Documentaries have an honored place in visual education. Of course, there are some who want to spice them up a bit with dramatic re-enactments. These are sometimes called docudramas. Then there are those who fake the documentary style to make mockumentaries, generally as a species of comedy. Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot is none of these. A pseudo-documentary, it comes with “The Beast” collection I’ve mentioned before a time or two (mainly to excuse my bizarre viewing). It presents itself as a documentary, but pretty much everything about it is fake. The only real people are Roger Patterson—the movie shows his famous Bigfoot film—and perhaps the miners at Ape Canyon. Oh, and Teddy Roosevelt. In any case, the movie follows seven men as they make their way into remote British Columbia where “the computer” tells them sasquatch likely live.
The pseudoscience is easily enough spotted early on, but the movie never lets up its purported intent to bring low-budget proof back from the wilderness. I’m not sure how the actual wildlife footage was captured. In this slow-paced horror film there is quite a bit of actual nature thrown in. I also wondered how they managed to get a cougar to attack a horse train and a bear not to maul one of the incompetent actors. These two scenes aren’t special effects, and it strikes me as being either foolhardy or that trained animals were used. It doesn’t seem to have had the budget for the latter, but a real mountain lion does land on one of the horses before quickly making an escape. Although shot at night, the bear attack doesn’t seem entirely fake. These things kept me wondering.
After about two months of horseback riding the crew makes it to the computer-predicted sasquatch homeland. Bigfoot attacks the camp at night—no question that this one is fake—and after all these weeks of riding they decide to leave the next day. Getting there is, apparently, most of the fun. Fun, however, isn’t a word I’d use to describe this movie. The hokey caricature characters (the old-timer, the dopey cook, the injun, the scientist—who does nothing but measure a thing or two) are worth a pseudo-laugh or two but the story struggles to keep the viewer awake on a cold weekend afternoon. I kept wondering, in the Pennsylvania chill, how the weather in northern Canada was better in late September than it was around here in April. I had to remind myself that Bigfoot was big in the seventies. Big enough to handle both documentaries and fiction, and movies that are the latter, pretending to be the former.
Steve A. Wiggins 