Strangely, some of your universe's critics do not appreciate Bigfoot. Reviewer lfdewolfe writes, "Screw this movie! I HATE IT!!! Words cannot describe my hatred for this movie." Reviewer bensonmum2 writes, "What a complete load of garbage! Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, about Bigfoot is wretched." And reviewer TheUnknown837-1 writes, "The screenplay is just the same set of words and phrases being repeated over and over again and the editing is absolutely horrendous."
Read on for an accurate appreciation of Robert F. Slatzer's Bigfoot...
The film opens at a small regional airport. Jazz plays on the soundtrack as a blonde woman drives her convertible onto the tarmac and climbs into a small propellor plane. She starts the plane, taxis, then flies the plane over the mountains.
The film cuts to two men in a decrepit station wagon driving through the mountains. The driver is none other than John Carradine. The passenger is someone other than John Carradine. They stop. Hilariously, the only way to get out of the car is for Mr. Carradine to untie a bungie cord holding the door to the frame. While Mr. Carradine is distracted by a group of motorcyclists rushing past on the road, his partner, Briggs, enters the forest and immediately sees big footprints in the mud.
Of course, Briggs performs the familiar scientific verification that the prints belong to a bigfoot: He places his own shoe in the footprint and sees that his shoe is much smaller than the print.
When he hears some growling noises in the woods, Briggs returns to Mr. Carradine and the car.
Elsewhere, the blonde woman, who is definitely inside the plane she is flying, has engine trouble and sends out a mayday call. She has no choice but to jump out of the plane. Fortunately for her, she is wearing a parachute, and the parachute works.
On the ground, she strips suggestively out of her flight suit, unaware that she is being watched by something with a hairy arm.
When the bigfoot approaches her, she screams, and the film cuts to its charming title sequence featuring images of large footprints and an intriguing folk music score (if the film’s subtitles are to be believed).
Later, at Bennett’s General Store, a group of motorcycle riders drives away as Mr. Carradine and Briggs pull up in their car. The two traveling salesmen introduce themselves to the elderly proprietor, Mr. Bennett, and his slightly less elderly daughter, Nellie. They are attempting to sell gadgets to Mr. Bennett, but he is not interested.
Elsewhere, the motorcyclists (not a biker gang but a group of twenty-something preppies) ride their bikes into the mountains for a weekend of fun.
One couple of bikers has trouble with their motorcycle, so they lie on a blanket and make out. The young woman, wearing a bikini, scolds her boyfriend for wanting to fix his motorcycle. “All right,” she says poetically, “go make love to your iron mistress.” When he does so, she walks through the forest (which does not look like a set inside a soundstage because the floor is covered in sand). She sees a symbol on a rock and calls over her boyfriend Rick (played by Chris Mitchum. Robert Mitchum’s son). “This place looks like an old Indian burial ground,” he says. “Hey, dig the size of these graves. They must have been giants. This one looks fresh!”
Perhaps unwisely, Rick climbs on top of the fresh grave and begins removing handfuls of dirt. He uncovers the face of what must be a bigfoot, and then a live bigfoot appears (“giants” might have been an exaggeration) and attacks them, punching Rick and abducting his bikini-clad girlfriend.
Their friends, oblivious to the bigfoot attack, ride off on their motorcycles, even though it is the middle of the night (indicated by the howling of a stock footage wolf). Rick rides back to the general store, where he calls the local sheriff about the bigfoot attack and abduction. The sheriff, perhaps predictably, does not believe Rick, but Mr. Carradine and Briggs overhear his story. Seeing the monetary potential in finding and capturing a bigfoot, Mr. Carradine offers to drive Rick back into the mountains to search for the creature.
After several minutes of driving (Rick inexplicably leaves his motorcycle behind, prompting a local to admire the fancy bike, saying it must have cost a hundred dollars), they stop the car and begin walking through the forest in the dark, armed with rifles and flashlights. They find the bigfoot graveyard, and Mr. Carradine says, “As a former student of archeology, I recognize these markings as having a peculiar significance.”
Then Rick uncovers the buried bigfoot, shocking the two newcomers. “What kind of creature is that, anyhow?” asks Briggs.
Mr. Carradine continues his lecture. “What separates them from animals and primates…they bury their own dead.”
In a shocking sequence, the film cuts to the bigfoot’s point of view as he moves through the forest to his open-air lair, where the abducted women are tied to slender trees.
The women speculate about what is going on. The parachuting woman says, “They’re more human than we think. I’m sure that’s why they brought us here.” She adds, “The only thing I can figure out is that they’re a dying race and they want to reproduce more of their own kind.”
“How horrible,” Rick’s girlfriend says.
“Have you ever heard of the gap? The gap between the Neanderthal man and the human.”
“Like the missing link?”
“Exactly. Scientists say there is a missing link. Maybe these creatures are what they’re talking about.”
Meanwhile, in a shot clearly intended to be chilling, a group of bigfoots sit around a campfire roasting marshmallows.
In the morning, the motorcyclists continue motorcycling and Mr. Carradine, Briggs, and Rick continue hiking along the mountain. (The sight of Mr. Carradine, clearly in his hundreds as he was throughout most of his career, stumbling as he climbs a steep mountain trail can only engender respect in the audience watching this esteemed actor commit to his role…though many forest scenes appear to have been shot, sensibly, on a soundstage.)
Elsewhere, the abducted women are watched by what appears to be a toddler bigfoot while the other creatures go hunting in the forest.
Nearby, the three hunters spot a bigfoot and follow it, but they are surprisingly attacked and abducted by a group of the creatures.
The motorcyclists come across a cabin in the woods and its inhabitants, a Native American man named Hardrock, his wife Falling Star, and another man. They tell the couple that Rick phoned them (it is unclear how, as they have been riding all night) about a creature abducting his girlfriend, and the woman says, “Sasquatch.”
“Sasqua-who?” The bikers laugh. “What’s that mean?”
“That’s Indian talk…for bigfoot,” Hardrock says. He warns them about the dangers of bigfoot, but he agrees to go with the cyclists to hunt for the creature. They also, sensibly, bring dynamite.
The bigfoots tie Mr. Carradine, Briggs, and Rick to trees next to the women. In an extremely disturbing sequence, the creatures take the parachuting woman to another stand of trees and tie her up while the largest bigfoot approaches her ominously. She screams and faints.
Meanwhile, in a comedic sequence offsetting the (offscreen) rape, a group of U.S. Forest Service employees are on the phone with the sheriff, telling him that nothing gets by them, when a bigfoot wanders around outside, visible through an oddly placed window in their office.
In the woods, the parachuting woman escapes when two bigfoots begin fighting. They chase her through the woods, leading to the highly eventful climactic sequence. At the bigfoots’ lair, the motorcyclists arrive to rescue their friends, and Mr. Carradine and Briggs abduct the toddler bigfoot to be the centerpiece of an intended traveling show. Then they climb with most of the bikers and Hardrock to the top of the mountain, where they hear the parachutist screaming. They find the biggest bigfoot carrying the woman to a rocky outcrop. The monster throws a boulder at his pursuers, but it is ineffectual, allowing the woman to escape yet again…but she is abducted again, seconds later.
In the climax, Hardrock shoots the bigfoot. Ironically, Mr. Carradine offers anyone in the group five hundred dollars to capture the creature alive, but they all begin firing their weapons at the bigfoot.
Finally, one of the motorcyclists throws dynamite at the bigfoot, exploding it.
In the aftermath, Mr. Carradine sits dejectedly on a log. “My critter. My poor critter. I’ll never get it now.”
Hardrock tells his friend, “Well, Slim, we finally got him.”
Oddly, Mr. Carradine replies, “It wasn’t you, Mister. It was beauty did him in.”
Everybody leaves except the parachutist. Noting her physical attributes, Mr. Carradine has a new idea. “We’ll tour the country, the continent, everywhere. Well, people all over the world will gladly pay a pretty penny to not only contemplate the delectable contours of your imposing beauty, but also could hear about the thrills and chills and risks you endured while you was a captive of these yet-to-be-classified bigfoot critters that exist right here on this great Earth. I can see it now. Beauty and the Beast.”
They walk away together, somehow ignoring the fact that there are several more bigfoots still alive in the surrounding area.
The End
Bigfoot (1970) is the proverbial movie that has everything. It has bigfoot, of course, but it also has motorcycles, Native Americans, sheriffs, women in underwear, dynamite, horror, comedy, and John Carradine. Clearly, anyone who does not enjoy this film does not enjoy any of the finer things in life. Robert F. Slatzer, whose earlier film The Hellcats is grittier and focused on crime and motorcycles, decided to up the entertainment value when he made Bigfoot, and one can only conclude Bigfoot is even better than The Hellcats. It is unfortunate that Bigfoot is the last film he ever directed (though he lived until 2005), but perhaps in this film he said all he wanted to say. The world of bigfoot cinema, and cinema at large, owes him a great deal because of this gift to audiences everywhere.