Release Date: February 13th, 1976
Format: 16mm (Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, CA)
Written by: Ed Hawkins and Ronald D. Olson
Directed by: Ed Ragozzino
2 Stars
Last up in Frida’s super secret grindhouse triple-feature of 1970s Bigfoot movies: Sasquatch. Unlike the evening’s first two films, The Legend of Boggy Creek and Creature from Black Lake, Sasquatch was filmed and takes place in the greater Pacific Northwest! Good! I was getting tired of that violent, bootleg version known as the Fouke Monster.
Sasquatch is a bit of an oddity in its form and structure. Part docudrama (like Boggy Creek) and part traditional narrative (like Creature from Black Lake), Sasquatch also includes the famous footage from the Patterson-Grimlin film (you know the one, where two hikers stumble upon Bigfoot right before he looks over his shoulder at the camera and walks away into the forests of northern California).
Also, unfortunately, Sasquatch ventures into the mondo genre. Not familiar with mondo films? They were pseudo documentaries, popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s, that were largely staged by the filmmakers and purported to explore all sorts of taboo subjects, from death to sex to, in the case of Sasquatch, violent animal encounters. Director Ed Ragozzino stages a few of these encounters that I wish I would have known about beforehand. If you’re an animal lover, you might want to skip these scenes. There’s one in which a cougar is clearly pushed off a cliff and lands in the middle of a pack of horses; the horses are severely startled and the cougar takes off running back into the forest. There’s another where a black bear starts lightly pawing at a baby raccoon, who falls into a creek (thankfully the little guy makes it back to shore eventually). There’s also a scene of two large male grizzlies savagely fighting each other (this one might be actual documentary footage, but Ragozzino had lost my trust by this point).
Ignoring the mondo unpleasantness (if you can), Sasquatch is just okay. Its greatest strength is its stunning photography in the Cascade Mountains surrounding Bend, Oregon. It’s some breathtaking scenery, and it seems like it was a difficult shoot for the cast and crew.
But jeez, just leave the poor little animals out of it.
