If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if King Kong was remade by hungover carnies with a budget smaller than a Girl Scout cookie drive, look no further than Bigfoot (1970). This cinematic tragedy takes America’s favorite campfire monster and turns him into the clumsiest backyard wrestler in the history of exploitation filmmaking.
The movie opens with Joi Lansing, in all her B-movie glory, crash-landing in the woods only to be kidnapped by a guy in a shag carpet suit who looks less like a mythical creature and more like your uncle passed out in the bear rug after Thanksgiving dinner. Cue the screaming women—because that’s basically all they’re allowed to do here: scream, be tied to trees, and wait for their turn in Bigfoot’s weird lair of plywood caves and mildew.
Chris Mitchum plays a biker named Rick, whose job is to squint into the middle distance and somehow make looking confused last an entire runtime. He and his leather-jacket buddies decide to help, but not before Jasper B. Hawks (John Carradine, slumming so hard it’s practically a mining expedition) and his buddy Elmer decide that the best use of Bigfoot is as a freak show attraction. Yes, Carradine, a man who once acted with John Ford, spends this film trying to sell tickets to watch Sasquatch like he’s running a rural Chuck E. Cheese.
And let’s not forget the pièce de résistance: “Dad” Bigfoot. Standing at twelve feet tall (or at least twelve feet of uneven stilts and sweaty rubber), he’s the patriarch of this furry family of kidnappers. His big action sequence? Fighting a bear. Only problem is, it looks less like a fight and more like two drunk mascots at a county fair rolling around for spilled popcorn. Later, Dad Bigfoot goes on a “rampage” through town that involves casually knocking over cardboard props and stepping on the local drunk, Lucky Bob, who—spoiler—deserved a better ending than this movie.
Eventually, the bikers blow him up with dynamite, which is exactly how this film should’ve ended in the first five minutes. Jasper sighs and rips off the famous King Kong line: “It was beauty that did him in.” No, Jasper. It wasn’t beauty. It was cheap costumes, bad acting, a script scribbled on a napkin, and a director who thought Bigfoot could be “the eighth wonder of the world” instead of what it really is—the eighth circle of cinematic hell.
At its worst, Bigfoot is a cynical cash grab. At its best, it’s an unintentional comedy about hairy men kidnapping screaming blondes while John Carradine cashes a check that probably couldn’t cover his bar tab. Either way, this isn’t the Pacific Northwest’s Sasquatch legend—it’s a reminder that sometimes the scariest monster in the woods is a bad movie itself.
