then remember the words of Roger Mason, that, one of those students will have to spend the rest of her life in a mental institution!

Long live paper mache monsters!!

Growing up in 1960s and 70s Montana I first saw Curse of Bigfoot on a classic late night movie program called Creatures Features hosted by Bob Wilkins and later John Stanley out of Stockton California. Curse of Bigfoot was of course made like other cheap horror films of the day, like The Creeping Terror, on a shoestring budget in B&W with the cast also the same people making the movie. But I do remember being scared by the monster in Curse of Bigfoot. If I remember it right it had a cooked egg like thing over each eye. This movie was great fun and very funny. It is currently about to be released on DVD with documentary on the making and other behind the scenes materials. If you are a fan of this movie email me for details about the upcoming DVD release..I believe it is in January 2002.