THE 3RD HALL OF INFAMY: Infamy Rises Again

Another one I haven't heard of. I'll torture myself with it over the weekend, probably on Sunday.

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I'm guessing this is beelzebubble's nomination.

This nomination is from the deranged mind of a man who thinks Bokeh is high-octane entertainment.

I just guessed him because of his Trog nomination. Curious how trashy this film will be by comparison (I kind of liked Trog).

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I expected yours to be a 50's/60's B-movie, tbh.

The Curse of Bigfoot, 1975

The professor of a course about ancient monsters invites a colleague to come and tell his class the story of an ill-fated high school archeological trip that ran afoul of a bigfoot-like monster.

Who would have thought it is possible to make a movie entirely out of interludes?

There are many subgenres of bad movies. There are films that are incompetently made. There are films that are morally reprehensible in their goals. There are films where young people reading off of cue cards use parkour to spread religious teachings and save the world from satanic microchip credit cards.

Then there are movies like this one, which offend through their utter lack of any substance. At least a bad b-movie offers the blessing of the occasional outlandish line of dialogue. At least a racist propaganda documentary offers historical interest. And at least absurd religious films make you appreciate the movies that tackle questions of belief with nuance and care. This movie gives you nothing: nothing to hate, nothing to love, and precious little to even mock. There is no meat on the bone, nothing to even chew up and spit out.

Things start in promising b-movie territory, as a lumbering creature in a paper-mache mask stalks a woman, a dog, and a bowl of milk. The bad costume is an effect that, to its credit, is unintentionally upsetting as it looks so much like a dude in a poorly-made mask that you feel like you’re in slasher territory, not monster movie territory. But after what feels like something that’s at least enjoyably messy, the film shifts down about 8 gears and grinds away at the lowest speed possible. A teacher lectures interminably, which turns into an introduction to another professor who will ramble interminably.

It would be deceiving to talk about the middle of the film as the rough stretch, because that “middle” is really the 80 minutes between about 4 minutes at the beginning and 4 minutes at the end where there is a hint of action. A teacher and the five blandest teenagers ever wander around the hills, betraying an astonishing ignorance about the indigenous population they are supposedly investigating.

There is a single effective moment in the middle of the film, the discovery of a mummified (though it looks to be more caked in mud or stone) body in a sealed up cave. But the movie itself can barely sustain interest in this development, deciding that the teenagers talking about where they can buy a bottle of Coke is just as compelling and a great use of minutes (minutes!) of screen time.

As I said, there was little in this film that made me feel anything. I would say the closest I got to an emotion was the irritation I often feel in creature features where the scientists jump so quickly from discovering evidence of a new species/creature to KILL IT!! KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!

I didn’t learn the name of a single character in this film except for the milk-drinking dog.

Curse of Bigfoot

So because people kept pulling me away from my chair I didn't get to finish this first.

First and foremost, I'd like to thank this movie for being one of the very few I've seen that had the decency to use Prego sauce for blood. Secondly, I'd like to address a piece of trivia: this is a lightly expanded version of a 1958 film called Teenagers Battle the Thing. Roughly a half-hour was added to this with a couple of actors from the original film appearing for the new scenes.

Next, I'd like to say that getting punked like that at the beginning was like a stark contrast between a completely imperfect movie and a TOLERABLE moviue, or at least it was tolerable when people would actually do some talking. Just like with three movies I saw during Twin Cinema week: Strawberries Need Rain, Bury Me an Angel and The Little Things, this movie is spending too much time with "travel" montages and not enough with plot, although at least when they discover something they're having real conversations. So I already saw three movies that are worse in the travel montage department than this. And to avoid winning this tourney, you should have a plus like that.

But the biggest problem with the movie, related to the travel montages, lies in its self-painting as a horror movie when the first five minutes are basically an intro to a prehistoric drama like 1000000 Years BC, and the next five make up three-quarters of the horror we get through the entire first half! Thankfully it remembers there's a monster to look for halfway when the advertised genre kicks in, but only occasionally. By this point, all the chit-chat has gotten so boring that no one can possibly complain about Hulk 2003 anymore. I didn't even care how they beat the monster as long as the movie ended.

Overall, there were some parts where they put in effort into storytelling for a cheesy b-movie, but none for pacing, scares or direction.

= 15

These people clearly have your wellbeing at heart. Treasure them!

Good lord! Slow down you lunatics!

They must be eager to ruin their days.

We've got a taste for blood!


The blood is ketchup.

Still pretty sure it was pasta sauce this time.

Perhaps Bigfoot was misunderstood in the film. All he wanted was to make pasta all along.

Glad you caught this because I was going to mention it as well. It's so bad at whatever it's trying to be that it inadvertently becomes actually disturbing. Or would have been disturbing, if it had been filmed with an ounce of skill.

I used to own this on VHS (more on that later), and I honestly didn't remember that the (not Bigfoot) monster actually shows up at the end. It's possible that I literally never finished watching this thing despite owning it for years.

Monday is probably when I can watch this

10 minutes into the film and it just seems like your typical low budget B-movie.

Some other thoughts:

-The overlong teacher speech so far isn't that bad, tbh. Given it occurs at the same time as the cutaways to the forest and a vignette of a couple men having a run-in with Bigfoot, I don't think it hurts the pacing.

-The sequence of the men encountering Bigfoot was overlong, didn't ramp up tension throughout it, the climax of that scene was unexpected but only because the scene frequently seemed like it was going nowhere, and the payoff was pretty unsatisfying.

-What high school lectures its students on Bigfoot in the first place?

I would also like the answer to this question.