If I’ve learned anything from my week of watching Bigfoot movies, it’s that Yankees aren’t wanted in the places where Bigfoot resides. You can also rewrite that sentence to cover city folks aren’t wanted when Bigfoot decides to walk on through Western Pennsylvania or Southeastern Ohio.

This one is all about two dudes: Rives (John David Carson, Empire of the Ants) and Pahoo (Dennis Fimple, House of 1000 Corpses). That’s right, Pahoo. Dennis Fimple was 36 when he played this young twenty-something just back from ‘Nam and looking for something, anything, maybe even Bigfoot. Rives is more concerned with hamburgers, fries and Cokes. And oh yeah, redhead goddesses. Well, everyone gets what they want in Black Lake.

You get a lot of character actors in here, like Western star Dub Taylor as Grandpa Bridges, Bill Thurman whose career stretches from The Last Picture Show to Mountaintop Motel Massacre, and Jack Elam, who is the best part of this film as the tracker Joe Canton.

Elam lost an eye to a sharpened pencil at a Boy Scout meeting as a child (he also literally grew up picking cotton) before serving in WW II, becoming a studio accountant and even managing the Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles. A character actor in numerous gangster and Western films, as well as TV, Elam came up with a quote that many have stolen over the years in relation to how Hollywood sees people. He said that casting directors would say this about him:

• Stage 1: “Who is Jack Elam?”
• Stage 2: “Get me Jack Elam.”
• Stage 3: “I want a Jack Elam type.”
• Stage 4: “I want a younger Jack Elam.”
• Stage 5: “Who is Jack Elam?”

He shows up in some crazy roles, such as Doctor Nikolas Van Helsing in the Cannonball Run films and in The Norseman, Charles B. Pierce’s bonkers ode to Vikings that stars Lee Majors (we really need to get to this movie).

This was re-released theatrically in 1982 as part of a multi-film package called “5 Deranged Features”. Also on the bill were Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971) (under the title They’re Coming to Get You so perhaps people went thinking they were about to see the American cut of All the Colors of the Dark), The Wizard of Gore under the name House of Torture, Shriek of the Mutilated and The Corpse Grinders, but called Night of the Howling Beast.

If you’re up for seeing college students try and get laid while eating burgers and hunting Bigfoot, then this is probably the exact movie you’re looking for.

If there’s one nice thing I can say, it’s that the cinematographer of the film is Dean Cundey (Halloween, The Fog, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Rock ‘n Roll High School and many, many more great movies). There are some interesting shots and it’s not your typical dark swampy seventies affair.

If you want to check it out for yourself, it’s on Amazon Prime.

As I worked on Bigfoot Week, I turned to Phil Hall’s The Weirdest Movie Ever Made for guidance. All it said about this movie was “the 1980s started with another vicious Bigfoot attacking humans in Night of the Demon (1980),” so I didn’t expect much. I have to tell you, my mind still hasn’t fully comprehended what I just watched.

The film starts with a giallo-style framing device, where several policemen are interviewing Professor Bill Nugent, an anthropology teacher who was found in the woods with his face mutilated, surrounded by the bodies of his dead students.

This is a film of unconnected narratives, where one character after another appears to tell a story about Bigfoot, then that story is reenacted. It starts with Carla Thomas, whose family was murdered by a Bigfoot. That’s when Nugent initiates a flashback of his class discovering proof of the creature after it attacked a family on a picnic.

The authorities determine that all of the murders in the area that Bigfoot was involved in had to be a hoax. Carla goes one further by saying that the police tampered with the evidence in her father’s case. She also tells another flashback story where we watch a couple in the throes of passion inside a van. The man is soon dragged from the vehicle and dies in bloody pain on the windshield while the woman watches.

It’s at this point that I realized that this isn’t really a Bigfoot movie per se. It’s a slasher. A slasher that ended up on the video nasties list due to its shocking levels of gore and mayhem.

The university won’t sanction Nugent’s class trip to continue searching for Bigfoot, but they head out anyway. Nugent and his group plan on staying at Carlson’s Landing, owned by Lou Carlson, who refuses to help the professor and students. Well, he does until they get him drunk and he reveals that a woman in the woods named Wanda has a connection with the beast.

Meanwhile, Bigfoot shoves a man into a sleeper bag, swings him around and around, then throws him into a tree where he’s impaled on a tree branch.

Nugent and the kids make it to town and learn that Wanda went mute and insane after having a deformed stillbirth. Her father was a preacher named Emmet McGinty whose followers live in total isolation, inbreeding and practicing cannibalism and human sacrifices. And oh yeah — the sheriff is spying on them now.

As they reach their campsite, Nugent regales the kids about a biker who castrated and died nearby. Casual, fun conversation? Sure. You’ll enjoy watching it in lurid detail, too. A few hours after they all go to sleep, they are awakened by McGinty’s Satanic cult — which includes the sheriff — as they chant and perform a sex ritual with a girl who we soon learn is Wanda. Nugent panics and fires his gun, leading to complete chaos and the Bigfoot statues catching on fire.

At this point, any sane person would leave the woods. But Nugent and crew press on, despite Bigfoot following them and stealing their boat. They find Wanda’s cabin and bribe her with candy. Once they show her a track of Bigfoot’s prints, she goes crazy and locks herself in a room.

How would you pass the time? Oh, more stories. Nugent speaks about an outdoorsman who was cut up with his own axe and then regales us all with a little anecdote about two Girl Scouts who are walking through the woods holding knives. Why? Who knows. But Bigfoot soon shows up and girls them with their own weapons. Finally, one of the students plays top this and tells about Bigfoot slamming a man’s head into a tree repeatedly until the man shoots himself. In the midst of all this, two of the kids decide to have sex, which draws out Bigfoot, who tears up the boy’s back.

Somehow, Nugent’s teaching abilities extend to hypnosis. He uses those on Wanda, who helps us flashback to her abusive childhood, her father interrupted her first lovemaking experience and then her rape by Bigfoot. Yep. You read that right. Convinced the father of the child was a demon, McGinty killed the beast’s offspring and Wanda got her revenge by setting him on fire.

Again, at this point, anyone sane would get out of the woods. Nope. They decide to dig up the body of Wanda’s child, which brings out Bigfoot who steals back his child’s bones.

Everyone decides to become a cover version of Night of the Living Dead and see much of the footage in Bigfoot vision. Bigfoot breaks in while Wanda calmly watches. The monster strangles folks, rips out intestines, slices throats, shoves people’s faces through glass windows like his name is Dario Argento and then shoves Nugent’s face onto a hot stove. You’ll cheer, trust me. This is why you watch movies.

Nugent wakes up back in the giallo framing device, where the doctors sedate him as he pleads for everyone to find Wanda and Bigfoot. The police discuss his story, declare him criminally insane and move on. Are they part of the conspiracy?

After doing some research on this, I learned that the original ending of the movie had a helicopter rescue the remaining students and the sheriff telling Wanda that Bigfoot was safe. The film’s distributor felt the movie would sell better commercial if all of the students were killed.

I love this movie. Pure perfect love. From the words “those horror stories that you heard about the forest…they’re all true!” to the bloody ending where nearly every single character is wiped out in graphic detail, this is a movie that shocks you at every turn. Brutal violence. Odd moments of humor. Loud blasts of synthesizer beeps, boops and squeals. Nonsensical plotting and a movie that has no idea what it truly wants to be, so it becomes all of them.

I want more people to discover this film. It’s scummy filmmaking at its bloody best.

Originally released by porn label VCX (under their VCII label) in the 1980’s, this was re-released by Code Red a few years back. Luckily, you can find it on Amazon Prime.

Slice is a total mess — think a slice of pizza that you piled up high with every single kind of topping you ever wanted and wondered why it was such a doughy mess. But you know what? Sometimes, those kinds of experiments in stoner cooking pay off. And after watching this movie, I felt the same way.

Let me see if I can summarize this rambling bit of wacko into one coherent sentence: In the town of Kingfisher, the truce between the living and the dead is endangered by the murders of several delivery people from Perfect Pizza. There are also witches and werewolves. And a lot of the movie’s story is told through music videos. Oh yeah — Perfect Pizza is also the gateway to Hell.

That’s no accident — the star of the film is Chance the Rapper, who plays Dax, the aforementioned werewolf. And the direction comes from Austin Vesely, who directed several of Chance’s videos. 

Jack (Paul Scheer of How Did This Get Made?) has opened Perfect Pizza over the ashes of the Yummy Yummy Chinese Food restaurant, which was destroyed, and also above the previous ashes of an insane asylum which became a haunted burial ground that is currently inhabited by around 40,000 ghosts. Sean (director Vesely) is killed at the beginning of the film, bringing his girlfriend Astrid (Zazie Beetz, Deadpool 2) back to the shop she thought she left behind.

Is Dax the werewolf the killer? How does Big Cheese and his gang fit in? Is that a zombie working in the pizza shop? How awesome is it to see Hannibal Buress and Chris Parnell in a horror movie? Is this a film audacious enough to have a reporter write her story aloud to help bring all the threads together moments before the film quite literally goes to hell?

This movie is like a 1970’s Fourth World Kirby comic, in that it has 82 million ideas that it tries to fit into 82 minutes. The town of Kingfisher is fascinating — who becomes a ghost? Who becomes a zombie? Why do the witches hare everyone? Why is the occult drawn to take out? This would have worked so much better as a Netflix series, but I’m really just saying that because I wish we had more time to explore the setting and characters, like how Dax doesn’t want to be a hero or villain, but must finally make a choice.

So many of the reviews I’ve read have really taken this movie to task for being unfocused and all over the place. That’s probably why I liked it so much! I’d rather have a movie packed with big ideas and pure craziness than something that bores me.

You can find Slice on Amazon Prime.

George Henderson (John Lithgow) and his family are heading back from a trip to the Cascade mountains — the first trip where he hasn’t bagged an animal. That’s when he hits a big critter with his Ford Country Squire. More than that, he’s hit a sasquatch. And once he gets it strapped to the roof, he learns that it’s not dead. Nope, now it’s part of the family.

Harry soon escapes their suburban home before going wild throughout Seattle before becoming part of the family — just in time to leave them behind and go back home. He just has to avoid being captured or killed by Jacques LaFleur, a hunter who has been after Bigfoot so long that he’s become a joke.

This is another of the films that Becca watched nearly every single day, along with every Halloween film. She knows every character by name, every beat of the story and is able to explain each and every nuance of the story.

Hey — I’m always happy when Don Ameche shows up in a movie. Since my childhood, he’s always been known as John, half of The Bickersons with Frances Langford as Blanche. Here, he plays Dr. Wallace Wrightwood, a man whose life was ruined by his search for Bigfoot.

Rick Baker did an amazing job on the FX here, placing Predator actor Kevin Peter Hall into a complex costume that makes him look exactly as we imagine a Sasquatch to look like. I love the sequence at the end where Harry’s real family reveals themselves in the forest, including a child! No wonder this movie won an Academy Award for Best Make-Up.

Here’s some trivia for you. Co-writer Bill Martin also wrote songs for Harry Nilsson’s “Harry” album and can be seen wearing a bear costume on the album’s art. That’s where Harry gets his name — he’s named for Nilsson (Son of Dracula). Plus, cryptozoologist Loren Coleman claims that David Suchet’s Jacques character is based on Rene Dahinden, a Canadian by way of Switzerland researcher who was a big advocate for the Patterson-Gimlin film. He also claims that Ameche’s character is a combination of Sasquatch researchers John Green, Peter Byrne and Dr. Grover Krantz.

This led to a TV series and will be, one imagines, one day remade as an inferior reimagining. You can watch it for yourself on Netflix.

As college friends try to hold onto the good old days by staying in touch via the internet, their evening of stories, pranks, drinking and making fun of one another is interrupted by a demon that has been trapped for centuries in Salem, Massachusetts. Seeing as how that demon is on a mission to bring the devil to our reality and how it can also possess multiple people at once, this will be a night that tests their friendship and changes the world forever.

Kendra, AJ, Mar and Dwayne spent time together at THE Ohio State but adulthood is making them grow apart. The only way for them to reconnect is through an all-night video chat. e-Demon captures that night — as well as multiple text messages, Wikipedia pages, message board posts and so much more — ala the films Searching and Unfriended.

The weirdness starts when Gamma introduces his grandmother, who warns of a horrible danger in the trunk that’s in the attic of their family home. The gang has been pranking each other all night with bloody stunts that look real, so when the demon comes to life, it just seems like one more goof. But nope — it’s real and ready to destroy them all.

If you’re looking for a straight-ahead narrative, this isn’t it. Instead, the film is near hyperactive, jumping from screen to screen. But it’s an interesting narrative technique. I wouldn’t want to see every movie in this way, but it works here. The cast are all relative newcomers, but they handle themselves well, basically all acting toward the camera for long uninterrupted takes, reacting to things on their laptops instead of other living people. Actually, the cast being unrecognizable faces really helps tell the story, which slowly grows in intensity.

At first, I was kind of put off by this gimmick, but by the end of the film, particularly with the way it treats the ending, I was hooked.

This is writer/director/producer Jeremy Wechter’s first full-length project. I’ll definitely be seeking out whatever he works on next.

e-Demon is playing in New York at Cinema Village starting tomorrow — complete with Q&A with the director at all showings this weekend. It’s also available on demand and you can get the DVD on Amazon. Learn more at the official site, the e-Demon Resistance Network.

Disclaimer: I was sent this movie by its PR team, but as you know, that has no bearing on my review.

According to The Weirdest Movie Ever Made, the book we reviewed at the start of the week, the Patterson-Gimlin film may have made Patterson rich, but Gimlin at first wanted nothing to do with it.

Yet according to author Phil Hall, “After Patterson’s death, Gimlin approached his former partner’s widow, Patricia Patterson, regarding the failure to provide him with the profits from the screenings of the Bluff Creek film. Unable to settle amicably with Mrs. Patterson, Gimlin filed a lawsuit against her…” with the end result being Gimlin was eventually “rewarded 100 percent of all past, present and future publication rights of the imagery connected to the film.”

After this victory, Gimlin was convinced that he should sue American National Enterprises, which is the company behind 1975’s Sasquatch: Legend of Bigfoot.

Turns out that while Bigfoot was difficult to find in the wild, he was easy to find in the courtroom. American National Enterprises was also suing our old friends  Sunn Classic Pictures, claiming that they were illegally using the Patterson-Gimlin film for The Mysterious Monsters. American National Enterprises and Sunn Classic Pictures may have settled out of court, but René Dahinden, author of the book Sasquatch, was bankrolling Gimlin’s legal battles.

Gimlin was, at heart, a cowboy and had little interest in the stress of these battles. You’ll have to read the book to learn more — I don’t want to give away more of Hall’s fine work for free — because it’s time that we get to Ivan Marx.

Don’t get confused. This is the second 1975 entitled The Legend of Bigfoot. And this one is all about Ivan Marx, created by Ivan Marx and narrated by Ivan Marx. According to Wikipedia, the film receives “praise focused largely on the nature footage and the new information about cryptozoology, but criticism largely focused on Marx’s rambling voice-overs (seen by some as self-promotion) and the poor-quality Bigfoot footage, that most have accepted as a hoax. However, to this day, there are many supporters of Marx, who consider him a true explorer and pioneer in the field of cryptozoology.”

If you watch this movie and come away thinking that Ivan Marx and his wife Peggy, who would go on to also make In the Shadow of Bigfoot and Bigfoot: Alive and Well in ’82, are the Ed and Lorraine Warren of the Bigfoot world, then you’re not alone.

Get ready for 70 some odd minutes of rambling raconteur Ivan Marx telling some tall tales. He opens facing the camera, telling us that this movie is the result of ten years of research and he stands behind every word. Seeing as how I had no idea who Ivan Marx was before this movie began, I was inclined to listen.

After explaining to us his pedigree as a tracker, showing us his wife and the cougar pups that live on their ranch and talking about the first men who told him of Bigfoot, Marx learns about the land of petrified wood from his brother-in-law, a place where carvings tell the tale of giant hand and foot having monsters stealing children.

After a series of cow murders and a dead bear near some large tracks, he begins trying to hunt and study something he barely believes in. This takes him to the Oh-mah statues in the redwoods and all along the Oregon coast to no avail.

While on a job filming a cinnamon bear, he’s able to capture footage of the beast. Nobody believes him and he becomes being questioned by science. Then he takes us on a tour of b-roll footage of injured squirrels, goats in the dirt, glaciers melting, the Trans-Alaska pipeline, Bigfoot painters, the Northern Lights and more.

He even gets the promise that he’ll see Bigfoot from an Eskimo and while he gets the footage of some shining eyes, he doesn’t see the creature…because he disappeared behind a rainbow. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, you can.

We then watch more nature footage of salmon, geese, moose, caribou and more until we see a young Bigfoot in the stream. The other animals — all from other b-roll footage of course — aren’t afraid. “Bigfoot is a benevolent creature!” Yep, Marx also figures out that the creature is mostly a vegetarian with occasional fish meals. Yes, this movie taught me that Bigfoot is a pescetarian!

Luckily, Marx isn’t giving up here. He’s figured out Bigfoot’s migratory patterns and he’s on the search for the creature…all in the hopes of protecting him from mankind.

This film was directed by Harry Winer, who would go on to direct two of Becca’s favorite movies, the Jamie Lee Curtis starring House Arrest and SpaceCamp. It’s a shambling mess of a film and your ability to enjoy it will be solely determined by how much of Ivan Marx’s carny spirit you can stomach. As for me, I’ve spent more than half my life as a professional wrestler, so I was all in for this.

You can watch it for free on Amazon Prime and at the Internet Archive.

This movie lies to you from the very moment it begins. First off, it’s barely a movie, clicking in around 59 minutes. And when you get to the real heart of the movie, it’s not even about Bigfoot! It’s really about a mummy coming back from the dead.

A high school biology class — filled with stoners — spends much of the opening of the movie discussing cryptozoological creatures like the griffin. What school is this? Who approved this lesson plan? Nonetheless, this class is interrupted by a good friend of their teacher, who frighteningly warns that he took his class to search for Bigfoot 15 years ago, a field trip where parents bemoaned signing the permission slips, as nearly everyone involved ended up in mental institution.

That’s when we cut to footage of a completely different movie — a student film made in 1958 called Teenagers Battle the Thing — where that class travels to Native American burial ground where a mummy attacks the kids.

This is a movie that redefines the phrase bad movie. It has it all — B roll travelogue footage, amateurish acting from two different decades, day for night footage that’s explained away by the moon being so bright and a climax that explains that the only way to stop Bigfoot is to set him on fire. Even better, the print I watched was completely blobbed out and orange. This is not a movie that demands a blu ray or 4K transfer. It belongs beaten up and hard to watch.

You can check this out for free at the Internet Archive.

For the last twenty years, thousands of deformed frogs have been popping up in Minnesota ponds with some populations having over 70% of their number mutated.  After years of testing, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency came up with plenty of theories for the cause but nothing definite and in 2001, the U.S. Government pulled all further research funding.

This isn’t something made up for a movie. It’s a true story and it’s nowhere near finished, as frog mutations have spread to other states and even India and China.

Strange Nature is a full-length feature film from writer/director James Ojala, who was part of the special effects crew for movies like Thor, Tron: Legacy, Jackals, John Dies at the End and more. It’s based on the Minnesota frogs and how they impact the lives of a single mother and her 11-year-old-son who have come back to her hometown.

Kim Sweet (Lisa Sheridan, who has appeared on TV shows like CSI: Miami and Invasion) and her son, Brody, are in town because they’ve run out of options. And with Chuck (Bruce Bohne, the Snyder Dawn of the Dead), her father, dying of liver cancer, there’s a chance for her to reconnect.

They’re in town for less than a few moments before mutated frogs start hopping up. The American Patriot organic pesticide plant may be the cause, but just like Jaws, Blood Beach and every other movie mayor ever, Mayor Paulson (Stephen Tobolowsky, Single White Female) squashes every attempt to get the story out. After all, they keep the town alive. The guys who work at the plant — like Sam (former WWE star John Hennigan) don’t want to hear a single thing about it, nor does the neighbor whose shed hides furry costumes in a moment of weird humor that takes the movie off the tracks for a bit.

That said — this movie really shines when it comes to the creature effects, like the mutant frogs, puppies, two-headed wolves and more that start to emerge. Maybe it’s all of the Bigfoot movies I’ve been watching, but I enjoyed that this film feels more like a 1970’s eco-horror film than a modern movie. Trust me, that’s a compliment. It balances real human drama — fitting in at a new school, befriending kids that others make fun of, trying to come back to a place that you thought you escaped, dealing with your life’s dream turning on you, going from being cared for by a parent to being their caregiver — with horrific elements well.

Soon, tourists start coming to town to make fun of the townsfolks with their Minnesota – Land of 1,000 Freaks shirts. Even worse, the mutations and child disappearances start to tie together, as do more and more mutant births. And when our heroine gets pregnant — to her son’s teacher no less — things go from bad to worse. Add in the fact that babies act like parasites, killing their mothers and this becomes a film that progressively paints its characters into deeper and darker corners.

Hennigan is really good here, as is Dave Mattey, who plays Joseph, who shares a birth defect with his daughter that the townsfolks wrongly take as the reason for their town’s issues.

Those that appreciate a decent story — as well as those that love gore — will be equally satisfied with this one.

You can learn more about the movie — which is making its theatrical debut at the Laemmle Glendale in Los Angeles September 22-27  — at the official site.