I find that genre cinema is very subjective. A great drama is a great drama from the 30s to the 60s to the current. When we start talking about genres, though, from comedy to horror to sci-fi, they are often very much a product of their time and, quite often, one's opinion of a movie in that genre depends on time and place. There are a lot of bad 80s horror movies that I love. I won't try to tell you that they are good, but they are great to me. I can't help but feel that this is the case with those who love this movie. To be fair, this was a monster hit at the time, but that really only leaves me to wonder if people in 1972 just needed something better to do with their time.
I was in elementary school at the dawn of the 80s and I used to look forward to those days when the teacher would wheel in that reel-to- reel movie projector. The smell of the bulbs and the film, the sounds of the spool, the look of the movies. It's still such a hot-wire memory for me. For those too young to remember, this reference is meaningless, but this movie is exactly the kind of thing I imagine watching on a sunny afternoon, sitting on my rug square, in a 3rd grade class on that projector. That's about the quality of it, too.
Frankly, the film is terrible. The acting is atrocious, because most aren't actors, they are the real life people re-enacting their experiences. The music is cheesy. So many people on here are talking about how great it is. Really? Really??? Bad folk music that was dated two months after it came out and sounds downright hokey now. Wisely, we never really see the monster, but that's also one of the things hurting the movie. Yep, it's a guy in a Halloween store gorilla suit. We probably didn't want to see it much more than we do, but a little more monster would have gone a long, long way in this movie because there's just nothing else here.
I'll break this movie down for you in one paragraph. This guy saw Bigfoot outside his house, there was some weird noise, there was a dark shape. This woman and her kids saw Bigfoot. There is more running, some more noises and some more vague shapes. Repeat this for about a dozen more encounters along the way. That's all you get. Like watching a dryer to see if the red sock will fall a different way this time, it's an endless litany of the same experiences, acted out poorly, hoping something will change with this one. Eventually, you are praying that Bigfoot will shred one of these people just to give you something different.
Okay, it's supposedly a landmark movie. The first pseudo- documentary style horror film. That might be the case, but that doesn't make it interesting or exciting. I think I've only given a rating this low to a handful of movies, but this one deserved it. If you didn't see it at the drive-in in 1972 and it didn't scare you as a kid and you still have some childhood impression of it, then quite simply there is nothing, at all, worth watching here.
I was in elementary school at the dawn of the 80s and I used to look forward to those days when the teacher would wheel in that reel-to- reel movie projector. The smell of the bulbs and the film, the sounds of the spool, the look of the movies. It's still such a hot-wire memory for me. For those too young to remember, this reference is meaningless, but this movie is exactly the kind of thing I imagine watching on a sunny afternoon, sitting on my rug square, in a 3rd grade class on that projector. That's about the quality of it, too.
Frankly, the film is terrible. The acting is atrocious, because most aren't actors, they are the real life people re-enacting their experiences. The music is cheesy. So many people on here are talking about how great it is. Really? Really??? Bad folk music that was dated two months after it came out and sounds downright hokey now. Wisely, we never really see the monster, but that's also one of the things hurting the movie. Yep, it's a guy in a Halloween store gorilla suit. We probably didn't want to see it much more than we do, but a little more monster would have gone a long, long way in this movie because there's just nothing else here.
I'll break this movie down for you in one paragraph. This guy saw Bigfoot outside his house, there was some weird noise, there was a dark shape. This woman and her kids saw Bigfoot. There is more running, some more noises and some more vague shapes. Repeat this for about a dozen more encounters along the way. That's all you get. Like watching a dryer to see if the red sock will fall a different way this time, it's an endless litany of the same experiences, acted out poorly, hoping something will change with this one. Eventually, you are praying that Bigfoot will shred one of these people just to give you something different.
Okay, it's supposedly a landmark movie. The first pseudo- documentary style horror film. That might be the case, but that doesn't make it interesting or exciting. I think I've only given a rating this low to a handful of movies, but this one deserved it. If you didn't see it at the drive-in in 1972 and it didn't scare you as a kid and you still have some childhood impression of it, then quite simply there is nothing, at all, worth watching here.