Jasper B. Hawks (John Carradine!) and Elmer Briggs (John Mitchum, brother of Robert and the writer of the John Wayne voiced "America, Why I Love Her" that TV stations used to sign off when TV stations still existed and actually signed off) are driving around the forest. And Joi Landis (Joi Lansing, a former MGM contract girl who shows up in the long tracking shot that begins Touch of Evil, in her final role) is a pilot whose plane breaks down. She parachutes into the woods and encounters Bigfoot.Then there's Rick (Chris Mitchum, son of Robert and also an actor in films like Jodorowsky's Tusk and Faceless) and his girlfriend Chris who find a Bigfoot cemetery and get attacked, too.Of course, the authorities are of no help. Only Jasper will help Rick and that's because he wants a Bigfoot for his freak show.Peggy gets kidnapped by Bigfoot and we discover that Joi has been taken, too. Upon reaching the lair of the Bigfoots (Bigfeet?), we discover that the creatures we've seen are his wives and the real creature is 200 feet tall. Yes. You just read that right. And he's about to fight a bear that's just as huge.A gang of bikers gas Bigfoot but he escapes the freakshow, goes nuts in town and then gets blown up by bikers. John Carradine quotes from King Kong (he does throughout the film) and the movie ends.Along the way, we find Doodles Weaver, whose scene in the completely bonkers The Zodiac Killer may be the most ridiculous scene in what is quite honestly one of the strangest films I've ever seen. And hey, is that Bing Crosby's son Lindsey? Yes, it is! And the first singing cowboy, Ken Maynard! This movie is packed with actors who have much more interesting stories than the film they're stuck in.But you know what is interesting? The strange doom funk that plays every time the bikers show up. And keep your eyes open for a quick appearance by Haji, who famously appeared in Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Director Robert F. Slatzer only did two other movies, but one of them was The Hellcats, where Russ Hagen battles a female gang. Leather on the outside...all woman on the inside!But hey - Bigfoot. Come for the bikers. Stay for the bigfoots. Enjoy the bikinis. But dig this crazy sound, man!

Don't let all the naysayers sway you. This is a little gem of a bad movie. By the best guess of many this is probably the very first flick to deal with the notion that the American wilderness was home to a large, unknown primate species. Back in the primitive '70's the legend was just starting to get noticed and there was not a lot of information around concerning the supposed nature and habits of the creature. This left writer-director Robert Slatzer plenty of room to let his imagination run wild, and run wild it did. In his vision, Sasquatch is not merely a wild animal afoot in the pacific Northwest, it is a full blown cave man! According to him they have a language, make stone tools, know how to tie knots and bury their dead. Naturally they are also completely beguiled by sexy white women in the best King Kong tradition, which leads them to kidnap several young ladies, one from the ranks of a biker gang. This sets the plot into motion as a group of unlikely allies sets out to locate the ladies and rescue them from the lecherous monsters. That preceding description might have you thinking that it might not be a half bad flick. Don't get carried away. Slatzer may have a wild imagination but he's also completely clueless on how to tell a story cinematically. Suspense, pacing, believable dialogue, etc. are all well beyond his feeble abilities. There is a hilarious scene where the two beauties are bound to poles and at the mercy of the bigfeet. you might imagine that the ladies would be scared out of their wits at this point, but no. Slatzer has them calmly discuss the morphology of their captors. One girl even surmises that the child- like creature in the group is a Sasquatch-human hybrid! Ridiculous!John Carradine and John Mitchum are completely wasted in their roles as the avaricious traveling salesmen who hope to capture one of the critters and make a fortune. Location footage is mixed with cheesy sets that are easily distinguished from the real thing. No doubt Slatzer hoped nobody would be able to tell the difference. I had hoped that the climax of the film was going to be an unintentionally hilarious rumble between the bikers and the Bigfeet, but no such luck. That would have probably taken days to film and Slatzer couldn't afford to rent the camera that long. Instead one of the creatures flees into a cave and a biker tosses in a bundle of dynamite. There is a lame excuse for an explosion and we are assured that we have just seen the end of the naughty Bigfoot, but then a cryptic message appears on the screen: "Or Is It??" As it turns out, yes it is. If Slatzer was planning a sequel it does not seem to have materialized and the world was able to get on with the understandable task of ignoring this guy's movies.

There is no excuse for a movie this bad. Absolutely no excuse whatsoever. Not merely the fact that it has some good quality cast names in it (John Carradine, John Mitchum) but because it is completely treacherous not only to the industry and the art form, but to the filmmakers themselves. Making a movie like "Bigfoot" is like constructing the Empire State Building out of cardboard and expecting people to work in it every day without ever hearing a shred of complaint. It would also be astonishing that anybody even let you get that far. It's astonishing here, too.We all know the cult legend of the Americas' simian wonder. Well, as this movie would like us to believe, there is not just one Sasquatch, but dozens of them. And even though they are described (in the film) as being nine feet tall, in reality they're just stubby, man-sized fuzzballs who carry around clubs and sticks and tie people to trees with...I'm not sure what that was or how they got it. And I don't want to waste my precious brain cells pondering over it.Anyway, whatever. You've got a fashion model (played by real life fashion model Joi Lansing) who crashes her plane in the wilderness and is kidnapped by some lecherous Sasquatches. Then you have some rowdy bikers. One of their girls, while wandering about the woods in nothing but her bra and panties, is kidnapped by another. Her boyfriend sees the big ape and recruits a pair of goofball con men and they all embark on a mission to rescue their girls from the men in ape suits.The con men are played by John Carradine and John Mitchum, of all people. These two marvelous talents who were so wonderful in so many movies are the only ones involved in this treacherous production who act like professionals. Though they could have easily just hammed their way through (and nobdoy would have blamed them) they stick through to the end, even though they can't come within a lightyear of saving the movie."Bigfoot" looks and sounds as if it were made by a group of bottom feeders who had never seen a movie before in their lives. The photography is grainy and amateur and the audio on the soundtrack is so poorly assembled and recorded that you find yourself constantly adjusting the volume on your TV set. The screenplay is just the same set of words and phrases being repeated over and over again and the editing is absolutely horrendous. There is a horrible shot where Joi Lansing is on the run from a Sasquatch. She runs past us in the foreground and keeps on running until she's against the horizon. Then the Sasquatch appears to follow her. Between that point and the first one, we never cut away or adjust camera speed. Add to the fact that Joi Lansing was apparently trying to imitate Fay Wray in her screams and coming across as irksome. And the scene where she crashes her plane is missing not one, but several key shots so that we don't even get the whole picture of what has happened.I don't think I even need to touch on the special effects.This is one of the worst, most unremittingly agonizing and horrible movies ever made. As a person who has been and worked on a movie set and knows the pain and pressures that go into making a film, I find it absolutely appalling that anybody would even proceed and suffer their way through the production of something like this. The business isn't even that much of a money-maker for the cast and crew. It's the executives who really get the dough. So why bother unless you're at least going to put up an effort? There are other jobs out there. Other careers.

My dad had a pair of Cinemacanica 35mm projectors and he bought this film. If he paid more than a nickel for it he was over charged. Then again, this movie was so bad that he decreed that if my brothers or myself acted out of line, then the perpetrator would be sentenced to watch this film.Needless to say I watched this film many times and my father wore out the print. Maybe he did get his money's worth out of it. Heck! I bet my dad would gladly have paid a thousand dollars for this as much as he made me watch it.By the way, this movie caused terrible trauma for me. I've never been able to watch another movie with Christopher Mitchum. He has to be the worst actor of all time.