Curse Of Bigfoot

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.


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.  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.  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.  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.  Only after the Monster reaches her does Scotty the dog make a halfhearted attempt to bark out a warning.  Basically:  Monster in woods, dog barks, lady emerges from house, Monster steals upon lady and smites her. 

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 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?”  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.”  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.”  


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.  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.

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.  Five of those students, three boys and two girls were especially fascinated with the study of archeology.  So I arranged a field trip. 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.”  


And so, finally, we get to the moment of the film where you will either fall in love with it, or begin to hate it with a burning passion, or both.  For you see, the entire half hour of stuff covered above was merely filler material added to pad out another, hour-long picture made fifteen to twenty years earlier. This, perhaps, constitutes the titular ‘Curse of Bigfoot,’ since frankly there really isn’t another in evidence. Yes, all these discursions, enough to make Herman Melville himself plead for mercy, were merely ingredients whipped together to manufacture something lengthy enough to play in a two-hour, late night TV slot.  So let us say goodbye to Whitmore and Middle Aged Roger and say hello to Young Roger and a whole new bunch of friends!


Fittingly, this original films starts with…stock footage, library music and a blathering narrator.  The transition really is seamless.  Well, OK, that’s not true.   Even so, the director’s technique clearly hasn’t changed much over the years, so there is a real sense of continuity between the new and old material despite the intervening decades.  This proves especially true once we meet the younger version of Roger Mason, who was played by the same ‘actor,’ Bob Clymire, fifteen to twenty years earlier.


The ‘students’ were probably picked up from drama clubs or the local community theater. However, both Clymire and Bill Simonson, who played Wyman, assay their roles in a naturalistic fashion, completely bereft of the hamminess often evinced by small town thespians.  Their understated line readings are certainly wooden and stilted—unsurprisingly, neither man ever appeared in anything else*—but still play better than if they had chewed the scenery. 


The group is to visit an excavation site situated outside the small rural town of Ivanpah (Pop. 523), where they will look for American Indian artifacts.  So they make their way in an old red pickup truck, with the ‘students’ sitting mostly up upon the side panels of the rear cargo area. Anyway, they soon travel through the metropolis of Ivanpah, and then into the country, through some commercial orange groves.  (The evidence seems to point to the film taking place in California, although that’s a guess.)  The music plays up how gently sylvan and bucolic all this is. Eventually they reach the little house they’ll all be staying in.  They enter the house, which for our purposes consists of the front room, where the student will bunk out in sleeping bags.  Yes, all of them, boys and the girls alike. They also gab a little as they look over a rather dubious display of ‘artifacts.’  They soon head out into the rock country where the dig is.  “I bet you find quite a few Indian petroglyths up in this area,” Roger says, because he’s a science teacher and that’s how they talk.  Linda, the whiny brunette girl (Sharon is the taller, more amenable blonde) of course doesn’t know what a ‘petroglyph,’ so Roger explains for her—and our—benefit.


At the realistically tiny excavation camp, Bill shows them some pottery shards and ‘prayer sticks’ (utterly ordinary sticks). They waste some more time—ours, mostly—and then eventually find a stone tablet set in the ground amidst some brush.  This has scratches on it, which are inevitably declared to be primitive markings, “older than anything I’ve ever seen…these are the types of markings made by cavemen!” (!!!)  They decide—naturally—to remove this ancient, historical paradigm-shifting tablet, and hope to get it loose and back down the hill without breaking it.  So they pull on it, and dig at it, and so on.  “Whoever put that in there wanted it to stay!” someone exclaims.  Eventually, though, they pull it free. To their shock, this unleashes a cloud of thick white smoke.  The tablet wasn’t just set in the ground like a marker; it was covering the entrance to a cave.  Boy, lucky that rope magically appeared, huh?  Anyway, everyone wants to go down, but eventually Bill, Bob and Johnny are chosen.  One of them stumbles across a (weirdly well-lit) side chamber.  This contains a cairn upon which sits a perfectly preserved—one might almost described it as new looking—clay-covered humanoid figure.  The others arrive and Bill labels the figure a “mummy.”  They immediately decide to take it to the little house they’re staying in and, and I swear this is what they’re going to do, store arguably the single most amazing archaeological find in history inside a large garden shed.


Soon it’s safely tucked away inside the shed. “Are you going to dig it open and look inside?” one of the boys asks.  Of course not!  Bill is, after all, a professional.  “I’m afraid if we try opening it here we may destroy something,” he replies.  By gad, sir, you’re right!  Roger agrees, too.  “Sometimes just exposing a body to the air will cause it to fall apart,” he explains. Then Norman (I think, the ‘boys’ are rather generic with their gangly forms and matching haircuts) asserts that he saw the mummy move.  (Bum bum bum!)  He is ridiculed, naturally, but maintains his claim.  Anyway, they all decide to go inside and eat dinner.

Norman, still fretting over what he saw earlier, goes to the shed to check out the mummy.  Sure enough, it begins moving around and he beats feet back to the house.  He incoherently informs the others, and they run outside to have a look. Needless to say, the shed itself proves empty except for the blanket and pieces of the shattered clay shell.  Following this we actually do get a hard-to-see shot (our first since the prologue) of the really incredibly scraggly monster shuffling through the grove.  And with just over twenty minutes of movie left, that leaves lots and lots of time for awesome, non-stop Bigfoot action!


 Not that this is anything to write home about.  A woman is sitting in her living room.  We see Bigfoot lurking outside.  They show a window shattering (clearly candy glass), and…how do I describe this? Apparently it was too awkward to have the guy in the suit climb in through the window.   So they just repeat a brief bit of a zooming close-up of Bigfoot’s face from earlier in the movie—which again focuses our attention on the eyehole cut into the mask—to imply that he’s approaching her.  (Despite the fact that this shot was in, again, broad daylight, and that there is highly inappropriate greenery behind the beast.)  Anyway, this dynamic sequence eats up another couple of minutes.  And needless to say, the woman’s demise occurs off-camera.


The next day the Walt the Sheriff arrives at the group’s house in a really awesome old, black, hearse-like station wagon. Walt admits that he is only buying their story because he knows Bill, and because of the woman’s death.  Bill describes the barely glimpses creature as “larger than a man.”  I’m assuming the man they mean is Dudley Moore. Eventually, they find some broken branches and some blood.  There was a report of a guy shooting at the Bigfoot, and Bill theorizes that this must be his blood.  “What makes you say that?” he’s asked.  Yes, this thought processes on this are quite a mystery.  “This isn’t ordinary blood,” he replies, gazing at it whilst sitting in the deep shadows from the trees.  “This is too dark in color.” 


Cut to the laying of said trap, which makes those elaborate Rube Goldberg-like snares the Mystery Gang used to set up seem like a model of efficiency.  Otherwise their plan involves setting out buckets of petrol.  Apparently having seen The Thing from Another World, they plan to toss the fuel onto the Bigfoot and then set it alight.  This scheme, astoundingly, makes hiding behind a wall of dried out hay bales even more ingenious.  The bait is to be several large packages of meat scraps the Sheriff brought in from town.  

In the brush we see Bigfoot, via the same damn close-up used in the beginning of the film, and during the attack on the woman. He rushes the Sheriff.  Now that we’ve finally gotten to the monster stuff, now the filmmakers rush things.  Failing to raise Walt on the radio, the rest of them all decide to troop over to his location, buckets of gas, flares and all.  They toss the petrol on the creature, and light him up, and he goes up like a dummy filled with straw whose waving arms are being manipulated with strings.  


 I have to say, we got one last quick glance at the kids, and frankly none of them seemed that traumatized.  So much for that “three of them are in a mental institution for life” business.  On the other hand, we can only hope it was whiny Linda who was the girl who never spoke again.  At that point you’d have to call the whole “rampaging monster” thing a draw.


Curse of Bigfoot is perhaps most interesting as an example of good, old-fashioned cinema huckstering.  The original film, the 60 minute Teenagers Battle the Thing, was an attempt at a typical regionally made drive-in teens vs. monster flick.  From there, though, the timeline gets rather murky.  Accounts vary, but the original film was apparently produced circa 1958.  If so, it’s a bit surprising that it was shot in color.  Admittedly, the film in whatever limited release it had—including an eventual VHS release under the Teenagers title—was printed and distributed in black and white.  Still, the fact that the negative was in color is what allowed it to be expanded and resurrected nearly two decades later. Many sources list the revamp as occurring in 1972, fourteen years after the initial shoot.  This seems credible.  However, Whitmore clearly refers to both The Exorcist and Jaws (albeit in a bizarrely elliptical fashion), which were respectively released in 1973 and 1975.  In any case, if the IMDB is to be believed, the revamped Curse of Bigfoot eventually sold as a TV property in 1978.


Isn’t this one reason we watch these obscurities?  Here Curse of Bigfoot is this dreadful little picture, and yet in one aspect, it’s possibly unique.  How many times has an actor appeared, at length, in a single film in scenes shot nearly twenty years apart?  It really lays bare how inadequate old age make-up is.  Luckily, we usually suspend disbelief in this matter like we do in so many other ways.  Even so, Clymire’s return really ties the new and old material together in a way that otherwise would be impossible.