**Contains Spoilers*--as if I could spoil a film that's already so rancid!!!
I've seen some screwball movies in my time but this hybrid hash is definitely in the top Five.
It starts with a mangy-looking Bigfoot killing a caveman, followed by credits bearing a 1963 copyright date. Then it switches to a sequence (of radically different picture quality) in which a zombie attacks a woman on an isolated farm. This turns out to be a "typical Hollywood monster flick" being screened by a professor of cryptozoology for a class full of half-snoozing students with early-70s hair. The prof lectures some more about monsters, especially Bigfoot, and we get to see footage of logging operations in the Northwest. (How EXCITING!!!) Another Bigfoot, looking different than the shambling giant hairball seen earlier, stalks a couple of luckless travelers who've blundered into his territory. Then the professor introduces an older professor who previously encountered Bigfoot. Cut back to the 1963 footage, which looks like it might have been shot in Arizona or New Mexico. The older professor and some nerdy students go on a field trip, find a mummified "Bigfoot" and prepare to haul it back to civilization. The monster wakes up--which puts him ahead of the audience-- and goes on a rampage, if you can call killing one person offscreen a rampage. I won't describe the plot any more because I don't want to spoil the "brilliant" and "thrilling" ending.
If nothing else this movie should make viewers feel better about their own scholastic performance. The doofy students here are dumber than the characters in Herschell Gordon Lewis flicks and that's saying a lot. The score in the older footage is the same weird music that used to turn up in Andy Milligan's movies. It's almost as if a drunk cut up several different films in a Cuisinart and a dope fiend randomly sewed 87 minutes together afterward. The overall effect is like that of a bad fever dream, especially if you saw this on New York City's Channel 9 in the wee hours of the morning. Bad as this mess is, it would have been more dull than Earth Science class without the added footage. William Simonsen, Robert Clymire, and Ruth Ann Manella star in what remains, to date, their only claim to fame.
I've seen some screwball movies in my time but this hybrid hash is definitely in the top Five.
It starts with a mangy-looking Bigfoot killing a caveman, followed by credits bearing a 1963 copyright date. Then it switches to a sequence (of radically different picture quality) in which a zombie attacks a woman on an isolated farm. This turns out to be a "typical Hollywood monster flick" being screened by a professor of cryptozoology for a class full of half-snoozing students with early-70s hair. The prof lectures some more about monsters, especially Bigfoot, and we get to see footage of logging operations in the Northwest. (How EXCITING!!!) Another Bigfoot, looking different than the shambling giant hairball seen earlier, stalks a couple of luckless travelers who've blundered into his territory. Then the professor introduces an older professor who previously encountered Bigfoot. Cut back to the 1963 footage, which looks like it might have been shot in Arizona or New Mexico. The older professor and some nerdy students go on a field trip, find a mummified "Bigfoot" and prepare to haul it back to civilization. The monster wakes up--which puts him ahead of the audience-- and goes on a rampage, if you can call killing one person offscreen a rampage. I won't describe the plot any more because I don't want to spoil the "brilliant" and "thrilling" ending.
If nothing else this movie should make viewers feel better about their own scholastic performance. The doofy students here are dumber than the characters in Herschell Gordon Lewis flicks and that's saying a lot. The score in the older footage is the same weird music that used to turn up in Andy Milligan's movies. It's almost as if a drunk cut up several different films in a Cuisinart and a dope fiend randomly sewed 87 minutes together afterward. The overall effect is like that of a bad fever dream, especially if you saw this on New York City's Channel 9 in the wee hours of the morning. Bad as this mess is, it would have been more dull than Earth Science class without the added footage. William Simonsen, Robert Clymire, and Ruth Ann Manella star in what remains, to date, their only claim to fame.
