Bigfoot B-Movie Review

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BIGFOOT - Skull

Rated PG

Reviewed by Andrew Borntreger on 24 May 2010

The Characters:

Jasper B. Hawks - John Carradine! He's a traveling salesman who never lets an opportunity pass him by, not even if it means shooting the opportunity in the knees so that it can't get away.
Elmer Briggs - This man was born 200 years too late. What he needs is a mint julep and a Confederacy to enjoy it in.
Joi - A smart blonde! Check her out!
Chris - Shortly after having sex with her boyfriend, she is kidnapped to become the next Mrs. Bigfoot. I hope that this girl likes her men hairy. If there was one thing hairier than a boyfriend in 1970, it was Bigfoot.
Rick - Chris' boyfriend. He spends most of the film being sore over the whole "Bigfoot hit me on the head and stole my girl" thing.
Rick's Friends - They ride motorcycles.
Bigfoot - He's big, hairy, and prone to committing sexual assault. The NFL needs to draft this guy before he becomes extinct.
The Missing Links - Bigfoot's smaller kin who kidnap women for him to mate with. Who knew that Sasquatch needs enablers?

The Plot:

Even though John Carradine is among my favorite b-movie actors, this film is a dreadful bore. Of course, Mr. Carradine's performance is hamstrung by the fact that he is not playing a scientist of some sort, and the film lacks anything that would allow him to engage in his exceptional propensity for techno-babble. Given a table filled with miscellaneous beakers and test tubes, an ad-hoc x-ray projector, or, God bless, a Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson brain, John Carradine becomes an oratorical messiah.

However, in this movie John is just a traveling salesman with an inept sidekick. Jasper and Elmer are traveling through the mountains in a derelict station wagon filled with an assortment of useless junk masquerading as merchandise. The door is tied shut with rope, the radiator leaks, and various pieces of the vehicle appear ready to succumb to the inexorable force of gravity. This is not the sort of car you want to drive up and down steep mountain roads, even when there are numerous streams that can be used to fill the radiator. Fortune smiles on the bagmen, and they arrive alive at a sleepy general store that serves as the gateway between civilization and the wilderness.

Joi's afternoon flight in her small plane goes a bit less well. Even though she checks the aircraft prior to departure, and even though the plane appears to be in perfect working order, while flying over the mountains the airplane suffers a sudden, complete, and catastrophic failure. Joi either bails out or is thrown clear as the plane plummets to Earth (actually, it might have simply disintegrated in mid-air). Luckily, the pilot turned skydiver is wearing a jumpsuit and a parachute. She makes it safely to the ground. While Joi is stripping off her jumpsuit, Bigfoot happens to come strolling by.

"Hi, little girl, want to make a movie?"

From what I gather, Bigfoot's problem is that the few surviving sasquatch females are infertile. Whether that is due to monkey menopause, untreated ape STDs, or DDT (maybe sasquatch lay eggs or something) is not explained. It's just that mommy sasquatch needs a surrogate. So, there is Bigfoot, wandering through the empty woods, thinking to himself that unless he can find something to breed with, his race is going to die out, and he stumbles across a buxom blonde stripping off her clothes. Can I get a "Thank you, Jez-eezzz!" from you?

This film is so Southern that I'm turning into a Baptist by osmosis. Amen.

Later on, Rick and his friends ride their bikes into the woods to party. It's the kind of soiree that only happened during the 60's and 70's. Ah, those were the days. The men sat around the campfire wearing turtlenecks and drinking beer while the women shimmied to the music blaring from a cheap radio, and then they shagged. However, Rich and Chris are not partaking of the present-retro goodness. The pair made the mistake of stopping earlier to get their freak on, and stumbled across the secret sasquatch burial ground. When a bigfoot (but not the Bigfoot) shows up, Rick gets knocked out and Chris is carried off to join Joi. Both girls are tied to trees, awaiting Bigfoot's marital attentions.

Since they are tied up, Joi and Chris contemplate their situation. They quickly realize that capturing human females must be a part of the sasquatch's reproductive strategy. I would say that both girls take the news rather well, especially since the blessed event is going to be intimately personal affairs for both women. Bigfoot is going to take his big hairy youknowwhat and stick it in the lucky gal's big hairy (it's the 70's) youknowwhat. Ostensibly, this will either cause the desired round belly condition, or else Bigfoot will try again until it does. I imagine that women who, for various reasons, fail to make babies eventually cause Bigfoot to get angry, and then he takes them apart to find out what is wrong.

Each time that Bigfoot disassembles a young lady and finds an IUD inside, his primate brain probably screams, "Another one of these things! I hate these things! Why do they keep making women with these? Oh well, I just have to put her back together without this, and it's babies all the way." Yeah, well good luck with that, big fella. Most guys learn the hard way that taking a lawn mower apart to figure out what is wrong is a bad idea. Women are even more complicated. They either work, or they don't. Do not change their factory settings, do not buy new parts for them, and do not try to disassemble and reassemble them. Don't even "open the hood" so to speak. There are no user serviceable parts.

It's almost as though Apple designed women.

Upon regaining consciousness, Rick stumbles his way out of the woods and into the general store. He convinces Jasper and Elmer that Bigfoot really exists, that the hairy monster really did thump Rick over the head, and that Bigfoot really did kidnap Chris for purposes unknown. Jasper does not care about Rick's headache or the peril to Chris' virtue; what interests the traveling salesman is the idea that capturing Bigfoot could make him gobs of money. The huckster grabs some guns from his truck and the trio (Jasper, Elmer, and Rick) heads into the mountains.

The rescue party gets ambushed by the bigfoot tribe, and the rescuers are soon tied to wooden poles along with Joi and Chris. I hope that Bigfoot does not try to procreate with the men. That would explain why the race is becoming extinct, but I already have enough random bits of horror to fuel my nightmares. John Carradine screaming as a huge shaggy primate mistakenly attempts to fend off extinction in a completely useless and horribly offensive way is not the sort of thing I need my psyche contemplating at 2 AM.

Of course, dreaming that I am being chased by the Michelin Tire Man isn't a whole lot of fun either. Nor is it the sort of nightmare easily explained to my spouse in the wee hours of the morning.

The women are saved from Bigfoot's captive breeding program by a combination of bear intervention and a search party discovering the sasquatch's den. Quite a bit of lead is tossed at Bigfoot by the humans. Bleeding from multiple wounds, the hairy creature retreats into a cave. For good measure, one of the men tosses dynamite in after the monster. The end, and God bless.

Just in case my review made this film sound more interesting than it is: it's not. People talk a lot. People stand around a lot. Rick's friends ride their motorcycles a lot. Jasper tries to sell a lot of stuff to the owner of the general store. Maybe that sounds like a lot, but not a whole lot happens.

Join the B-Masters as we search for missing links and sasquatch. Click on the banner for more reviews.

Things I Learned From This Movie:

Bigfoot is usually seen near bodies of water because he suffers from a chronic case of hiccups.
Pine forests are a motorcyclist's playground.
The last thing a girl wants to be, when there are eight-foot-tall horny humanoids about is beautifully, bountifully, buxom.
Southerners believe that "boy" is a universal pronoun.
You know that fuzzy guy at your work who has a BO problem? He's actually a shaved sasquatch.
Primates are genetically wired to prefer blondes.
Ron Jeremy is the product of Bigfoot mating with a human female.
Sometimes the best part of a movie is the poster.

Stuff To Watch For:

13 mins - Your eyes are not deceiving you. There is an individual, notable, and prominent credit for a camper.
17 mins - Worst spontaneous nookie pit stop ever!
23 mins - This is not day for night, more like polarizer for night.
31 mins - I almost know this song, but it is being played so badly that I cannot put my finger on it.
51 mins - Where are we supposed to be? Georgia? Alabama? Oregon?
58 mins - He looks more like Mel Brooks than a Native American.
70 mins - That is a really loud frog.
76 mins - For crying out loud, movie: do something!

Audio clips in wav format

SOUNDS

Starving actors speak out

	File	Dialog
	bigfoot1.wav	Elmer: "There's something out there, Jasper. I seen big, huge footprints down by that stream like I've never seen before!" Jasper: "Briggs, my good man, if you continue to travel with me, you'll see a lot of things you've never seen before."
	bigfoot2.wav	Rick makes a phone call to his friends.
	bigfoot3.wav	Chris: "What do these creatures want?" Joi: "They're more human than you think. I'm sure that's why they brought us here." Chris: "But why?" Joi: "The only thing I can figure out is that they're a dying race, and they want to reproduce more of their own kind." Chris: "How horrible!"
	bigfoot4.wav	Elmer: "Jasper, my old legs ain't holding out too good." Jasper: "They'd better, 'cause we're not quitting until we find it." Elmer: "But dog-gone it..." Jasper: "We're sitting on a million dollars, Briggs. And it's right up there!" Rick: "When we find it, Mr. Hawks, I want you to shoot it." Jasper: "Now, hold on boy. Not if I don't have to. That critter's worth more alive to me than dead."
	Theme Song	Listen to a clip from the soundtrack.

Click for a larger image

IMAGES

Scenes from the movie

Watch a scene

VIDEO

MPEG video files

	bigfoot1.mpg - 9.4m
	Footage of people on motorcycles, moth-eaten creature suits, and two women tied to trees. Imagine eighty more minutes of this, and you will have a good picture of the rest of the film.