Curse of Bigfoot (1978), Part 1
How special is this film to me? Let me quote from my own amazing origin story. The hero, a high school-aged Ken Begg:
“I can remember the exact moment watching Bad Movies became a part of my life… The kindling was provided by [the book The 50 Worst Films of All Time]. The spark soon appeared. Late one Saturday night, my mother called up the stairs to where I was ensconced in my room. She bade me downstairs, saying that if I was looking for bad movies, she had a doozy.
There, on her 19 inch bedroom TV screen, ran a movie that I immediately recognized as “The One”. It was a simply awful flick about some high school kids and their adventure with Bigfoot. As the remaining half hour ran, I sat mesmerized. The next day, I looked in the TV Guide and learned that the title of the movie was Curse of Bigfoot. I never looked back.
The fire was kept alive in part due to a comrade-in-arms to share this odd hobby with. I had met Andrew Muchoney in high school as part of a group of people who hung out together. Among his various occupations, Andrew had a background similar to mine in terms of monster movies and sarcasm. I excitedly described Curse of Bigfoot to him. Luckily, by keeping an eye on the TV listings, I was able to find a repeat showing, and garnered an early video recording.
Andrew’s viewing of my copy resulted in a similar enthusiasm. Shortly after, we hooked another classic, Larry Buchanan’s It’s Alive (not to be confused with Larry Cohen’s “mutant baby” flick). We were teenagers, and so brought a certain passion to our new hobby. We would watch Curse of Bigfoot (and later It’s Alive) over and over and over again. Amazed at how slow segments of either film were, we would time sequences by watching them again. Then forgetting how long exactly the scenes were, we would conduct the experiment again.
Sometimes, operating under a “Chicken” principal to see who would surrender to common sense first (the loser), we would watch the films repeatedly over the course of an evening. We’ve between us seen hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Bad Movies in the decade and a half since.* None, though, were studied with the fervor and detailed preoccupation with which we gawked at those two. They were, in terms of the hobby, our first loves.”
[*Now rather longer than that.]
As such things work, my first was not as mature, as subtle, as sophisticated as the loves of later years. Curse of Bigfoot wears its manifest badness on its sleeve, offering everything with casual abandon, withholding nothing. It is cheaply budgeted, woodenly acted, inanely scripted, poorly shot, ineptly edited and cynically composed. You needn’t work for its charms, they are freely given.
I adore it still.
We open with generic, slightly fuzzy swamp footage. The quality and particularly the muted color palette of these shots will strike a familiar cord to anyone who was a public school student from the 1950s through the ‘70s. The accompanying music is equally generic, as are the echo-y monkey chatters used to suggest Primal Nature As Yet Unbesmirched by Man. Actually, it reminds me a great deal of Journey to the Beginning of Time, a dubbed Czechoslovakian dinosaur movie that ran in serial form here in Chicago on the Garfield Goose show back in my youth.
The music itself is clearly meant to inject a note of somewhat ponderous menace to the proceedings. Adding to this is the Narrator, who tells us of Ye Ancient Times, blathering over a tracking shot of black footsteps in the sand, and then a tracking shot of white footsteps (apparently highlighted with a thick coat of Elmer’s Glue) in the sand. These increasingly human-like imprints purportedly mark the evolution of Man.
“It happened! two million years ago. In steaming swamps and prehistoric jungles, the earliest man-like creature walked the Earth. Not human; more beast than man.* A monster of evolution. It walked across the eons of time, slowly changing, becoming more and more human, more and more advanced.”
[*Artist’s Conception]
“Until, in the Pleistocene, just thousands of years ago, Man himself emerged. But the change from beast into Man was not a steady one. Sometimes, primitive Man would find his life threatened, terrified, by the appearance of a monster from the past*!”
[*Artist’s Conception]
With this introduction, we now suddenly espy a fellow in what yet remains the mangiest, most moth-eaten quasi-apeman suit I’ve ever seen. In a shot that instantly procured the film a place in my stony heart, a close-up of the truly laughable mask reveals that the creature’s ‘eyes’ were solid ovals of black plastic. They thus of necessity had to hack a single, yet entirely evident, hole out of one of them, in order that the poor sap in the suit could see anything at all.
“Rah, I am a monsta.”
To the accompaniment of shrill cords, this primordial terror charges drunkenly towards the camera, presumably hoping not to trip for the eleventh time as the poor sap stuck in the suit desperately peers through that teeny little hole in his mask. In any case the creature’s luck holds, and his prey, a primitive forebear of ours, dies writhing on a rock. So gruesome is this attack that the victim unleashes an entire bottle of barbecue sauce to mark his demise.
Cue the opening credits, as we see stock footage of Hopi pueblos and other such non sequiturs. Then we see a sight that will become all too familiar over my long decades as a bad movieologist: The bright sun peering through the branches of a tree, counterintiutively belayed by a bluish tint and loudly dubbed-in cricket sounds, both universal shorthand for ‘day for night’ shots. Even so, it takes a special kind of genius to introduce said footage with, again, a tinted shot of what is either the blazing sun, or the Moon gone supernova.
Anyway, having established that is it ‘night,’ we move on several shots of an isolated (but clearly suburban-looking) house. Then we get another shot of the sun, just to screw with us, I guess. Then it’s on to the ‘woods,’ where something is moving through the foliage. This proves to be a person in a Nehru jacket, a Beatles haircut and a face which appears to have been grievously disfigured by an exploding taffy apple. This is, as you’d guess, a Monster.
The Monster moves rather torpidly through the trees, almost as if he were trying to eat up as much (ironically named) running time as possible. Meanwhile, the director gets fancy, shooting up from the ground so that we get a truly sinister vantage of the underside of the Monster’s chin.
There follow more shots of the house, or, to be technically accurate, a repeat of shots already seen. Here we meet our next character in our Tableau of Destiny, a large black hound sitting in the yard of said house, his ginormous tongue hanging down like a pink, moist Tapestry of Fate. Then trees. Monster. House. The Dog begins barking. Monster. House. Dog barking. Trees. Repeat of Bottom of the Monster’s Chin shot. Dog barking….
Are you starting to see a pattern here?
Eventually, thanks to a pointless yet exceedingly slow and protracted zoom shot—the film was apparently shot in Molass-O-Vision™—we see the interior lights of the house snap on. And so enters our Final Player. This is The Lady, who emerges upon the porch in a voluminous, not to mention hideously ugly, housecoat. To emphasize her irate nature, she pauses to lodge her hands against her hips. “Scotty!” she cries, referring, presumably, to the Dog and not the Monster.
The Lady approaches Scotty so as to continue to remonstrate with him. Amazingly, despite the fact that we clearly saw both her empty hands when she made Angry Arm Triangles on the porch just a few seconds ago, she now enters shot with Scotty bearing a large pitcher of milk. Apparently this is just kept out in the yard and she grabbed it on the way over.
“You’re making enough noise to wake up the dead,” she observes, a statement perhaps provided with ironical intent on the filmmaker’s part. However, since we have no idea if the Monster is undead or not, this is conjecture at best. In any case, she pours Scotty a large bowl of Yard Milk, and to our delight we get to watch Scotty lap up the entire contents of this, more or less in real time.
During this fascinating display, sure to elicit rapt captivation from members of the National Dairy Council, The Lady proceeds to pet Scotty as the Monster continues to shuffle his way towards the scene’s dénouement. Eventually…and I do mean eventually…we cut to a static shot of The Lady in the foreground, who now mimes petting a clearly no longer present Scotty while we in the audience, godlike, observe the exceedingly measured approach of her rather lackadaisical doom.
Only after the Monster reaches her, following roughly half an hour of Ominous Creeping, does Scotty the dog make a halfhearted attempt to bark out a warning. One can only posit that Scotty was in fact an evil Machiavelli of Mutts, who cannily barked earlier solely to lure his poor, trusting mistress to disaster, and then sat sleekly silent as Horrible Death stole leisurely towards her. Presumably this final spasm of barking represented Scotty’s malign, canine gloating. How he must have sneered with doggy derision when The Lady affectionately, if woodenly, queried, “Must you bark at every jackrabbit?”*
[*Despite the brevity of her performance, the woman playing The Lady displays that mystifying complete inability to deliver a sentence in a manner which suggests she has ever actually spoken aloud in real life, or heard anyone else do so. Her stuttering read of “Scotty, if you’re good for the rest of the night, and don’t awaken, anyone else, I’ll promise to take you hunting with me tomorrow,” must be heard to be disbelieved.]
So, let’s take a quiz. Consider the events as I’ve described them. Basically: Monster in woods, dog barks, lady emerges from house, Monster steals upon lady and smites her. So how long do you think such a scene would take to unfold?
Answer: Six minutes.
What’s that, you say? You’re unimpressed? Six minutes doesn’t sound like that much? Let’s experiment further. Turn to the nearest analog clock or wristwatch. Stare at it, without deviation, for six straight minutes. Admittedly, that’s not a perfect analogy, since the clock will provide much more entertainment, what with that second hand whipping around at a dizzying, NASCAR-like pace. Still, it will give you a faint notion of what I’m talking about here.
In any case, just before the actual kacking, we cut to a darkened room and a close-up of an old-style movie projector. In a twist clearly designed to completely BLOW YOUR MIND, it turns out the above described, er, action (?) was actually a film being watched by a class of about a dozen high school students.
Their instructor is one Mr. Whitmore, one of those unctuous prats whose helmet of hair (albeit with one scalp-revealing divot on the side) and smarmily theatrical, self-satisfied manner pronounce his belief that he’s one of those ‘hip’ teachers who can not only teach but ‘relate’ and ‘rap’ with the kids. Lucas Tanner and Room 222 had a lot to answer for. I will say, however, that his drab, inexpensive-looking sports jacket and tie look about right.
Of course, what do you expect from a guy who’s teaching a barely-attended high school class on monsters? No, really. He has old woodcut posters of ancient monsters (the Kraken, etc.) up on display and proceeds to lecture his charges on various cryptozoological subjects. First, though, he bloviates pompously on the ‘film’ they just watched.
“Here,” he opines, “you have the classic example [!] of the Hollywood monster. The movie studios turned out films like these by the hundreds back in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. [Well, sorta….] *chuckles* Werewolves. Vampires. Monsters created by atomic radiation. Creatures from outer space. They all did their part to paralyze the kids at the Saturday matinee…and [arching brow] to give the girls an excuse to move as close as possible to the boy at the drive-in?”
This last is delivered with a slight leer that makes his winking pervertedness easily the scariest thing in the movie. As the students grimace uncomfortably in response, one gets the impression that it’s only previous stern lectures from the principle that keep him from continuing on in the vein: “Then, the smell of her hair. My god, the smell! Then the grappling, the loud, fevered explosions of hot humid breath, the delicious, agonizing fumbling at the buttons…” And then the classmates have another tale to tell during lunch period of the cops escorting Mr. Whitmore out of the room.
Having seemingly mastered himself this time, however, Whitmore moves on. He begins to talk of more modern horror movies. “All of you have seen recent films about the devil and demon possession. Even the film about the great white shark was a monster story of sorts, a modern day sea monster…” Apparently Whitmore is under the misapprehension that actually saying film titles violates some sort of copyright stricture. Meanwhile, the camera cuts to show his students taking in these ramblings with hilarious raptness.
Finally, noting, “Man has always had his monsters,” Whitmore moves on to the woodcut posters mounted on his chalkboard. Apparently smooth transitions aren’t one of his strengths. He continues to treat the subject with complete seriousness, however. “Very real, and sometimes, most unexplainable,” he mumbles, referring to the posters of cartoonish beasties. I’m not even sure what that means. In what contexts are monsters sometimes explainable and other times not? I’m not sure I’m following this.
Whitmore notes that today they’re concluding their “study of the supernatural, the powers and beings outside the reality of nature. So I’ve invited a guest speaker.” This, as we’ll see, proves to be a guy who had a run-in with Bigfoot. So I guess Bigfoot is “supernatural” and “outside the reality of nature.” Just as we’ve always thought of him. Say what you will about Whitmore pedagogical technique, but the man really knows his subject material.
Sadly, this guest has not arrived as of yet, so Whitmore preps the class on the fellow’s qualifications. “This man is a science teacher,” Whitmore declares from his podium, “as well as a widely-read author and a recognized authority on the phenomenon known as the Abominable Snowman, or, as this creature is known in North America, Bigfoot.” Uhm, well, sorta, I guess. Still, a guy who’s both “widely-read” and a “recognized authority”? Can’t argue with those credentials!
And…go to the stock footage, accompanied by library music apparently composed by someone who watched a lot of Johnny Quest episodes. The images include shots of mountains, possibly in the Himalayas. My favorite, however, is this one stretch were we are shown a series of radar arrays. This are accompanied by the line “…the search for these giant, man-like creatures…,” which forces one to ponder exactly how big these Yetis are if they are monitored via radar. ‘Giant’ creatures, indeed!
Said search, we are told, “started with the discovery of mysterious, huge footprints, which obviously were not made by any known form of human life.” And so off to the Himalayas, as we see footage of people looking over a map, a plane in flight, more mountains, the plane again, etc. Whitmore continues to provide (apparently outrightly fictional) details of folks like “mountaineer Eric Stapleton” discovering Yeti tracks.
Like his forthcoming guest, Stapleton was someone to reckoned with. He “was a professional photographer, as well as an educated scientific investigator and mountaineer.” Not to mention a college star-level fullback, recognized gourmet chef and acknowledged expert on the influences of the zodiacal signs on tidal patterns. He also was a highly qualified expert cobbler, a universally respected master of the Wushu martial arts, and wrote a popular Soduku column for a major publication.
Indeed, Stapleton’s photographs of “giant footprints” were, we’re told, published in papers around the world. “For the first time,” Whitmore explains, “the public began to know of the existence of a giant, man-like monster, which actually exists in the Himalayas. A monster known as Yeti, or, Bigfoot.” Uhm, well, sorta, I guess.
“Within two years, the reports of giant footprints within the wilderness areas of the world, spread from the Himalayas, into North America itself. [Well, that proves it.] In May of 1956, a man by the name of James Hunt, not only discovered footprints along the muddy banks of the Fraser River near Alberta, but Hunt actually sighted the Bigfoot monster, running into the woods. Unfortunately, he had no camera with him. And many people here in America said he was crazy, that the footprints were fake!” [Please, that’s what they said about those crop circles that were clearly left by UFOs, right? Cover-up!]
Still, naysayers aside, you can’t argue with the mounting, irrefutable evidence Whitmore provides. “But…over the next few years, reports continued throughout Canada, Washington State, Oregon, even into California. [And we know how level-headed they are in California!] It soon became apparent that Bigfoot was not just a hoax. Something was there, leaving giant footprints deep in the wilderness. Bigfoot was real.” Well, obviously.
Cut to a long stretch of logging processing footage clearly taken directly from an industrial short, complete with driving music. As such, it’s probably the most competently executed sequence we’ll be seeing here. This goes on for several minutes, accompanied only by Whitmore’s voiceovers. Such a thing would surely have impressed even Roger Corman for its thriftiness and spit-in-the-audience’s-eye audacity. (Even though there was a whole cottage industry of films just like this in the ‘70s. More on that later.)
And so we watch several straight minutes of logs rolling into a river (lots and lots of logs) and loggers cutting trees, and bulldozers moving through the woods, and, occasionally, a brief glimpse of a bedroom slipper modified to look like a Bigfoot foot. We also start getting purported Bigfoot POV shots, and given his breathing, the creature was either asthmatic or moonlighted as Darth Vader. In any case, watch for the one, joyous moment where the ‘Bigfoot’ shadow hits a tree and we can clearly see the outline of the camera on the cameraman’s shoulder.
Meanwhile, Whitmore continues building his case, with phrases like “proved beyond a doubt” and assertions such as “It was obvious they were becoming as curious about us as we were about them,” and “Very few educated observers would still deny that something was really out there, there was an incredible man-like monster actually living in the North American woods” and references to “strands of long, black hair tangled in tree branches. Hair which, when examined by scientists, proved to have come from some mysterious creature previously unknown to man.” It’s true, you can see these hair samples in the Smithsonian’s ‘Bigfoot is Real’ wing.
By the way, if I had a dollar for each time Whitmore refers to the creatures as “huge” or “giant” or such, I’d have had enough to fund this movie, and probably a sequel. Keep this in mind for later.
As if this wasn’t all the evidence one could possibly need, we now get more, in form of an anecdote (and ‘original’ footage, to boot!). “These two men were destined to become the first unfortunate persons to encounter Bigfoot, face to face.*” So saying, for a good long while we watch a small truck drive through the forest at a clip of, literally, about five miles an hour. The trucks that transported the nitro in Wages of Fear drove faster than this.
[*Actually, this isn’t even true. As we’ll see, only one of them ‘encounters’ Bigfoot.]
Just when our nerves can take no more hot driving action, we finally see something else: A hairy dude, or something in a fur, or maybe even a Bigfoot, runs across the road way in front of the truck. The guys get out of the truck, and prove to be the ourdoorsy Sean Connery in a Stocking Cap and Flannel Shirt Doug Henning.
Connery goes into the trees to look for whatever it was, and looks, and looks, and looks. Occasionally we get a Bigfoot POV shot, or see the slipper-foot, or cut back to Henning. Mostly we get boredom, accompanied by the same irritating piece of music played over and over again. Eventually Connery picks up a stick, just in case, I guess. He then has it in some shots and not in others as he continues to stroll around. Presumably it was kept in the same place as Scotty’s milk jug.
This goes on a while…a long while. Eventually Henning, presumably fearing his friend has starved to death and is currently just a skeleton, goes off to look for him. The most exciting moment of the entire segment is when Henning nearly slips running down a hill.
After more such shenanigans Henning hears a not-entirely believable scream. He rushes forward and finds Connery sort of rolling on the ground with his hands over his face, but seemingly unhurt. Henning looks briefly confused—he’s not the only one—and End Scene.
The above three paragraphs accounts for fully seven straight minutes of running time.
Astoundingly, at least one of Whitmore’s students is still awake. Apparently he’s the audience identification character (except for the ‘being awake’ part), since he responds by asking “You except us to believe all this?” Confused by this display of common sense skepticism, as public school teachers often are, Whitmore replies by quoting Shakespeare (!!), the whole “there are more things in heaven and earth”, etc. [Well, that proves it.] I think the Bard would have been less embarrassed by this line’s appearance to open King Kong vs. Godzilla than its use here.
The best part is that Whitmore really seems somewhat offended by this, as he is apparently a true believer. (I’m assuming today he’s teaching, in much the same fashion, Anthropomorphic Global Warming.) “The greatest mistake a man can make is to disbelieve what he hasn’t seen,” he responds. Well, that proves it. He then rambles on about “evil powers” and “fantastic creatures,” and warns the youngsters that such disbelief could “sometimes result in a dreadful consequence.” Such as, I assume, sitting in this guy’s class all year. Again, though, most of the students listening to this appear to be drinking in this bilge with the utmost seriousness.
With his promised guest even yet absent, Whitmore decides to waste more time with an impromptu spot quiz. This allows a little camera time for some of the assembled students. To the good, these are pretty evidentially real, actual high school kids, and to the bad (by which I mean their ‘acting’), these are real, actual high school kids. Kids today, who have grown up in a world in which they are themselves constantly recorded, would no doubt find the student’s on-camera awkwardness alien and bewildering.
The first student, Anne, browscrunchingly identifies one of the posters of “ancient sea monsters” (as Whitmore labels them) as “one of the dragons from the 16th century, I think.” Whitmore approves of this answer, and moves on to a poster of what is supposedly a Griffin.
Sadly, this allows for the appearance of the Odious Comic Relief, in the form of a particularly baleful example of the ‘class clown.’ He recites the “bird monster’s” (I thought Whitmore said these were “ancient sea monsters”?) characteristics, which he gleans not from memory from just from staring at the poster in front of him.
However, he then inspires paroxysms of gibbering laughter from his classmates (clearly dubbed in) when he finishes by noting, “It eat everything, except your shoes. When the Griffin got you, all they’d ever find, was your shoes!” The raucous convulsions of mirth this assertion inspires mark the film’s single most outlandish incident.
Whitmore lets the class have its head for the moment. However, he then masterfully reasserts his place as Alpha Male by catching the Class Clown off guard with the following question, delivered, I swear, with a piercing glare. “What I want you to tell us, is when the legendary Griffin got its start?” Class Clown, put in his place, gloweringly ceases his class-disturbing observational humor.
His point made, Whitmore instead calls upon apparent surfer-dude Andy, whose flowing blonde Leif Garret hair presumably made him quite popular with his female peers. Andy is given one pivotal line, and he makes sure to emphasize the key word as instructed: “The Griffin was invented in the fourteen-hundreds by the Germans.”
Why such an awkwardly-phrased statement, and why the emphasis on that particular verb? All is revealed when the recently arrived guest speaker, one Roger Mason, erupts in response. “Really? I wonder,” he growls in his gravelly voice, surging towards Andy and shaking his notebook in the hapless student’s face. “I wonder, young man, if the ancient Griffin was really… invented, as you say… by some, demented madman?!” Happily, some wise soul downloaded this entire scene to YouTube, so you can watch it in all its glory. I mean, the guy really sells that last line and makes it a thing of beauty.
The room falls silent for a moment, as you’d expect, before Whitmore jumps in with a British-like intent to paper over the entire incident. “Roger!” he says, and drags the guy to the front of the class before any actual assault is committed. Even so, you can see why he believes this is the calm, Spock-like logician whose presentation will convince the kids of the reality of Bigfoot, and, apparently, Griffins.
Adding to this is Roger’s own fatalistic admission that “I wonder, if I should have come.” Whitmore has no such doubts though—I mean, even if Roger had killed Andy, he’d still have upwards of a dozen students left—and drags Roger behind the podium. Then, apparently still hoping to put the Recent Unpleasantness behind them, Whitmore again sings Roger’s praises. “I want to introduce you to a man who has spent much of his life assaulting strangers who express doubts as to the existence of mythological creatures as a teacher, and as a patently undermedicated lunatic highly respected scholar.”
Aside from noting that Roger has written several books on Bigfoot, he also again sells the notion that Roger has had a personal “experience…incredible experience…with the giant man-beast of America.” No, not Rosie O’Donnell. And note again the statement that Bigfoot is a ‘giant.’
Roger girds himself to speak, and let’s just say that in the years since his Bigfoot encounter (as we’ll soon see), he has picked up a rather more strenuous style of acting. First he apologizes to the class at large and Andy in particular. Then he appears to look at his notes, presumably making sure this appearance here today is to relate his Bigfoot encounter, and not the several times he was abducted by aliens or fishmen from the lost continent of Atlantis.
Roger notes that Whitmore was kind to introduce him as a “scholar,” since “I’m thought by many people to be nothing more than a madman”—yes, but do they think of you as a demented madman?—“or a liar, if you will.” Even so, the time has finally come to tell the tale that brought us all here today.
“Fifteen years ago,” Roger begins, “in a high school much like this one, I was teaching science to a group of students not unlike yourselves except that they didn’t look like a bunch of damn hippies. Five of those students, three boys and two girls [Editor Ken: I’ve done the math, and that would indeed be five students], were especially fascinated with the study of archeology. ”
But wait, things get even more unlikely! Well, OK, continue to be nearly as unlikely. “So I arranged a field trip,” Roger continues, his ACTING! becoming ever more labored as he continues. “As a result of that…field trip…three of those students will spend the rest of their lives in a mental institute. One girl…cannot speak to this day. She can only stare, straight ahead, in shock. She’s totally unable to communicate with the world outside her own mind.” So I married that gal and have been happy every day since! Good night, ladies and gentlemen!
But Roger’s agonized thesping isn’t done yet. “No!” he barks. “Never doubt that monsters exist. They do. Right here, in North America today. There are creatures that are known simply as Bigfoot. The motto of my story; if you ever see Bigfoot on a golf course, don’t let your students give him a can of beer that they’ve violently shaken as a gag.” I may have mistranscribed the last part; the sound on my DVD was pretty bad.
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JABOOTU the bad movie dimension » Blog Archive » Curse of Bigfoot (1978), Part 2 said this on May 31st, 2010 at 9:50 am