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...

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!!

Those Chiller Theater fans in Pittsburgh who stayed up for the special triple (as opposed to the usual double) feature on October 30 1976 were highly entertained by both "House of Frankenstein" and "House of Dracula." Ah, but the real Halloween 'trick' was this rickety home movie, shown in between the two Universal classics, which actually saw two repeat airings over the next 6 years (Aug 2 1980 and Jan 23 1982). With its classroom instructor discussing the shark in "Jaws," some of it at least appeared to be new, but by the time the flashbacks began, I noticed the late 50s vintage cars on display, and slowly began to realize that someone had decided to take an unreleasable 59 minute turkey of uncertain origin, add 29 minutes of 'new' footage, resulting in a full length feature that was truly a difficult sit. All I can say is that Larry Buchanan's Azaleas look like beloved works of art in comparison. The first half hour, set in a classroom, is interrupted by interminable stock footage of logging (!) and a slow crawl through the woods after a Bigfoot wannabe, seen for all of 10 seconds. Once the flashback begins, relating the original "Teenagers Battle the Thing," it fails to improve. By the time the excavation unearths an ancient mummy, it doesn't start walking until the last 23 minutes out of the 88 total, and is glimpsed for about 90 seconds (if that sounds like fun, be my guest). Bad movie buffs may find some entertainment value here, with no actual relation to Bigfoot (topical only during the 70s), I just hope that the updated version and additional footage did help the filmmakers turn a profit, since it has proved to be, in a sense, unforgettable, though for all the wrong reasons (just getting it shown must have been an achievement in itself).

In the tradition of such celebrated anticlassics as THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN and VAMPIRE MEN OF THE LOST PLANET, this mongrel concoction haphazardly conjoins a barely released amateur monster movie of the early 60s(about a student archaeological field excavation besieged by a resurrected mummy monster) with a noticeably more recently filmed wraparound involving Sasquatch lore. The older material is modestly amusing in the praxis of regional horror schlock, but the add-on seems to be both a means of padding this garbage to fit TV time slots, as well as a feeble attempt to incorporate Bigfoot into the story(a wet squib topic highly marketable at the time).

A positively horrible Scotch tape and rubber-band mess, although the older part has a naive, campy charm...sadly, fate would decree its unfortunate metamorphosis as a component to this throwaway picture. 2.5/10

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.