The Bukwas Stops Here: My Favorite Bigfoot Movies

Whether or not you believe in some hidden race of yet undiscovered nine foot tall wood-boogers is irrelevant when it comes to the bossman of the forest's varied silver screen appearances over the years, providing viewers with both shocks n' shlock in everything from half-baked mockumentaries to vintage porn. Whatever your preference in cinematic bipedal crypto-primates may be, there's probably something you'll enjoy here. Or laugh hysterically at, in some(most, really) cases.




16) Legend of Bigfoot(1976)

"That's not Bigfoot! That's my wife!" might sound like the punchline to a joke, but it could also double as the synopsis for this mockumentary by legendary outdoorsman and hoaxer, Ivan Marx.




15) Beauties and the Beast(1974)

"Hey Mack, would you mind telling that leg-jacked bimbo underneath you that your bag is slappin' off of to roll slightly to the right? She's on top of my leaf pouch and my magic berries are in there..."



14) Bigfoot(1970)

D-cupped go-go girls get lugged off by libidinous mate-starved monsters(translation: phony-looking monkey suits) while John Carradine enlists teenaged dirtbikers to help him blow off dynamite on even phonier-looking sets.





13) Capture of Bigfoot(1979)

Forget about the embarrassing white Bigfoot suit that belongs on a Lost in Space set chasing Dr. Smith around some foam boulders for a minute, and realize that this movie houses one of the most ridiculous dummy shots in cinema history.



12) Snowbeast(1977)

'Jaws'(1975) in the made-for-tv snow; tough guy Bo Svenson hogs eighty-six minutes of screen time, the Yeti gets two.



11) Sasquatch-The Legend of Bigfoot(1977)

A mid-seventies mockumentary with more padding than payoff, but if baggy gorilla suits silhouetted against the skyline, staged animal attacks, and encounter dramatizations are what socks it to you, then here you are. The much scrutinized Patterson/Gimlin Big Suit footage also figures prominently, as one would expect in this type of thing.



 10) Mysterious Monsters(1975)

That mask-uatch bears a striking resemblance to Rene Auberjonois.  Peter Graves also says "Ah."




9) The Untold(2002)

Lance Henriksen and pals search the dense forest for his missing daughter and his company's missing DNA sequencing technology and are, in turn, hunted down, one by one like animals by what's tantamount to the live-action version of this guy right here.



8) Yeti - il gigante del 20. secolo(1977)

Whatsa mattah you, Italian Disco-Yeti, why you change-ah you size right-ah before my very eyes-ah?




7) Curse of Bigfoot(1975)

This movie is undeniable proof that Bigfoot doesn't exist, because, if he did, he'd surely lumber down out of the wilderness and put his colossal skunk apey foot up the asses of everybody that was still alive that had a hand in making this one. Pure rotten enjoyment.



6) Abominable(2006)

Bigfoot bites a guy's head in half like a goo-filled chocolate easter bunny. Do I really need to add anything to that?



5) Shriek of the Mutilated(1974)

The greatest global-networking-cannibal-cult-uses-yeti-as-a-cover-to-eat-groovy-collegiates movie ever made.



4) Creature From Black Lake(1976)

A hippified conscientious objector named Rives and a 'Nam vet  named Pahoo who hates fried chicken, on an Bigfoot investigative grant from college, drive to the bayou and encounter amorous hillbilly girls, Jack Elam in his long johns, and are serenaded by Dub Taylor's countrified warbling. Bigfoot is not amused.





3)The Legend of Boggy Creek(1972)

John Chesna knows every word to this movie and sings all the songs, you don't even have to ask him to, most of the time. I hear Smokey may even make him an honorary Crabtree in a ceremony someday down there in the lonely bottoms.




2) Horror Express(1972)

When an ancient brain-sucking alien intelligence inhabits a suddenly unfrozen 'squatch on a passenger train, you'd better make sure Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are on board. Cossack Telly cracks a mean interrogative lash, too. Old school late night television delight.



1) Night of the Demon (1980)

Anyone who's seen this one knows full well, this movie lost it's footing during the pre-credit sequence and plunged headlong into a fifty-five gallon vat of crazy, from which some good egg threw it a towline comprised entirely of insane gore set pieces, but despite game rescue attempts, it drowned in the fucking crazy, any ol' ways.

"The Legend of Boggy Creek"(1972)d/Charles B. Pierce

We'll lumber into the month of April with a drive-in classic right out of the shadowy bottomlands of seventies' Texarkana folklore, as realized by local ad salesman and film set decorator Charles B. Pierce largely on a hundred thousand dollar donation by one of his clients, only to return some twenty-five million dollars at the box-office to date, standing as one of the most successful films of 1972.With the aforementioned budget limitations, Pierce cast his movie with many locals, using a gaggle of high schoolers as a makeshift film crew and approaching would-be actors with his plans while haunting a gas station(!) while producing, directing, filming, and even crooning the title track himself, resulting in a shabby-yet-authentic feel to his cryptozoological mockumentary, which would later inspire genre hit The Blair Witch Project(1999).The memorable artwork for the one sheet, as seen above, was supplied by none other than Ralph McQuarrie, who also designed the original Star Wars trilogy.The titular "Fouke Monster" has been reportedly seen by the southern Arkansas community as far back as the fifties, described as a hulking reddish-brown hominid of abhorrent fragrance, lonely cry, and giant three-toed footprints that it's been known to leave in the surrounding beanfields, and upon the eyewitness testimony of these townsfolk Pierce drew his own inspiration.Despite some amateur camerawork, acting performances, and a creature that looks at a glance to be a combination of a Howard Stern wig and a cheap gorilla costume, this one is probably the most terrifying G rated movie ever made this side of The Apple Dumpling Gang(1975), Escape to Witch Mountain(1975), or Benji the Hunted(1987).

"ZOMG! The hen just layed like, FOUR EGGS.."
After endless fuzzy eco-shots of wetlands and wilderness are interrupted by the Fouke monster's trademark 'lonely cry'(more resembles somebody taking a blowtorch to a baboon's egg purse, but that's just me), we see the narrator(Vern Stierman) as a young boy(Chuck Pierce, Jr) excitedly hurrying through countless fields to get to a country store, where he tells the local rocking chair set about a wild man terrorizing his family's home nearby, resulting in the coots laughingly promising to fix the wagon of any hairy varmints at a later date and sending him off.On-screen testimonial and lo-fi re-enactments of encounters with the creature from residents with expositive narration about Fouke's swampy and desolate locale follows; the prodigious Crabtree family apportions much of this screen time to their avail: Smokey's got a colossal hat, while teen trapper/fisher extraordinaire, Travis, is later immortalized in a frothy country ballad that'd break Boxcar Willie out in hives.To further serve the deceased Equus ferus caballus the taste of the lash, Buddy Crabtree's playing James Crabtree, and Jeff Crabtree is in the role of Fred Crabtree, both of whom flounder into the creature's path packing redneck heat with similarly anti-climactic results."He always travels the creeks...", notes the narrator, matter-of-factly.He also likes to peep tom around Mary Beth Searcy's pad, with a hot lead-tittie hereby administered by swamp-savvy Travis directly afterwards; a moment of silence for the kitteh, expiring from fright during the night.Wounded, the beast still manages to punk out the finest hunting dogs that Texas and Arkansas had to offer, respectively, in a hunt that goes as well as DAC on Showtime at the Apollo.Then the real terror begins in the form of a wildlife montage accompanied by a bromidic ballad as cackled by the film's director.C'mon everybody, sing along at home:This is how the story plaaaaays, a world on which we seldom gaaaaze, apagefromthebookofyesterdaaaaays...

She was astounded to find 1962 on the back porch, looking for it's 'secretary look' back...
Hey Travis Crabtree, wait a minute for meee.Let's go back in the bottoms, back where the fish are bitin', where all the world's inviiiiiitin'...Herb Jones, on the other hand, enjoys the secluded penetralia of his shack out in the bottoms, visited occasionally by those Crabtree boys what furnish him tobacco and sugar and whatnot.Though the penurious old codger who once blew part of his foot away in a boating(?) accident makes for intriguing filler, his segment is creature-free.Some footprint investigation and speculation thereafter segues us into Bessie Smith's encounter with the unkempt brute, who then procedes to intrude on three isolated girls' pajama party as a gent named Walraven reports on his hide-ripped hound from a nearby mobile home."The creeks...he always travels the creeks.", adds the narrator.Next, Charles Turner and Don Ford, two locally employed cattlehands, move their wives and small children into a small house together to conserve money, only to have the infernal wretch harrass their lonely wives, until they're forced to flee to the landlord, who's gotta be distantly related to Tarantino somehow, I'm telling ya.The next day Bobby Ford and young Corky Hill find strange three-toed footprints in the mud while fishing Boggy Creek for a minute, and that very night, the Fouke monster is fixin' to return; to shamble around their property, sticking a hairy mitt through the bathroom window while Bobby's dumping for knowledge.The men of the house fire several rounds at the cryptid, which a constable later dismisses as a panther that's been living underneath the house, from the porch.After much fart-assing about with flashlights in the dark, the creature man-in-a-suit-handles Bobby, causing the traumatized hillbilly to crash through the front door while it's closed, in a state of stupefaction.Bobby recovers rapidly, and the Fords and Turners?Well, they mosey outta town with no future plans of ever returning, believe you me, Buster.Finally, we see the adult narrator revisiting the empty house, pondering the existence of such things and mysterious sounds in the night.Another monster howl cues a longer, more embarrassing reprise of the embarrassing main theme over a title montage...

Hey, what's (insert-your-mother's-name-here)'s swampy bottom doing out here in the swampy bottoms?
This one goes out, hands down, to Chesna, a cat I met through Doc that helped keep me reviewing flicks after my zine stint through his Bigfoot website; probably the only guy on this plane of existence that can pretty much recite tonight's review, verbatim.He'll even sing both tunes for you, as I learned one summer night while zooted sac around a fire at his place.Once we get the upcoming YouTube channel off the ground, you can expect to see and hear some of just what the hell I'm talkin' about, oh my cohorts.My earliest memories of this one stem from late night network television broadcasts as a young jar o'sauce, making light of the monkey suit with my kindred movie spirits and laughing at Bobby Ford busting through the door in a state of shock.What can I say, we were an odd conglomerate, me and my lads.I can throw this one(I dove at the Hen's Tooth bare bones dvd on sight, years ago) in every once in a while, and it takes me right back to those glorious days where anything seemed possible. Though Boggy Creek, from a technical standpoint, would merit somewhere between one and two Wops, I'm forced to give it the entertainment value score instead, which is three Big ones, all the way.A cult classic in every sense of the term.

" 'Try Texarkana, Louie,' you said.'There's bound to be bananas down there,' you said."

"Yeti - il gigante del 20. secolo"(1977)d/Gianfranco Parolini

Only in glorious Italy, my friends.Only in Italy.On several occasions in the past, we've examined several Jaws rip-off paroxysms from the boot, but tonight, we'll be looking at a King Kong rip-off instead, a mediterranean movie miscarriage so farcically inept, it almost makes the turgid-budgeted 1976 DeLaurentiis remake seem exceptional in comparison.Overseeing the project from the director's chair was Gianfranco Parolini, whose previous spaghetti western and sword and sandal credits included the impressive Sabata(1969), Adios Sabata(1971), and La furia di Ercole(1962), and who duplicated DeLaurentiis' construction of a massive and expensive animatronic robot that ends up seeing precious little screen time in the finished product.Instead, Parolini enlists Italian television actor Mimmo Crao to portray the titular snowman, who kind of looks like E.L.O. frontman Jeff Lynne circa the On the Third Day(1973) album, wearing only spirit-gummed crepe wool and a smile.The entire production is plagued with ubiquitous hokey movie scientifics and ineffective blue screen effects, where the yeti(who's got his own horrible, dated disco theme, as performed by the Yetians, mind you)can be anywhere from ten to a thousand feet tall, depending on the shot composition.Continuity?We don't need no stinkin' continuity.Add a supporting cast of bad dialogue-spewing comic book characters, headed by Antonella Interlenghi, who would later turn up as a teenaged teleporting flesh-chewer in Lucio Fulci's Paura nella città dei morti viventi(1980), and who really shoulda known better here, to be honest.Can't blame her for going by the screen name 'Phoenix Grant' on this one.More embarrassingly bad than those checked polyester curtain pants my parents had the balls to dress me in towards the end of the seventies, and though pictures of those babies may have thankfully disappeared over time, prints of this cinematic eyesore are still out there, floating around, and causing riotous unintentional laughter among the audiences ridiculous enough to sit through it, your humble narrator included.Onwards!

"He is sooo big, the man of snow.But he won't harm you, the yeee-tiii!"Come on, you know the words, people.
After watching some modestly impressive stock footage of glacial ice breaking off and being carried off into the sea, we meet Professor Wasserman(John Stacy), who's asked by an industrialist named Hunnicut(Eddie Faye) to head off an expedition to the coast of Newfoundland to humanely study the enigmatic Yeti(Mimmo Crao), discovered lodged in a capacious chunk of ice."An avalanche probably caught him while he was sleeping on the ice millions of years ago...then perhaps an earthquake caused the ice to break up and fall into the Arctic Ocean.", surmizes the professor, while Hunnicut declares the frozen fella to be the new Hunnicut Enterprises trademark, since nothing says 1970's multi-national corporation like an ice-encrusted crypto-hominid giant, really.Hunnicut's grandkids, Jane(Antonella Interlenghi) and her effeminate mute brother, Herbie, also oversee 'Operation Yeti', which, after extensive flamethrowers melt the bulk of the outer layers of ice off of the snowman, escalates to packing him into a massive plexiglas phone booth as towed by helicopter to 10,000 feet, where he can thaw the rest of the way, and comfortably at that, at the altitude of his native Himalayas.After several obvious shots of a model helicopter flying with a miniature yeti doll hanging below, the missing link grumpily awakens from his million year slumber with a booming scream that almost knocks his toy airlift out of the sky.Back on terra firma, Yeti breaks the fuck out like the shingles to the stupefaction of onlooking media types and lab coats in attendance, carrying off Jane and Herbie into the Canadian wilderness in the process.Jane's touch gives the Yeti an erect nipple(!), and he repays her by catching fish for them to eat, while Herbie's collie, Indio, trots off to find the professor.When he arrives, he sees the yeti using fish bones to comb Jane's hair while she uses hairspray to tend to the beast's wounds."Yeti, come!", she says, and the big lug bats his eyelashes at her flirtingly, apparently comprehending a language like English perfectly already.Phew...

Put it on a hanger right next to your "I'm With Stupid" tee in the nostalgia closet.
Not wasting a moment, Hunnicut launches a huge publicity campaign, consisting of cheap iron-on "Kiss Me Yeti" t-shirts and drivers refueling their vehicles being encouraged to "Put a Yeti in your tank and you'll have giant power!".In Toronto, Yeti is greeted by a parade(cue:awful disco theme), then makes his media debut atop one of Hunnicut's hotels where paparazzi flashbulbs whip him into a Kong-style frenzy where the ensuing chaos traps Jane in a glass observation elevator, which Yeti plays with like a yo-yo(!) by yanking the cables from above, before saving her from plummetting to her demise and strolling off through the city streets with the girl(or an unreasonable toy facsimile thereof) in his massive mitt.“If the Yeti doesn’t get oxygen within the next ten minutes he’ll die!”, Wasserman surmises, before being beaten to death by a couple of thugs paid by one of Hunnicut's rivals(Tony Kendall) in front of the Yeti's eyes, as he's ducked into a warehouse away from the local police force.Not content to stomp these bastards, Yeti uses his toes to strangle one of the men instead(!!).Herbie is held at gunpoint(Who's he going to tell, the kid's a mute, remember?) and his dog Indio is shanked while trying to guard the children.Yeti smashes through the warehouse wall just as the head baddie is about to C.T.F.O. Jane, forcing him to drive off with Herbie as a hostage.Yeti throws trees and boulders to nullify the other goons in cars, and scares the final carload of cohorts into falling off a cliff(!!!).After rescuing Herbie, he's attacked by a construction crane(or a Tonka-produced facsimile thereof) which he flips over, finally putting the fatal boot, extra large-style, to the last evildoer."This world is not for you. Go back to the wilderness, to the mountains, where life is like you knew it.”, Jane tells the Yeti, who sheds a single tear as he lumbers off into the forest as a bark is heard in the distance.You guessed it, Indio pulled through, afterall, and the movie ends with the boy and his dog running at each other in slow motion like a couple of love-smitten fools.Somebody fetch me a bucket.

"Eh!C'è ne di voi leccapiedi quello è giù là hanno soldi per il telefono?"
Recorded off of a late Saturday night television broadcast on Channel 29(shoulda left the eighties commercials in, might have been more entertaining), as evidenced by the tracking problems in the screencaps, and ripped to dvd, I'm sure my copy of this epic failure could be upgraded by now with a Pal region special edition or some such nonsense, but I'd rather spend my dough on smokes, choice hallucinogenics, or rad inked up women of low moral fiber at this point.I know how to live, motherfuckers.Asie from the aforementioned titles, Parolini also directed things like Diamante Lobo(1975), È tornato Sabata... hai chiuso un'altra volta(1971), and Se incontri Sartana prega per la tua morte(1968).In fact, eleven years would pass before he took the chair again after this movie, and that adventure, Alla ricerca dell'impero sepolto(1988), would be his last to date.Interlenghi would keep busy throughout the eighties, in fare like La Cage aux Folles 3: The Wedding(1985), but most recently appeared in an Italian television mini-series a few years ago.Crau, who would appear as Thaddeus in the Jesus of Nazareth mini-series the same year, has also enjoyed extended success on Italian television ever since.Let's hope he's gotten a haircut and put some clothes on in the years that followed.Kendall, born Luciano Stella, scored genre credits in movies like The Whip and the Body(1963), El ataque de los muertos sin ojos for Amando De Ossorio in 1973, and Las garras de Lorelei the following year.On the scale, Yeti's a one Wopper all the way, but as you can probably tell, it makes for pretty entertaining one-off viewing under the right circumstances.

"Lynyrd who just crashed a Convair CV-300 into my sauce bag??!!".

"Yeti"(2007)d/Paul Ziller

The people behind the original made-for-television movies being churned out for the Sy Fy Network are nothing, if not consistent. Add Yeti, which was apparently known as Raksha:Curse of the Snow Demon at one point, to the over-brimming list of z-grade genre fare the station unapologetically serves up on a regular basis.Yeti makes 1977's Snow Beast,a Jaws ripoff tele-pic starring Bo Swenson, look like Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years,and its...ahem...director(used loosely here), Paul Ziller, makes Troma's Lloyd Kaufman look like Steven Spielberg.I'm exaggerating here, right? Unfortunately, no, I'm really not.Everything about this production is laughably bad.Everyone involved should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.Dom DeLuise's oldest son, Peter, once had a flourishing career on television's 21 Jump Street at the end of the eighties.Johnny Depp was also on that show, now earning a staggering seventy-five million dollars a year in movies.Peter's in Yeti.Ed Marinaro was once a rising star on hit series Hill Street Blues at the outset of the eighties.His co-star,Daniel Travanti won two Emmys and a Golden Globe.Ed was in Yeti.
Doc n' I set out to get through this travesty last night, with the aid of a sizeable helping of Nagasaki Devil's Food cake to blur the lines of difficulty in undertaking such a task.Having personally sat through ten whole minutes of it the day I picked it out of a WalMart five dollar bin(the movie should be given away free in boxes of trash bags as "starter garbage"), I should have known better.Unintentional laughs followed.Ninety minutes worth.My roommate's annoying habit of repeatedly bringing up the "time remaining" display made perfect sense for once.How much longer.Okay,how about now?

Marc Menard as...Peyton Elway. Oh, you clever writers!
The "State College Grizzlies" are a collegiate football team(whose colors are brown-on-brown and whose gear looks to have been purchased at a flea market)flying to Japan for a bowl game,when their cgi plane crashes in the Himalayas(or Canada) during an electrical storm.The survivors(those would be the people still talking and moving, usually with some sort of blood appliance somewhere on their faces)include Peyton Elway(Marc Menard), the hot shot quarterback, Sarah(Carly Pope), the one girl not impressed with Elway's sub-Photo Shop level sports magazine articles,and Kyra(Elfina Luk), a dreadlocked Asian whiner, all look pretty comfortable arguing in light hoodies and short sleeved polos for people that have crashed into the caps of a mountain range permanently covered with snow and below the freezing point temerature-wise most of the year.So they huddle around a fire about the size of the right front grill on your stove and bicker about cannibalism amongst themselves.Two sportos venture out into the elements looking for the plane's radio, but they find the cave of the fearsome Yeti instead.While one jock is instantly a goner, the other, more resilient meathead fractures both his legs in fleeing the murderous creature,using both the plane's radio and his dead buddy's severed forearm as makeshift leg splints.Back at the fuselage, three energy bars aren't providing the daily caloric intake these sportos need to maintain physical excellence,so Peyton waltzes over to the line of frozen bodies with a shard of glass and comes back to the fire with six perfect,bloodless cube-chunks of spam and a sheet of metal from the wreck to fry them up on.Quarterback, hell, this guy's a surgeon.

In a pinch, a rubber severed arm makes a handy splint for a broken leg.
Inexplicably, the oriental shitlocked hippie sets the frozen bodies on fire to keep her friends,who turned to cannibalism after all of one day of being stranded, from eating them(explain to me again how cooking flesh renders it inedible,please?), and the titular snowman with a prostethic sagital crest like an Italian floor vase from making off with them to its lair,sub-video game level cgi Hulk-hopping through the white stuff.The "rescue team" consists of Peter DeLuise and some brawd with a terrible eastern bloc accent.When they zero in on the survivors' coordinates, they pitch a tent in the snow and catch some z's instead of radioing for more help, or trying to actually reach them, god forbid.Garcia, of the imaginative leg splint clan, returns to camp, only to get blasted in the eye with a flare gun by Raven, the self-centered dick who's been hoarding the chocolate bars for himself.The yeti converges on the kids, who throw a snowball at it before eating snowflakes and death at the three fingered latex gloves of the infernal beast,who skirts Sarah back to the cave for some spooning(!).Peter DeLuise gets beaten to death with his own severed leg, and there's a makeshift yard marker-turned-spear chained to a huge boulder used to pull the creature off a cliff to its death that'd have Wile E. Coyote green with envy.Except there's two of them, and the one that got buried in stock avalanche footage moments earlier, well yeah, he's finally dug himself out.The movie's over, but the headache remains.

How do you say "obviously fake" in Tibetan Sanskrit?
Ziller has thirty-four films, mostly made-for-television, under his belt,including such gems as Polar Storm, Ice Quake, Iron Golem, and Beyond Loch Ness. Here's hoping he someday figures out how to do it properly.Bad acting, piss poor effects and lazily crude cgi sequences, limp dialogue, inane story, it's all here promising you an embarrassing hour and a half of your life that you'll never get back, and if that sounds palatable somehow, then you'll understand the single wop rating I've bestowed upon it, as more of the same SyFy pulp they've been steadily pouring us for years now.It's not actual juice, nor is it healthy for you in any way, but once in a while, it's kinda fun going down.One wop.

When you get done beating him with his own disembodied leg, could you hit me with it a few times for watching this?

"The Untold"(2002)d/Jonas Quastel

Once again,the Boss of the Woods pokes his anthropoid peepers out from behind a massive redwood just long enough for another genre cameo,this time a Canadian indie feature,known south of the maple leaf,as "Sasquatch",and marking the first of a few sightings in the past decade, of Lance Henriksen in a 'foot flick.Andrea "Rescue Me" Roth is also on board here for a surprisingly fair slice of squatchploitation with several passable moments that just might leave an oversized footprint in the hairs on the back of your necks if you aren't careful.My main argument against the film achieving anything more than meager monster-driven mediocrity is a double-edged gladio;Adequate suspense is built throughout the movie with shadows in the trees and the obligatory heat based monster's eye view a la Predator.It's just that after all that buildup,the film suffers from terminal Snowbeast-itis(see:1977 Bo Svenson Yeti-terrorizes-ski-resort-and-ends-up-looking-like-missing-member-of-the-Banana-Splits telepic for details).Thyrza Richardson,the FX-slinger here,totally dropped the ball,opting for a baldheaded,oilslicked Captain Caveman look,instead of the more familiar hair-covered evolutionary rascal we've come to know and love in other efforts.Slightly attention-grabbing,but better served with the rest of Richardson's work on Stargate:Atlantis than carrying a murderous MoMo movie.Also raspberry-worthy here is the total lack of the red red kroovy throughout the picture.Everybody knows when you place several unlikeable characters in the middle of a vast b-movie forest setting,the payoff for the audience is seeing them snuffed in gross and inventive ways.You aren't gonna get any of that round these parts,stranger.The few deaths are sadly,off-camera and pretty bloodless.If those factors were both strengthened beforehand,this could have very easily gotten mo' love.The story,is said to be based upon "true events".Yeah,and an hour and a half of Gallagher smashing fruit and vegetables with a mallet is said to classify as comedy.

Did Andrea Roth have a bobbler double?If so,does said pair o' stunt tits have my phone number?
Self-made president of Bio Comp Industries,Harlan Knowles(Henriksen) has organized an expedition into the mountains,headed by Winston Burg(Phil Granger),a big game hunter/author,and guided by one of those annoying all-knowing part-native American types named Tyne(Russ Ferrier),to locate any survivors from an earlier company plane crash which his daughter,Tara(Erica Durance),was a part of.Knowles must have assembled his crack team with an emphasis on heavy douchebaggery;Burg is a flask-tipping snob,while Tyne's the obligatory outdoorsman who's probably never seen a cordless phone,let alone a gps unit.And they get worse from there.Knowles' technerd assistant is a thinly veiled cryptozoology buff who's constantly spouting folklore and striking out with the ladies when he isn't looking for a random Cadborosaurus in the waters of the mountain's lakes.The team's eye candy,Marla Lawson(Roth)is a ruthless gold-digging opportunist slut,offering Knowles a slice of hair pie as reward for letting her plunge her siphoning proboscis into his company's cash veins.Knowles,well,he looks around a lot,thinking about all the opportunities he's blown to salvage his relationship with his daughter,who could be very well toes up at this point.Something spies on the bickering city-slickers as they trudge through the forest,just beyond their line of sight,in the shadows.Burg fumbles the ball in finding the plane wreckage,which,by coinciding scratches in the towering redwoods,was dragged for miles by something from the point of impact.Burg wings a male grizzly bear,who turns up writhing in agony on the forest floor with a broken neck from a massive boulder wielded by...something.

Sasquatch or early Pogues gig closeup.You make the call.
After happening upon a cave full of primitive drawings along the way,and while Tyne discovers rancid-smelling hair samples on trees,and Burg is busy revealing himself to be a drunken story-embellisher with a nervous trigger finger and little nature savvy,Knowles stumbles upon the real reason he put the search party together,a black metal box that resembles an old top-loading vcr with a shoulder strap,the portable prototypical focus of a project called Huxley,that can classify any living human or animal's dna in seconds.So yeah,put that "World's Best Dad" coffee mug away for now.The techdork gets a video camera in the plane wreckage working,and Knowles is treated to Blair Witch-style narrative from his hysterical daughter after the crash,and the other survivors shooting wildly out of the twisted hull at whatever it is that dragged them from the site,having taken a blood sample from outside the plane that the Huxley machine,with its full database of all known living things,classifies as "unknown".After Burg is stripped of party leadership,he's relieved of living by a massive shadowy figure in the darkness.While the others search for Burg,Lawson makes off into the woods with the dna unit,and after Tyne discovers a sheltered burial mound that includes month-dead plane wreck passengers,including Knowles' daughter,and Winston's fresh corpse to boot.They stumble upon Lawson's twisted body in the foliage,with Knowles snatching up the undamaged Huxley box,then ordering the remaining survivors to descend back down the mountain without him,allowing him a mano a claw-o square off with the shadowy hulk that killed his daughter.Knowles loses.Awakening from his shit-kicked-outta-me,he discovers he is lying next to a primitive grave for the sasquatch that his plane hit and killed when it went down,and a living sasquatch observing him from a short distance away.Understanding why the beast had been so bloody umpy in the first place,he raises his rifle,but instead of plugging the legendary monster,he shoots the box instead.When he looks back to see the creature's response,it has disappeared into the mist.On the mainland,nobody believes the crazy technerd's wild Bigfoot stories,and he gets institutionalized for his troubles.True story according to who,Baron fuckin' Munchausen?

Using his magical crypto-vision,Bigfoot noticed the selfish campers were burning a fattie without him.
While Henriksen continues acting in movies and television,even supplying his trademark gravel-grinding voice to video games,Ferrier worked mostly on tv series,and hasn't done anything of note in a couple of years.The same is true for Granger,who can be spotted in Galactica spinoff,Caprica,and the V series remake.Roth,the curvy Canuck,most recognized as Denis Leary's troublesome wife on Rescue Me,also does other tv work.Director Quastel,who made his debut with tonight's entry, continues to toil away in lesser genre fare like Ripper 2:Letter From Within,and Scourge.Like I said earlier,it's no Legend of Boggy Creek(1972),but then again,it isn't as bad as Sasquatch Hunters(2005)either.As middle of the road monster mayhem(light on the mayhem)it earns two wops on the ratings scale.Worth a look,especially if you dig He of the Oversized Footprint and Smelly Ass forest clan,and the myriad of b-level movies made in His image.

"I'm not gonna chuck you through the forest,Henriksen.You were in Piranha Part 2,you've suffered enough."

"Creature From Black Lake"(1976)d/Joy N. Houck,Jr.

Yeah,yeah,yeah.For a guy who was sued for his house by his father,and who doesn't get to talk to or see his kids ever,I believe I've heard "Happy Father's Day" just about enough for one year.Put the shmaltzy greeting card from Dollar General and ugly tie on the kitchen table,and run out and see how long it takes to bury your brother in the sandbox already.I'm gonna throw your mother over my shoulder,take her upstairs and give her a bullet train ride to Orgasmo,doing things to her that would have Elagabalus him(her?)self calling for censorship.And,no,you can't have the car.What you can have,is tonight's review,keeping with the recent monsteriffic trend here at the Wop.Be thankful for the little things in life,is what I'm telling you.
We turn tonight once again to the wildman of the woods for our movie review,and where most cinematic venues concerning everyone's favorite cryptid fall miserably flat,this low budget drive in staple of the mid-seventies manages to deliver.Written by Jim McCullough,Jr.,who also plays Dub Taylor's grandson Orville in the film,and directed by the late Joy N. Houck,Jr. and featuring the acting skills of Jack Elam,John David Carson,and Dennis Fimple,who have all joined the choir invisible,unfortunately,tonight's entry serves up some decent atmosphere and creepy swamp locations while not revealing very much of its titular anthropoid,which works in its favour here for the most part.If you've got a fifteen thousand dollar Bigfoot costume,show the damned thing off.If you don't(these guys didn't),then hide your shortcomings in the shadows,behind trees,etcetera.People are often more scared by what they don't see,as has been said so many times over the years.As it stands,this movie rises near to the top of the vast sea of Squatch-sploitation films so popular in the seventies,and remains a grainy,groovy good time to be had.

"Let's see Pahoo find me here!"boasts the bellicose beast.
Rives(Carson)departs the windy confines of Chicago on ummm,brace yourselves...a university-funded,academically-sponsored research project on Bigfoot(yeah.)after hearing of 'Squatch-dealt death down in the swamps of Louisiana from his Anthropology professor(director Hauck).Laugh all you want,I've been in Chicago in January,I'd probably opt for hunting murderous man-monsters in a swamp full of water moccasins and Italian-starved mosquitos over that wind and lake-effect snow anyday myself.Although such a research project seems a bit far fetched,let's look at the equipment he packs for the trip:One seventies van,some sleeping bags,a tape recorder,and uh,Pahoo(Fimple)."What's a Pahoo?",you ask.Well,Pahoo is Rives' goofy,white 'Nam vet buddy with an Indian name who craves hot young girls and hamburgers and has an aversion to fried chicken.Pahoo looks like he missed out on Down's Syndrome by about half of a chromosome.So,maybe the university didn't shell out much afterall,eh.Thus,the two men embark on their low budgeted journey to the northwest corner of Louisiana,in pursuit of one of the only suspects in documented cases of Bigfoot-on-man crime.When they reach Oil City,they find a backwoods town so rural that the locals even call a guy named Pahoo a "yankee",and resistance in the form of local sheriff Carter(Bill Thurman) whose cautionary suggestions about nose-poking and that fabled place,"where it don't belong",fall upon the deaf ears of anti-authoritarian student/rebel Rives.

"Go ahead,throw the ball already,I AM looking at ya!"
After fruitless efforts to interview the local townsfolk and much Pahoo-based slapstick at the diner,the men are approached by Orville Bridges(McCullough),a local in a ten gallon hat who was orphaned as a baby as a direct result with an encounter with the creature,who is willing to help the boys out off-the-record.At the Bridges' place,the men are entertained by a Gramps(Taylor)/Orville hoedown on the front porch,but Pahoo,already appetite-less at the thought of more fried chicken,dines on his own foot instead when he blurts out creature-related queries and upsets Grandpa's wife,inadvertently opening the old family wounds and buying the amateur cyptozoologists a night in the barn,where they manage to record the actual screams of the creature on their groovy tape recorder.After a poorly timed date with two local young hot-to-trot foxes lands the men in jail(one is the sheriff's daughter,oh sweet irony),they meet lazy-eyed trapper, Joe Canton(Elam),who just happens to be the guy they were looking for in the first place;his partner being the unlucky bastard who got death-dunked in the drink by Bigfoot in the credits.The hulking,belching,farting drunk with eyes by Marty Feldman allows the boys to camp on his land,where Pahoo,tired of his doormat status,finally explodes on Rives around the campfire,reminding him that he was getting shot at in 'Nam while Rives was probably dodging the draft in Canada with the rest of the Pinkos.And Pahoo will have an extra serving of beans,thank you,Bitch.At this point the creature crashes their party,flipping their van down an embankment,nearly killing both of them,and putting Pahoo in a convalescent bed at the hospital in the process,where both teary-eyed men vow to return to Black Lake and prove the ornery beast's existence once and for all,once Pahoo comes out of traction,that is.

"I warned you fuckers,if I heard you play Sammy Johns' "Chevy Van" one more time..."
The always unforgettable Elam worked in television and film right up until his death in 2003,in everything from "Jinxed!" to "The Soggy Bottom Gang Rides Again".Fimple,who most of the younger readers will remember as Grampa Hugo in Zombie's "House of 1,000 Corpses",worked mainly in television until his death in 2003.His cinematic sidekick,Carson,who scored a genre role in 1977's "Empire of the Ants",also had a long career in television until his untimely death in 2009.Director Houck,who helmed genre pictures like 1969's Night of Bloody Horror and Night of the Strangler in 1972,died in 2003.There's a sad pattern here somewhere.Hell,even Roger Pancake,later of "Dracula's Dog" fame,is no longer with us.Nevertheless,Creature is a highly watchable slice of seventies Bigfootiana,that comes recommended from your humble N.On the scale,it leaves footprints in the swampy bottom more than two wops long...

"I know I almost got ya killed,Pahoo.Let's do it all over again once your bones fuse back together!"

"Clawed:The Legend of Sasquatch"(2005)d/Karl Kozak

Bigfoot usually makes for some entertaining(if not always,good) genre fare,as we've seen in the past here at the Wop.Not this time,unfortunately.This movie stinks like two shit-covered skunk apes lighting each others farts on fire atop a sulfuric heap of rotten eggs.We've taken on some Bad-squatch before,but the levels of ineptitude usually translated into hilarity,whereas what we have here is the cinematic equivalent of what it would be like if you drank a barium milkshake over the course of eighty five minutes,without choice esophagus or duodenum x-rays to look at afterwards.Kozak's movie,originally titled "The Unknown",is like a mash up of Jaws(1975),and Grizzly(1976),only without the suspense or entertainment value.Hell,there's barely even any Bigfoot in the damned thing.I was left so flat afterwards,I was nearly rendered a "carpenter's dream" and pondered reviewing something else,only deciding to go ahead with this,so as to warn you against wasting time or money on it.Let's put it this way.When I'm culling screenshots from a dvd,I'm usually left with about fifty decent ones to choose from,which I whittle down to what I think are the four best ones,the ones you see here when the post is finished.By the time the end credits rolled here,I had seven.And picking four decent ones out of those was nearly as hard as it was to sit through the movie in the first fucking place.

Bigfoot's cutting throats these days.Who gave him the knife?
An abrasive redneck tool(Miles "Tarzan" O'Keefe,paying his electric bill here)and his buddies are out poaching bear on Echo Mountain,a peak steeped in historic folklore and mystery,when his fellow lawbreakers all eat Bigfoot-inflicted throat lacerated death after the wild man of the woods KTFO's him for stumbling upon a camoflaged grave...or maybe it was the hootin',hollerin',and gunfire.We may never know.Ed(Isn't that a great hayseed name?Two syllables down south...Ay-uhd.)comes back around,and naturally blames it all on the Indian forest ranger,vowing to gather up the remaining goobers he knows and take revenge.After some cheap beer and a few games of pool,of course.Back in town,the sheriff and the mayor are closing down the beach,errr,ummm,blaming the deaths on a rogue grizzly bear in hope that the negative press doesn't evaporate the tourist dollars.Tourist dollars?The local barbershop and five and dime have a busy season?At the high school,the local obnoxious meathead Jay(Brandon Henschel)is being forced to partner up with the local brainiac nerd/Bigfoot buff Richard(Dylan Purcell) on an endangered species presentation over the weekend,or they both get ffffff....ailed.Jay gathers up two eager young pieces of trim(Chelsea Hobbs,Casey LaBow),some brewskis,and a video camera,taking his impending school failure as seriously as horror buffs should probably take Karl Kozak.

Even the grizzly bear is yawning out of boredom.
Way up on Echo Mountain,you can hear the tires spinning,maybe catch the faint scent of burning rubber,but things have kinda stalled out.Richard gathers firewood and comes face to face with a huge grizzly,but it lumbers off,balking at the thought of having to lick its own balls to get the taste of dork off its breath,the same way I had to dull my taste buds with a half pack of smokes to get the taste of the movie outta my mouth.Ed's redneck posse starts falling prey to the Pissed-squatch,one by one,but off camera is no way to stage deaths when you've got an elaborate costume to show off.Back at the crazy drunken sex-crazed teen party camp,it's much the same.Jay narrates an episode of "Douche Jock in the Woods" into his camera,Richard relates the folklore of the surrounding mountainside in a limp campfire tale,complete with equally flaccid black and white flashback sequence,and when Bigfoot finally muscles in on their boring weekend(through pov camerawork and growling,mind you),they all run off in different directions.When Ed finally loses his last marble,using the Indian as bait,shooting the last of his egghead buddies himself,and taking one of the girls hostage,Bigfoot finally...well...finally does nothing.In the aftermath,Jay manages to get some footage of the elusive creature,and the boys turn it in as part of their presentation,which the teacher tries to cash in on,instead having the film called a hoax,and being called a fraud of the lowest caliber by the whole community.Ironically,calling this production a "horror movie" is the biggest fraud I can shed light on here.

This is the only bobbler shot in the whole movie.
Kozak went on to direct Skid Marks(2007),a comedy about ambulance drivers,after dropping this full deuce two years earlier.I never thought I'd see a Bigfoot feature with less payoff than Ivan Marx's two jokumentaries,but I was wrong.Seeing his poor wife shuffle around in animal skins was far more rewarding than anything showcased here,which is a shame,because most of the elements are in place:a decent looking suit,ignorant Buford poachers,teenaged campers;the potential bodycount is pretty high,obligatory indians who know what's going on,and some really epic scenery,but in the end,it's all wasted here.You may have to actually wait for my third screenplay in line for a satisfactory Sasquatch story.That's all I'll say about that.None of the unknowns in tonight's entry really went on to do anything of note either,unless you count bit television roles or dancing extras in forgettable movies.Even Miles O'Keefe hadn't worked in film for five years afterwards.I can't give it a zero,due to the slick production values and nice cinematography on display,but still,avoid this one at all costs.

I see you hiding in there,Mask-uatch,and you oughta be.