Can it Be? Even More Sasquatch Films!
(Cinematic Sasquatches Part V)
Considering the deep abiding awfulness of most bigfoot movies, Claw: The Legend of Sasquatch (2006) is pretty good, as the cast of unknowns aren't agregiously bad, & the sasquatch FX aren't laughable. It does try. But without the great bulk of truly abysmal films of this type in comparison, there's not a lot to Clawed that would allow it to stand on its own merits.
 S.O.B. white trash hunters devoid of concern for the environment enter a sasquatch's territory & raise hell. Despite their superior numbers & weapons, only one comes back alive.
The survivor organizes a redneck revenge raid on the forest, intending to kill the creature, which they hope is just a big grizzly. They also intend to kill John Eagleheart, the Native American Park Ranger, who knows it is no bear, but Taku-he, or bigfoot. Without any perceivable reason the rednecks just think Eagleheart is somehow to blame for everything.
Four teenagers including a dumb jock, a smart geek, & two interchangeable babes, set out camping, in hopes of encountering & photographing a man-killing grizzly as a school science project, with the added intention of getting laid in the woods.
The smart geek has read a book about Taku-he so knows almost as much about it as John Eagleheart. Though he's smart, he's not smart enough to stay out of the woods even knowing some Pacific Northwest hillbillies had recently been ripped to shreds.
The drunken redneck avengers being harmful to the environment & quick to kill things including even human beings sort of deserve to be picked off one by one, so they are. The teens, however, are boring but innocuous & don't deserve to die, so they don't. When the last psycho redneck threatens one of the teenage girls, John Eagleheart & the sasquatch actually appear to have joined forces to help her.
Apparently the sasquatch has a type of moral discernment & prefers cute, young, & horny teens to ugly, drunk, & bigotted rednecks. That really takes a load off my mind, as I never thought a monster would spare me just cuz I'm well-meaning & a liberal.
If Eagleheart had been in the film more it might have been more fun. None of the other characters are more than adequate.
Taku-he isn't seen much. It's a half hour before we see just his expressive caveman face, then somewhile longer before we see more of him, & only at the end does he stand still long enough that we can actually look at him. I thought he looked okay & should've been utilized more, since so little else was at all interesting.
 Four ultra-bad movies on dvd under the collective title Bigfoot Terror: 4 Blood-Freezing Features consist of:
Bill Rebane's Ed Woodian The Capture of Bigfoot (1979); Michael Findlay's puppy-like phony yeti in Shriek of the Mutilated (1974); the retro-silly Search for the Beast (1997) which appears to be original to this collection, having failed previously to get a distribution contract with reason; & last but least, a moronic "nonfiction" documentary The Legend of Bigfoot (1976).
This phony documentary tries to look like a nature film with narration chronicling the "factual" & self-important exploits of Bigfoot hunter Ivan Marx, & includes yeah-right "real" footage of the beast.
Ivan Marx was often exposed as a hoaxer, yet always returned with increasingly foolish footage of his bowlegged self in a fur suit in order to prove, even if the last time it was a hoax, this time it's for real.
More of his hoky footage will convince rubes & mental deficients to believe in Marx's vanity documentary In the Shadow of Bigfoot (1988), one of many pokerfaced promotionals sold by sundry hoaxers of Marx's ilk. After his death his family finally officially revealed the truth of all that long-debated hoax footage, as if any of it even required confessions.
This kind of fakery has done good business with videos, books, lectures, workshops, television specials & spots, & even forest group vacations marketed as "sasquatch expeditions," all fairly profitable. Marx continues to be cited & sold at many fronts as the real deal, as his pranks have been credited with starting the whole Bigfoot craze beginning in 1958, & to this day there are gullible souls who want someone to charge them money to believe It's Twoo It's Twoo.
Of course the sundry True Facts documentaries that exist about sasquatches are not of much interest to film lovers per se, not even to shlock film lovers, so I've elected not to provide much coverage for such films. I make this exception because one of them padded out the four-film set Bigfoot Terror & because Marx represents a sub-sub-genre of homemade movies in the marketplace.
If a fondness for schlock is coincident with an interest in crackpotism, gullibility, & professional hoaxing, such items might be worth tracking down.
 The aforementioned Search for the Beast also in the Bigfoot Terror four-film collection seems to have been made for the softcore porn market & never otherwise distributed.
As the collection looks distinctly like it probably contains films for juvenile horror fans, the inclusion of a "dirty" movie might alarm the occasional parent who mistakenly believes such things are kept in a back room away from the underaged. In fact a great many multi-pack discount collections feature genre-connected dirty films, with narry a warning on the package..
A bit of sex to flute music in the woods of Alabama is followed by a mysterious attack of some beasty or person we're not initially permitted to see.
When we do eventually get a good close look at him, including his anal sex scene with a woodland babe wearing a teddy, it's just a very basic ape costume with rubber pects, & one hell of a silly mask that makes for one of the least believable bigfoots ever in a horror flick, X-rated or other.
The halfbreed baby sasquatch is more interesting, resembling a furry slipper with glass eyes & plastic teeth glued to the sole.
As the Alabama bigfoot has the hots for human women, it's up to the Professor to arm himself to the teeth for a guns-&-gore climax that just might startle you awake for the finale.
 The cheapy Screams of a Winter Night (aka Howlings of a Winter Night, 1979) was made with student actors attending Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, a college that has since been abandoned, the neglected campus becoming a popular teen hang-out.
Screams of a Winter Night is an anthology film that draws on overly familiar urban folklore, framed as stories told by young campers in the standard z-horror setting of a cabin in the woods. As I write this, it has never had an official dvd release, but can be found as a grey-market copy of a fuzzy old vhs tape.
Three stories unfold, each stupider than the next, one involving a dwarf sasquatch in the story called "The Moss Point Man." Before the stories are fully told we'll have encountered a fake werewolf, a mute psychopath in an allegedly haunted hotel, & a wallflower of a gal who finally goes psycho.
Suburban Sasquatch (2004) is an abjectly amateur production about a sasquatch rampaging through the suburbs, available so far as I know only from director Dave Wascavage who has a website for his company Troubled Moon Films.
It seems to have been filmed mostly on a lawn in the back yard, & has perhaps the worst computer generated blood splatters I've yet seen. Local "police" wearing what look like UPS uniforms. The "best" gore FX is the recurring one of cutting away from anything graphic & seeing mannikin limbs thrown in the air.
And then it sticks in an incompetent faux Native American maiden who fights the sasquatch with tomahawk & bow & arrow while dressed in a buckskin miniskirt. The portrayal of "Indians" (the warrior babe & her "wise" grampa) comes dangerously close to racist, but is more certainly retarded. That the "warrior" maiden never does win against the magic sasquatch, but has to be saved by the dork news reporter, just makes stupid stupider.
The song behind the end-credits has got to be heard to be believed, it's hysterically bad, but written with bizarre sincerity. Badly recorded, too, so it sounds like its being squalled by an injured cat from the far end of a drain pipe.
It's shot on a small digital camcorder & if you can think back to the worst of the cheapo sasquatch movies of the 1970s, this one's worse than that. And a more honest title would've been Suburban Rented Gorilla Suit.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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