| Bigger feet means bigger foot odor
Bigfoot (1969): To the people who moan and complain about the state of modern filmmaking, I offer this little observation: at least nobody makes movies about Bigfoot anymore. There used to be dozens of these flicks, and they were all terrible. The beast’s television career was, if not exactly better, at least somewhat entertaining. (The Simpsons, The Six Million Dollar Man and, of course, Bigfoot and Wildboy, the heartwarming adventures of a feral child and his pet sasquatch.)
Psychotronic’s Michael Weldon cites Bigfoot as "the second worst Bigfoot movie," which is rather a bold claim if you’re familiar with the genre (and Mike certainly is).
John Carradine plays a travelling salesman who suddenly decides he wants to go into the sideshow business by capturing Bigfoot alive. Chris Mitchum shows up as part of a motorcycle gang who roar through the (rather flat) mountains and (rather sparse) woods on their petite Yamaha motorbikes, looking for Bigfoot when they’re not awkwardly making out with their bikini-clad girlfriends. Busy model Joi Lansing plays "Joi Landis," who drops into the movie by parachute. She promptly strips off her jumpsuit to reveal a peculiar mini-dress with a neckline that plunges all the way down to the belt. This outfit has a slightly science-fictiony appearance, and I kept getting the feeling that I’d seen slightly less revealing versions of it in old episodes of Star Trek or Logan’s Run.
Joi promptly gets kidnapped by Bigfoot, who takes her to his lair and ties her to a tree. (Or, more accurately, he lashes her to a sapling using a single piece of twine, girdled gently around Joi’s waist.) A bikini-clad biker chick is tied to the next sapling over, so she and Joi have lots of hilarious conversations about what icky fate is in store for them. They look at the little sasquatch children running around, and conclude (based on no visible evidence I could detect) that they are half-breeds, and that Bigfoot must mate with (gasp) humans in order to reproduce! We’re left to ponder Joi’s fate as a potential Bigfoot concubine while the movie keeps cutting back to thrilling scenes of John Carradine trying to sell stuff to Ken Maynard. Long John’s not a very good salesman – he walks into Ken’s general store (leaving his products in the car) and continually badgers the poor guy while he’s trying to do business with his own customers. After doing this for three hours without success, John suddenly remembers he’s in a Bigfoot movie, and races off into the mountains, followed by Ken Maynard, Chris Mitchum, Lindsay Rosby, some cops and about nine unidentified bikers. It resembles a chase scene from Benny Hill.
Meanwhile, Joi has wriggled free from her wispy bonds, and runs through the woods, bouncing majestically. The camera is pointing straight down for most of this chase scene, staring directly into Joi’s wobbling cleavage. To save money, the filmmakers filmed just one shot of Joi running and then repeated it over and over, so she runs in the same zig-zag pattern eight times. This weakens the scene somewhat, since most of the suspense of the film comes from wondering if Joi’s polyester-straining antics will ever result in some good nipple visibility.
Finally, she breaks through into a clearing where the rest of the cast is standing there waiting for her. Bigfoot erupts out of the woods, and gets pumped full of lead. ("One hundred dollars... no, five hundred dollars to the man who captures the creature alive!" yells John Carradine, while the bikers riddle the beast with bullets.)
The mountain suddenly comes alive with the snarling and hissing of Bigfoot’s extended family (oh yeah, them) and one of the bikers hurls a bundle of dynamite (without a fuse) into the mouth of a cave. Kaboom! No more snarling. Movie ends. Audience demands money back. |
