Drive-in Classic 3 of 50: THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT

And now for a chance of pace. A big, hairy, stinky change of pace. The Legend of Bigfoot was released in 1976, and according to the description on the DVD sleeve, it's a documentary. I was expecting it to be the kind of thing that you might see on the Discovery Channel... a look at the history of the Bigfoot legend, with some blurry photos and plaster casts but no new information. And, of course, it would contain the famous Patterson-Gimli Bigfoot film. Yeah, I definitely knew it would include the Patterson film, which we've all seen a million times.

I was wrong.

Wait, what? Could a public domain movie included in one of these 50-movie packs actually have something that I, a former child Bigfoot aficionado, had never seen before? Maybe!

THE "STORY"
The film was directed by Harry Stuart Winer, but the star of the show, the guy who wants us all to listen to him talk, is Ivan Marx. I looked him up - Ivan Marx was active in the Bigfoot believers community for a while, but this page, which refers to him as "the greatest huckster," seems representative of what most of his peers thought of him. But let's give him the benefit of the doubt! He's here to tell us about Bigfoot, and the whole movie is a first-person account of his personal Sasquatch journey.

From the very beginning, there are many shots of rugged outdoorsy stuff. What is this, a cigarette commercial? HA! Ivan Marx's voiceover says, sincerely: "This is my country." He's a tracker, see, which means he doesn't kill for sport, but to protect innocent animals from mean ol' bully animals. Or something like that. One day he was called to Alaska, where a rancher reported a large animal was killing his cows. Marx figured it must be a Kodiak bear-- but hold the phone! The rancher had a different idea: He insisted 'twas Bigfoot killed the beef. HA HA HAHA HAHA HA! That's a laugh. Of course, Marx doesn't believe in Bigfoot: "What a buncha hogwash," he says, with just as much sincerity as the nature stuff.

Marx tells his brother-in-law about the Bigfoot nonsense, but the bro-in-law says, "Hold on there, pardner! Bigfoots might be real!" (Not an exact quote.) See, 700 years ago, Indians drew pictures on cave walls of a giant man-beast-creature-monster-thing. What more proof could you ask for? And no sooner are the splinters of doubt stuck in the finger of Marx's mind than he comes across an 18-inch-long footprint... with hair in it! He sends it to a lab, and they report that the hair doesn't come from any known animal. Which would imply that it comes from... an unknown animal. Like a purple octo-zebra! That's an unknown animal, right? Well -- have you ever known one?

Long story short, Marx soon becomes a Bigfoot beliver. He searches all over the country in places where Bigfoots (or is it Bigfeet?) have been reported... and then, in Washington state, he sees one! It seems to have injured its foot, and sadly, the Bigfoot nation has no public health care system, so it's limping around in pain, but Marx captures it on film. He's amazed at his luck... but honestly, I'm more amazed that he expected anyone to accept the film as real, 'cause gee, it sure looks like a person wearing a furry suit and doing a funny dance. But Marx doesn't mention that.

Soon Marx develops a theory, based on his hardcore research, of course: Bigfoot migrates! The species travels north from various places in North America toward the Arctic Circle, where it mates at the moose breeding grounds. He doesn't tell us how the moose might feel about the Bigfoots invading their sex playground. Marx still can't get anyone to believe he's seen a Bigfoot with his own eyes, so he resolves to get real proof, even if it means traveling far from home, braving the cold, and watching moose gettin' it on. Because apparently filming a "real, live" Bigfoot still wasn't good enough.

BODY COUNT
No humans died, but a couple of animals don't make it through the film alive.

LESSONS I LEARNED
-Bigfoot migrated across the Bering Strait before the Ice Age. That's why he lives in North America! What?

-According to Ivan Marx: "You don't know what it is to wait 'til you've been a tracker." (My brother drives a Tracker. Does that count?)

-Ground squirrels play hard to get.

-The legends are true: Bigfoot can turn into a white bird, or some crap like that.

-Moose sexual tension is actually not sexy at all.

MY FAVORITE LINES
Ivan Marx: (while waiting for Bigfoot to show up on a beach) My secluded beach turned into Coney Island! The only way Bigfoot could show up here was wearing swimming trunks!

Ivan Marx: (while chasing a Bigfoot with his camera) What the hell am I doing?!

SADDEST MOMENT
-Marx has a whole feature film to fill, so he wastes some time by filming two ground squirrels. They're a playful mating pair... and then one of them gets hit by a car.

COMMENTS
-When I was a kid, I was all about Bigfoot. I'm still not convinced it's impossible (sadly, I've pretty much given up on the Loch Ness Monster) that they exist, but jeez, this movie doesn't help the cause of the believers much. So much of the theorizing just seems like stuff Ivan Marx made up as he went along... and then when he realized he still didn't have enough to make a feature film, he threw in a bunch of random nature footage and called it a day.

-You know, one of the things that made the aforementioned Patterson-Gimli Bigfoot film so debatable was the shaky camera work and the distance from the subject. It could just be a guy in a suit... but it's hard to tell! So let's assume Ivan Marx wanted his own much-talked-about Bigfoot footage, so he bought some suits and had his wife film him hopping around. He should have had her stand farther away! He should have had her shake the camera around! There's some Bigfoot footage at the end of the film that almost looks more like the Sasquatch family decided to shoot some home movies than an amazing example of wildlife caught on camera. And from what I've read online, this is not even the fakest of Marx's Bigfoot "evidence."

-So, yeah. Maybe Bigfoot is real, but Ivan Marx was not the man to prove it.

-Did this really play in drive-ins? I can't imagine it being very interesting to teenagers, but then, they were probably only there to get to first base anyway. Kind of like those moose.

-To be fair, the nature footage in this film probably looked pretty good on movie screens. Certainly it looked better than the washed-out copy on my public domain DVD set, anyway.

-So what do YOU think? Are there Bigfoots? Sasquatches? Oomahs? Yetis? Harry and the Hendersons? Let me know in the comments!

Letter grade for The Legend of Bigfoot: C

So what should I watch next? I'm really trying to avoid anything that looks like horror, so I'm thinking maybe my next "50 Movie Pack" movie will be Prime Time, which is allegedly a comedy.