THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT (1976)

So, were at the second flick in the chilling movie pack and all I can say is WOW! This is a documentary about a guy named Ivan Marx and his hunt for the ever elusive Bigfoot. Marx supposedly got exclusive footage of the beast back in the 70's and it is some of the most famous footage of the beast. It has been called a hoax by many experts and it does, indeed look like a guy in a really bad monkey suit. The quality of the pictures are so bad that it only seems to add to the feeling of the hoax. Now, Marx only had a few minutes of this footage so the rest of the 77 minute running time is a lot of nature photography and Marx' droning narration.
This flick reminds me of those Sunn Classics like In Search Of Noah's Ark and it's ilk. I liked the grainy 16mm feel to the entire proceedings and you do see a side of 70's America that has vanished from the country and it works really well as a cinematic time capsule. The truly horrific scene would have been of these two squirrels. They are playing on a dirt road and kissing and being cute and then one gets hit by a car. The other one tries to drag the wounded one off the road to safety to no avail. Then the hawks show up. The wounded one manages to crawl to hole to safety narrowly escaping being a bird's lunch. The only way they could have gotten this shot would have been to chase the wounded squirrel with a camera. I think the squirrel was running from them instead of any bird that never shared a shot with the animal. If you like nature footage then you will like this flick. Any wild animal you can think of in North America is represented here.
Listening to the narration you can hear a man who started out being one of the best trackers in the world and then got consumed by this obsession with Bigfoot. You can even hear him lament about having to rely on second hand information to track this elusive beast. A tracker prefers to work with what's in front of him, not what people tell them so you can feel for this man's increasing sense of frustration.
Overall, the film seems disjointed. One scene runs into another fro not apparent reason. My wife, Martha said it looked like this guy did a nature documentary, added the Bigfoot shots and then did an entire narration to loosely link the Bigfoot plot line with what we were watching.
I would have to agree with her.
Ivan Marx died five years ago and the secret of his footage died with him. Most experts agree that it is fake, but his widow, Peggy Marx insists that what he filmed was real. Ivan Marx even made a sequel called BIGFOOT, ALIVE IN '82 where he is assaulted by a Bigfoot and has to shoot at it to save himself and his wife.
This is the only documentary in the 50 pack and it is definitely odd enough that it warrants at least one viewing. The bizarre, disjointed imagery of a nature documentary coupled with the constant, droning narration of a man who has lost it make for fine viewing.