1976 Bigfoot movie
Rating: 2/20 (Fred: 2/20; Josh: 2/20)
Plot: Five teenagers with an interest in archaeology and their teacher go on a field trip with a guy who claims to be an archaeologist. They find a lot of prayer sticks and some rocks. I'm not even fucking joking. That's seriously what the script of this movie had them find. Prayer sticks! After a lot of unnecessary scenes of the characters standing around or eating, they stumble upon a cave where they find a mummy. That mummy later comes to life as a Bigfoot creature and wreaks havoc. Three of those teenagers, sadly, had to be institutionalized, and it turned their teacher into a real grouch.
Bigfoot isn't spotted very often, but I found something that is even more rare than the elusive beast: Interesting parts of this movie!
So here's how this happened. There was a movie called Teenagers Battle the Thing made around 1963 that makes up the bulk of this. It was unreleased. In 1976, two of the kids in the original played two entirely different characters, and an extended exposition was filmed to set up the last hour of the movie which was that original early-60's movie. So you have a half an hour of exposition where a guy (or girl--we couldn't tell) in a pantsuit gets attacked by the titular monster, a teacher in what must be some sort of Introduction to Monsters class that we didn't have at my high school talks about monsters and tells a story about two guys who get attacked after seeing the monster, and a surly guest speaker comes in to that classroom and shares his story--the original movie's story--with the class. And then it ends abruptly.
And in between what passes as important plot points in all this? Lots of extraneous shots of slowly-driving trucks (twice anyway with two different trucks), shots of the teenagers and two adults scaling a mountain, weird day/night continuity errors made weirder by having dialogue about seeing stars, conversations about going into town to buy pop, a minute-long scene involving a character giving another character some money for an orange pop, lots of prayer stick (I swear I'm not kidding about these) explanation, and a few shots of the monster itself. The monster's obviously a dude in a costume since this is either the late-50's, early-60's, or 70's when this is being made. It's a terrible costume. The monster's got something wrong with one eye, iffy fangs, and patches of hair missing, and I'm not sure why the makers of this decided to ever show a close-up of the thing. Well, just look at the cover. I guess hundreds of thousands of years in a cave will do that to you though. It's hard not to laugh whenever the monster shows up on screen which is not a good thing considering this is supposed to be a horror film. The acting's almost as ugly, and curiously--though not surprisingly at all--none of the credited actors in this movie had a second acting role in their filmographies. The non-credited ones did, including Jackey Neyman who was Debbie in Manos: The Hands of Fate. Boy, think about it. You're in two movies, and one of them is this pile of crap and the other is Manos: The Hands of Fate. That's what I'd call a career. It's also the only movie the director made. And it's the only movie I've felt the need to apologize for to the other Bad Movie Clubbers, one that required a pep talk in the middle just to get everybody to man up and make it through the thing. Curse of Bigfoot will numb your mind as it takes seemingly hours to get to any kind of plot at all and mostly seems to cut out what most people would consider the good parts to show the mundane, like a weird experimental film almost.
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