The Joi of Bigfoot

The best bait to lure Bigfoot out into the open? Gorgeous women in bikinis. Shocked that Bigfoot hunters haven’t thought of this before.

This isn’t the plot of Bigfoot, a 1970 sub-budget “horror” movie, but it should be. Rather, it’s just one part of a bigger tapestry that weaves together a horror legend (John Carradine), a supermodel (Joi Lansing), and dynamite-packin’ bikers with semi-combed hair. (What a bunch of disrespectful punks.)

Parachuting into the forest after her plane quits flying, Joi, with her flotation devices stored safely under her blouse, runs smack into Bigfoot. Elsewhere, a biker guy horizontally makes out with his bikini-clad new girlfriend, only to discover they’re  swapping spit on a Bigfoot burial ground. Guess who shows up to punch out the boyfriend (wicked right hook) and make off with the make-out girl?

The local sheriff doesn’t have time for this hair-covered nonsense, and pretty much doesn’t do much to solve the mystery of the missing women. So Biker Rick (the guy whose bricks were earlier flipped by Bigfoot), turns to hucksters for help. Some help – they plan to capture B-foot to exploit for financial gain. (“People will pay 50 cents to see it!”)

Meanwhile, the top-heavy abducted gals are tied up (!) by Bigfoot, where they hypothesize about their situation and give away a big clue as to the what lies ahead. (More than one Bigfoot, as it turns out – and they seem to be gooning out over something at the top of the mountain everyone’s partying/making out/peeing on.)

Finally, after much hippie bongo music, noisy motorcycles tearing up the woods and great one liners (“They’re practically sub-human, but they look like animals…”), the hucksters and Biker Rick (cool name) slog through the forest until they happen upon the abducted gals and the Bigfoot lair (not quite an apartment as it doesn’t even have a kitchenette).

And it’s here we get the “slap your head in astonishment” big surprise. The thing at the top of the mountain the other Bigfeet are fearful of is… I’ll just say that the hint lies in the Bigfoot creatures themselves, all of whom are female. Run with it. And the end? Has something to do with dynamite – and Joi Lansing running through the woods, barely keeping her mountainous region from popping out of her top.

P.S. Bigfoot fights a bear in this one. I thought they were friends. The bear probably owed him money. Or a honey-dipped pine cone. Man, I could sure go for one of those right now.

Dead and Buried: Obscene But Not Heard

Dead & Buried, a 1981 lurid crap classic and, despite its budgetary limitations, actually added a new twist to the zombie genre without evening knowing it or promoting itself as a zombie movie. But to tell you what it is, I’d have to spoil the entire thing. By doing so, as the neighbor’s 4 year-old kid says, will have me “going to jail for a very long time.”

Since I don’t want to go to jail for any length of time, I’ll just give you a few of the juicy details – and by that, I mean oozing, shiny juicy gore.

Potter’s Bluff is a small coastal New England town where its residents act nice at first, then bash you over the head with hard objects, tie you up, then light you on fire while you’re still screaming about being hit with hard objects. As you’re doing your best Joan of Arc impersonation, this large group of PB’s citizens take pictures and home movie footage, all the while showing about as much emotion as someone totally wasted on Zima™.

If you somehow manage to live, you get taken to the hospital, where a nurse will give you a co-pay lethal injection in the eye. Then off to the coroner you go, while the local sheriff searches for clues as to who is wasting gasoline and matches on tourists.

Daily explicit and grisly deaths, with the recently deceased showing up soon thereafter, fit as a fiddle, looking no worse for wear and tear (emphasis on the tear). The sheriff is flummoxed (word of the day calendar –sweet), but slowly starts to assemble the clues. It isn’t until he stumbles across footage of the townsfolk’s handiwork that he loses it, especially since one clip involves his wife and… Uh oh.

During this, the emotionally distraught sheriff also discovers who is behind all this madness. And it’s right here we get the money shot. In a sweet twist, the horror of all this “bringing ‘em back to life” whack-a-do pays off like a max bet penny slot machine. Did for me, anyway.

FYI: Due to its unflinching gore and violence, Dead & Buried was initially banned as a “video nasty” in the UK in the early 1980s, but was later acquitted of obscenity charges and removed from the Director of Public Prosecutions’ list. Whew!

The Claw Is Family

I’ve eaten crawdads. I’ve eaten lobster. Crawdads are harder to eat as you first need to “pinch the tail and suck the head.” (Sounds like what a 1-800 escort is paid to do.) Lobster is preferable as all you have to do is crack the shell and shove the sweet meat into your mouth. OK, that didn’t sound right.

Regardless, two distantly related shellfish that deserve rental space in your tract. But what if they were movies instead of breakfast? Such is the case with Crawdaddy, an in-production sci-fi tongue-in-cheeker about a genetically altered (i.e., colossal) crawdad seeking revenge. The other, of course, is Ebirah, the giant teabag lobster that had a less-than-rewarding bout with Godzilla in the 1966 semi-classic, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (aka, Godzilla, Ebirah, Mothra: Big Duel in the South Seas and Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster).

But the shell of it all is that Crawdaddy looks to be another SyFy Channel™ schlobster fest. All they seem to be doing is super-sizing another entree, backdropping it in a formulaic revenge agenda, and calling it a day. Ebirah, though limited in screen time, was not a digital creation (he was born in the primordial crab boil known as the ocean). Ebby really threw his claw into his performance and not let himself become just another notch on Godzilla’s victory bib. Who needed drawn butter when the action was so tasty?

Here’s what to expect with Crawdaddy…

Deep in the forest on Clear Lake, an experiment has gone terribly wrong. People are being systematically killed by an unforeseen danger. Among the survivors, including the biologist and sheriff, are three teenage ex-gang members, an Eagle Scout, a beautiful teenage blind girl, a Katrina transplant, and a hermit scientist.

Holding out at the scientist’s shack, they fight for their lives against the packs of dog-sized crawdads. The scientist reveals his involvement in creating genetically modified super-fish, which were eaten by the crawdad population at the lake, causing them to grow. It wasn’t until the last few days that they became aggressive. Just when the group thinks they’ve succeeded, the king of them all… Crawdaddy…has come to seek revenge for the killing of its spawn.

Ouch. This may be the first time a movie could give you ciguatera poisoning.