The Legend of Bigfoot

I got this movie in a blister pack for a dollar with another movie. Being a armchair detective about Sasquatch, Yowie and Alma I was interested in what this was about. I never heard of Marx, but I did see once the footage of the "limping" or sometimes pegged "waltzing" bigfoot. Even then I thought it was odd. It did in fact looked like someone in a cheesy gorilla suit waltzing about.

Most of the footage in the film was dull and as everyone else here has posted "way off course of the topic." But one has to remember that when you are hunting something that is hard to find Nature is going to come with it. In some respects this reminded me of "Legend of Boggy Creek." Thank god there was not crooner singing "Hey Travis Crabtree......." But again lets remember if the movie used strictly his footage, the movie would be only about 20 minutes long.

The last bit of footage has me raising an eyebrow with some interest. Having seen not 1 but 4 of these beings and a hell of a lot closer than probably Marx would have wanted, I always get a cold chill when I look at filmed footage or listen to its cries. While the supposed young one does nothing at all for me, the supposed older bigfoot gave me some severe cold chills. The younger one looked too thin and his acts too rehearsed or fact. The older one was massive in size. so I am at odds that the footage of the younger bigfoot maybe fake along with the waltzing bigfoot. If the waltzing/limping bigfoot film is real then one need to consider: 1) Could such a creature so lame survive? And if so how much more or less elusive can he be compared to a healthy creature? Sure such a lame creature would not find it easy to get away from hunters and others.

2) That the creature is not JUST lame but deformed, as his one arm was always on his chest and looked stiff and his one leg looks like its stiff all the way up to the hip.

My last statement is directed to Marx' comment about Sasquatch eating habits. Front evidence collected all over North America, it seems these creature have a huge diet and many rancher and farmers have found cattle, goats, pigs, chickens, fish, dogs, deer and other animals half eaten. Remember in the film, it all starts off with the killing of cattle and a bear???? Oh yeah in one report a roaming bigfoot was even treated to peanut-butter sandwiches which it seemed to enjoy.

Not a bad film. A lot better than Boggy Creek if you ask me.

It is extremely unlikely that a filmmaker today would make a movie like "The Legend Of Bigfoot". Even if by miracle it happened, there is no way a film distributor would try to release it to theaters. And all that unlikelihood is a good thing, if you ask me. If you are looking for proof of Bigfoot or at least a serious examination of the theory, you would best look elsewhere. I don't know who Ivan Marx is (or was), but he sure doesn't come across as an authority on the subject of Bigfoot. When he uncovers the few moments of "proof" in the movie, he says that authorities (who he never specifically identifies) back up his claims. But most of the movie is not a serious look one way or another to Bigfoot's existence. In fact, the movie plays like they took a number of wildlife home movies with Marx, added a few minutes of linking footage as well as a lot of boring and unconvincing narration, and waited for the audience to fork over its bucks. I am sure people who saw this movie back in 1976, even those that were kids, were really let down by this documentary. Don't join them.

I got this film in the Mill Creek Drive-in 50-pack film collection. This is not a grand documentary but there is something fun about it to watch. What makes this film enjoyable is the narrator believe it or not.

Our narrator is very enthusiastic and narrates the story well. Believe it or not he is the highlight of this film. Almost comical to listen to him because he sounds overly crazy about finding Bigfoot but it's good!

This documentary has a lot of stock-footage and older photos as well as some quirky dramatization footage. There is some historical information about society and bit of information of historical information of Bigfoot (to take with the grain of salt).

If you are remotely interested in Bigfoot then I would recommend this film. It is actually entertaining.

5/10

As any bigfoot movie aficionado can tell you there are two basic types of bigfoot movies. First, there are the purely narrative bigfoot flicks like the original "Bigfoot", "The Creature of Black Lake", "Shriek of the Mutilated" (kind of), the TV movie "Snowbeast", and the wonderfully gory "Night of the Demon" (you might also throw bigfoot-sex movies like "Beauties and the Beast" and "The Geek" in here as well). Then there are the bigfoot docudramas inspired by the seminal TV movie "Bigfoot- Monster or Myth" and the very successful theatrical film "The Legend of Boggy Creak". These latter movies combine supposedly real footage of bigfoot with "dramatic re-enactments" of supposed bigfoot encounters, along with often shameless amounts of padding. The regionally produced "Legend of Boggy Creek", for instance, contains lots of down-home Southern ballads and interviews with real, honest-to-god Southern "folk" which is often pretty peripheral to the bigfoot investigation. And "Sasquatch-the Legend of Bigfoot" and this movie, simply called "Legend of Bigfoot" have so much wildlife footage and cheesy voice-over narration, you often feel like you're the watching the old 1970's TV series "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom".

These bigfoot docudramas frankly have not aged very well. Even for people who still believe in bigfoot, they are kind of a gimmicky, phenomenon of their time like "The Blair Witch Project". If you are not a true bigfoot fan with fond childhood memories seeing these bigfoot flicks on the big and/or small screen, you will probably be pretty bored by any of these docudramas, but especially this one, which leaves out most of the drama until the very end. Personally though, I like to put this movie in the DVD player when I am very sleepy. I almost always fall asleep before they ever get to any of the bigfoot "footage", but I go to sleep bathed in the warm, gentle, nostalgic glow of bigfoot.

Tracker Ivan Marx, who stars in and narrates The Legend of Bigfoot, purports this to be an authentic documentary on the search for Bigfoot, one that offers incontrovertible evidence of the creature's existence. Is his claim sincere? I doubt it, the supposedly genuine footage of Sasquatch being far from convincing. But even if if this is a bona fide attempt at proving the legend of Bigfoot to be true, the fact remains that it is a crushing bore, consisting primarily of crappy hand-held wildlife footage accompanied by Marx's terrible Disney-style voice-over.

As Marx's investigation leads him North to the supposed Bigfoot breeding ground in the Arctic Circle, viewers get to enjoy nature movie-making its most banal—young coyotes meddling with a skunk, ground squirrels in love, moose mating rituals—while the presenter prattles on about survival of the fittest and animal migration patterns. Marx also caters for history buffs, giving a brief lesson on ancient tribal art and the gold rush in the Yukon. Sadly, those looking forward to his 'unchallengable proof' of Bigfoot will be left seriously wanting, the film's only footage of the creature being a few minutes of shaky film, shot from a distance, of what could easily be a man in a gorilla fancy dress costume.