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Saturday, October 25, 2014

31 Days of Halloween 2014: Day 25

Week #4: Bigfeet
The Legend of Bigfoot
1976
Harvey Winer

Ivan Marx, is a man who has been chasing after footage of Bigfoot for over ten years. He catches wild animals for a living and finds giant hand and footprints. His investigations lead him up and down the west coast. He finds seven-hundred year old rock carvings depicting being with huge hands and feet. He visits a woman who paints pictures of Bigfoot. Ivan ends up chasing Bigfoot all the way to the article circle. His investigations leads him to make a discovery about the creature that could change the way we think about it… or not.

Told entirely in voice over, The Legend of Bigfoot presents itself as a nature documentary. It tries to mimic early Disney nature films by featuring a series of vignettes about Ivan’s interactions with wild animals. Mostly it’s him catching them and annoying them to no end. Ivan never shuts up, his voice drawls over nearly every frame of the film. It’s amusing at first, but it starts to grate and by the end I wish he’d shut up. Much of the nature footage is pleasant, and I’m very curious where they managed to find a big dead bear. Watching Ivan play with the thing’s mouth is probably the closest this film comes to being horror. In the middle of the film there is prolonged sequence about ground squirrels in love that hits a note of tragedy involving a truck, and then it just keeps going... and going. The Bigfoot footage is probably the weakest part of the movie. It amounts to a cheap looking suit, shot out of focus and at a distance. We are told Bigfoot at one point vanished into a rainbow. Make of that what you will.

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