There are times when you suddenly realize you’ve seen a film before.
I experienced this unexpectedly with Bigfoot: in the film, a group of Bigfoots tie a young woman between two big wooden posts, as an offering to the giant Bigfoot who lives higher up the mountain.
And, of course, we’ve all seen that scene before. Only it was in King Kong the last time I saw it.
This was the first Bigfoot movie to come out after the release of the so-called Patterson footage, which suddenly made the elusive Sasquatch into an overnight celebrity.
However, the most memorable part of this film, besides the blatant King Kong rip-off (John Carradine even gets to repeat one of original’s most famous lines of dialogue), is the absurd and outrageous (not to mention over-dramatic) movie poster.
It is a swirl of motorcycles, hunters, a busty blonde, and a cop with a machine gun, around the brutal central figure of a huge Bigfoot showing off its suggestively muscular torso. This all comes with the tagline, “Breeds with Anything.”
While the film promises biker gangs what we get instead are a few young people running around the forest roads on tiny, two-stroke dirt bikes without a Harley in sight.
It’s not quite the same thing.
We do get a few blondes, as well as a suggestion that the Bigfoots might want to solve the problem of their dwindling numbers by a bit of crossbreeding.
But it is handled with a minimum of sensationalism and mostly just hinted at a bit.
I suppose that may disappoint some of you and it definitely doesn’t have much to do with that poster.
Instead, it is an amiable and minor effort which never takes itself too seriously, even if they did shoot it in places where people actually saw real Sasquatchs
It is also a pleasure to see John Carradine in good form. He actually has a fairly large part as Jasper B. Hawkes, the proprietor of a travelling store who sees the Bigfoot as his key to the big time. We even get to see him chasing through the woods after the beast. I found it almost shocking as the last film I watched with John (The Bees ) was made only eight years later and could barely move in that one. He looked frail, and his speech was slurred, as if he’d had a stroke.
But he’s at the top of his game this time around and is one of the best parts of the film.
Old Cowboy star Rex Maynard gets a bit part– his final role. His shopkeeper character isn’t given much to do and vanishes halfway through to be replaced by his character’s daughter who hadn’t put in an appearance up til that moment.
And the creature?
Well, it definitely isn’t “The Biggest Monster Since King Kong” as advertised. It’s just a guy in a suit and not a particularly good looking one either. Despite a few forced perspective shots to make it look taller, they clearly aren’t making it look much taller than the guy in the suit.
I don’t care if he is Six foot Eight. That still isn’t much compared to the original Kong. Or Godzilla, for that matter.
And I suppose that sums up the film. it is smaller and much less threatening than advertised.
It certainly isn’t what the poster led us to expect.
But it is fun, lighthearted and genial. I liked it more than I expected and it isn’t bad — as “B” movies go.
Particularly if you don’t expect it to be anything like the poster out in the lobby…
rivets on the poster 
2 thoughts on “Bigfoot (1970)”