THE 3RD HALL OF INFAMY: Infamy Rises Again

The Curse of the Bigfoot (1975) -

Horror films are a hard genre for me to hate since bad horror films can still be watchable, whether you're referring to so-bad-they're-good fare or camp/cheesiness, but what I can't handle is a horror film which is almost completely joyless like this one. Granted, I liked the first 30 minutes a bit more than the remaining hour, but this isn't saying much. A few of the bigfoot shots, while not good by any means, looked so ridiculous I initially thought this would be typical B-movie fare (I was on board with the film for the first 10 minutes). I also found the presenter's meltdown at a student during the classroom scenes to be pretty amusing to watch. As a whole, I wouldn't be surprised if the first half hour was put in just to pad out the length as if the filmmakers felt the 60 minute span for the main plot line wasn't enough to fill a feature length film, but awkward pacing aside, I didn't completely hate this section. That the remainder of the first 30 minutes were so unengaging though seemed to act as a warning sign for what was to come. I swear, the final hour has got to be one of the most bland and joyless things I've ever seen. To run through a brief list of its flaws, the characters have no personality whatsoever and they all blend into each other, the few bits of bigfoot action we got were super brief and poorly directed, and the meandering dialogue between the students was so dull to listen to. It's just a couple minutes of forgettable bigfoot scenes plus a ton of meandering conversations/bland characters to fill the rest of the hour. Again, the design of bigfoot looks super ridiculous, so you'd think this wouldn't be so joyless, but the few close-ups of bigfoot's face are about all the film has going for it in terms of cheesiness. That said, I will grant that one scene in the final hour was decently effective. Stumbling across the mummified remains of bigfoot in a mountain's hidden cave was an unnerving concept, but any potential the film had here fizzled out after five minutes. As it stands, this is in the running as my least favorite horror film of all time.

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IMDb
Letterboxd

And it's still got a full star? I have some serious work for you, my friend.

Yeah, thanks a lot, man

I rarely rate films this low since I don't normally seek out bad films.

At least watch some MST3K!

I will eventually.

I made notes while watching Curse of Bigfoot, and they became more and more incredulous and almost angry as the movie plodded along with it's time-wasting nothingness and lack of story, conflict, characters, meaning or excitement. The people who made this seem to lack a basic understanding of how movies work, and don't quite grasp the very human art of storytelling - to a degree that would worry me if I knew one of them. Could you imagine if, during Die Hard, the "terrorists" stopped to methodically hand out sandwiches and have lunch - eating up precious runtime, with no reason whatsoever? Why would you factor that into your movie, if there's no real reason to do so? To kill time? Because you're trying to think of things for your characters to do? You could accuse me of nitpicking - but Curse of Bigfoot is full of moments like that, and it helps to make this one of the most boring films I've ever watched.

Being boring would be bad enough, but Curse of Bigfoot is also a holy mess. The main body of the movie consists of a short film made by Don and J.T. Fields, and it has been buttressed with a prologue consisting of monster attacks that fit the very definition of "bad movie" so well that they almost seem purposely inept. They'd be amusing if they weren't so drawn out and lacking in tension. One of the reasons they lack tension is that this movie throws all these different humans into mix without introducing them as characters - so we don't care at all as they walk around, our inverse-talented moviemakers constructing moments when the audience is meant to be getting a little more worried and stressed. We just want the scene to be over with, random person be damned. In the meantime, the monster looks ridiculous and the one time an attack occurs that isn't off-camera we get an example of why stunt-people are needed for even the simplest of shots, like the ones the makers of this film managed to capture on film.

Then there's the classroom (there's far too much wrong with this movie for me to go into every aspect in detail - so I won't detail everything), where a lecturer becomes furious with a student for absolutely no reason except for the makers of the movie wanting to insert some ham-fisted drama. Here we receive a lesson that was lacking during any of my classes when attending university, hoping that at least one professor would regale us with tales about Bigfoot. But hey, at least there's some hope that somebody might say something interesting sometimes, with which this segment of the movie teases us without really delivering much. The guest lecturer is here to tell us the story that will form the main body of this 88 minutes of excruciating agony (he immediately apologizes after attacking the student, which just makes him look even more unstable.) During the rest of the movie, I'd miss the classroom scene so much - it at least had the promise of being intermittently amusing.

What follows is what I noted while watching a "detour to nowhere", because of how dull it is. Around 10 to 15 minutes of a teacher and his students walking around in the wilderness, talking about prehistoric man. Then there's the famous "lets have some sandwiches" scene. By the time they discover a cavern with mummified remains in, I'd had it with this film. There's plenty that follows which makes little sense, but I was kind of overwhelmed by the sheer number of nonsensical moments which builds to a crescendo when the mummy awakens (wasn't this film supposed to be about Bigfoot?) There are no characters really introduced and fleshed out - but we have the teacher and a sheriff of some kind. To tell you the truth, this is so boring it was hard to keep from not thinking about other stuff while watching this. For some reason everyone makes a small wall out of hay bales. I have no idea, even at a stretch, of what possible use that is in stopping a monster, which could just walk around it if it weren't already easy enough to knock over.

Curse of Bigfoot is worse than a lot of it's more famous, 'bad movie' brethren, but nowhere near as much fun as the likes of Plan 9 or Manos. It's leadenly slow, completely lacking in humour and so joyless that I at one stage wrote "this is anti-film", which it really seemed to be. Film is meant to entertain and enlighten, but this thing does nothing of the sort, and although it's obviously of it's time, it has aged particularly badly. It's aggressively boring, and while I don't enjoy it when movies are pretentious, if this film were at least that then I wouldn't feel so infuriated while watching nothing much happen go on and on and on for what seems like forever. Even films like Manos have the good sense to run for a little over an hour - but Bigfoot has so much walking around and eating of sandwiches to show us that it goes for nearly an hour and a half. If there is a Bigfoot out there somewhere, it should sue the makers of this film for defamation.

* Oh - and I loved that scene that was supposed to be taking place in the middle of the night, with the stars out for all to see, when it was obviously the middle of the day. But that's not enough for me to rate this any higher than a single one-half out of five. In fact, that's all the more reason to.



A favourite for winning this, in my opinion...

Late comment : is the fact that the lady at the start of the film gives her dog a bowl of milk the filmmakers' attempt at a joke? I simply took it at face value at first - simply another moment of severe eccentricity in a film full of it - but then I started to realise the twist in this action might have been meant as a 'laugh-out-loud' funny moment for when this movie was playing to packed cinemas once word of mouth had this winner killing it at the box office.

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I think the director was inspired by Andy Warhol's Sleep or Empire and decided to film a dog drinking an entire bowl of milk in real time as an homage.

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Captain's Log
My Collection

The Curse of the Bigfoot - 1 ten thirteen cent bottle of orange soda out of 5

Watching this movie feels like being in a mental deprivation chamber. Unlike a sensory deprivation chamber, which deprives you of feeling, this movie removes all purpose, "food," what have you from your thoughts, creating a void of meaning as if you cleared your brain's cache. Was it made, ahem...repurposed to try to replicate the success of The Legend of Boggy Creek? Its semi - with an emphasis on semi - docudrama format suggests this, but it totally misses the mark. In doing so, it becomes a classic example of how important it is to make your audience care about what happens to the characters in movies like this one. Despite shifting between many perspectives in its relatively short running time, Boggy Creek made me care about what happens to everyone in it from making them interesting, sympathetic, etc. to simply introducing them properly. This movie does none of these things. In fact, if someone pointed a gun to my head and asked me to name anyone in it or they would pull the trigger, my head would be the other kind of empty. This combined with the sense that every scene is directed and edited in the same manner means there is little to no tension (oh, that and the fact that the villain's papier-mâché head makes him look too ridiculous to be scary does not help). The actual reason why this movie was repurposed likely stems from a desire to capitalize on the Bigfoot craze of the '70s. In addition to all of the above, it still doesn’t work. You don't need to read trivia about this movie to determine that the beast in the original movie has nothing to do with the legendary beast, in other words.

As it tends to be with movies this terrible, the only satisfaction I find in them is unintentional. The moment where a student mentions that the day went by so fast got a chuckle out of me because every second of it felt like an hour. As for the bombastic score, I feel like I should compliment it, but since it doesn't enliven anything on screen, does it actually work? Then again, even if the movie had Mahler's 8th playing in the background, it would still be dull. While Mythbusters may have proved that you can actually polish a turd, this movie and the similarly terrible target of riffs Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders demonstrate that a clumsy redress is not how you do it. It ends up being a movie that makes the legend of Bigfoot as exciting as driving from Arizona to Nevada while closely following a slow-moving semi-truck.

LOL, my guess was that they were going to light it on fire when he got near it, but since they threw gasoline on him instead, they didn't really serve a purpose, did they?

On that note, the sheriff obviously hasn't seen any horror movies - or read his manual on how to be a police officer - because nothing good ever happens to them when they give their guns to someone else.

I spent the evening with a friend last night and I mentioned that I was taking part in a bad-movie challenge. "Oh, is that why you've been logging all of those godawful movies on Letterboxd lately?" Then he rattled off a list of my recent viewings, none of which were for this challenge.

That gave me a good laugh. 🤣

Hopefully, he didn't say "At least you're watching some great movies like Leap".

Halfway through Brothers

The Curse of the Bigfoot

Could they have made Bigfoot look any more ridiculous than he did? I doubt it. It was like wading through sludge watching this snoozefest. The lecture part of the film being the hardest to navigate although there never really was much reprieve. The worst quality of the movie is seemingly the production value which has very little to offer. The acting was often monotonous and atrocious. This is the film that kind of hits on all cylinders of badness, so yes, a great nomination.

Send your nomination in! Since we're making you suffer, you need to make us suffer in return.

I need to see this turd -polishing video.

I did.

Here is a clip: