After a break with a reasonably well-made and normal Bigfoot movie, it’s time to head back into the trenches with today’s Bigfoot movie, The Curse of Bigfoot.
When a professor of folklore and cryptozoology gives a lecture to students, he includes a personal anecdote involving students just like them finding a cryptid. This anecdote isn’t just for fun; it turns out to be the main plot of the movie, as we move into a flashback that shows a group of students on an archaeology excavation/hike. While searching for Native American artifacts, the students stumble upon a kind of mummy in a secret hidden cave entrance. Disturbing the resting place of the mummy, which is always a good idea, the students unknowingly awaken the creature, which turns out to be some kind of preserved fellow who may or may not be Bigfoot, the movie never really tells us. With this creature rampaging, the students become determined to stop it by any means necessary.
The Curse of Bigfoot is a fascinating movie to me, particularly when I look at it in context of the movies I’ve already talked about for this week. At the start we had an example of the new age of scam filmmaking, AI slop thrown together with a few buzzwords to get easy distribution, and this is the 1970s version of that very concept! One of the most well known Bigfoot movies, The Legend of Boggy Creek, came out in 1972, and was a hit, considering its low budget, and other people were desperate to capitalize off their success. So, directors and studios looked at footage they already had and jammed it all together to try and make something that could be viewed as related to or derivative of another successful movie. It’s why the movie has Bigfoot in the title despite the creature never really being defined as Bigfoot. Come to think of it, there’s no curse either!
Why tell you any of that? Because it’s a lot more interesting than talking about Curse of Bigfoot. Like a lot of old and extremely cheap monster movies, the creature makeup is, shall we say, lacking. It doesn’t really look like a Bigfoot or Sasquatch at all due to it still having wrappings and appearing to be a large guy with some horror movie makeup and layers of thick clothing to conceal his body. The rest of the story isn’t much more interesting than the creature, large amounts of the movie are hiking and searching for artifacts, and one particular fruit orchard has a lot of foot traffic as we’re constantly shown people walking through it.
The Curse of Bigfoot is bad, but it doesn’t make me angry, which is more than I can say for some movies I’ve seen this Spooktober. I wouldn’t really recommend sitting down and watching this as a movie, it’s bad but never rises to the general level of so-bad-its-good, except for maybe a few scenes toward the end. There’s probably an MST3K or Rifftrax version of this movie that’s much funnier, so check that out if it exists. Otherwise, this might be good background noise for a Halloween party, you don’t need to pay attention or follow the plot, just have it on and occasionally make fun of the silly makeup or the audacity of the studio to release it this way.