| Well, that about wraps it up for 2005. Don’t forget – January 1st is International "Flake Out on the Couch and Watch Tons of Sci-Fi Day," so be sure to have those Battlestar Galactica episodes cued up and ready to go. Nobody expects you to accomplish anything worthwhile on the first day of the year, so go ahead and be a lump.
Now on to this week’s movie; The Beauties and the Beast (1974), a ridiculous nudie flick about Bigfoot. This bold cinematic experiment manages to combine the tedium of a 1970s Sasquatch documentary with the tedium of a 1970s softcore porno.
We begin with some earnest narration about the legend of Bigfoot, delivered by a guy crouching in a thicket for some reason. His face is unintentionally obscured by thick foliage, bad lighting and a comically huge cowboy hat. This guy finishes his half-baked diatribe and disappears from the film. Soon we’re watching a hairy ape-man kidnapping topless sunbathers, which I’m pretty sure is the whole selling point of this movie.
The sasquatch costume is about as bad as you’d expect it to be, apart from the face, which is absolutely ludicrous. Believe me – you will not be able to stop laughing at the Bigfoot face. They tried to give it a more "human" appearance, I guess, and wound up with something a Teletubby might grow up into after decades of hard alcohol and drug abuse.
Anyhoo, ol’ goofy face keeps rounding up shrieking hotties and carrying them back to his cave for safekeeping. The girls can’t escape, because the monster stuffs a great big tumbleweed into the cave entrance when he leaves. Old hairy lips never does anything to his cute captives, mind you – he just likes collecting them. Eventually this plotline is abandoned completely, and we never find out what happens to the chicks in the cave.
We now switch over to the snail-paced main storyline, in which a pair of buxom female students goes on a camping trip in the wilderness. One of them is played by Uschi Digard, she of the bizarre European accent, big toothy grin and humongous breasts. Uschi and friend find a commune of hippies out near the lake, and do lots of skinny-dipping. Plenty of overlong sex scenes ensue, and one hippy chick has a jealous nightmare in which she faces down one of the campers in a nude wild-west style showdown. Seeing two women size each other up while wearing nothing but cowboy boots and gunbelts is one of those moments that just make you shake your head and wonder if you’re hallucinating.
A plot suddenly forms 15 minutes before the end of the film. Bad guys with shotguns appear and demand money. Bigfoot appears just as suddenly, defeats the bad guys, and makes friends with the hippies. Hooray!
Gloriously inept, The Beauties and the Beast provides seasoned movie mockers with plenty to laugh at. The protracted sex scenes make it uncomfortable viewing for large groups of people, so if you do find this out-of-print rarity on cassette, it’s probably better to loan it out to friends individually than to organize a big screening. Happy new year! |
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