The search for a great bigfoot film has thus far proved as unsatisfying and rewarding as the hunt for hirsute beast itself. Some have approached good, most are just mediocre and some, like Robert F. Slatzer’s Bigfoot – the very first feature film to feature North America’s most famous cryptozoological mystery – are just plain terrible. How hard can it be to do justice to this most enduring of myths? Very, it would seem…

Our story begins with pilot Joi Landis (Joi Lansing) losing control and crashlanding in the forests of Northern California. She escapes unscathed and proves to be wearing mini-dress under her flight suit, a fact that attracts the attention of a bigfoot who just happens to be passing. Elsewhere, backwoods trader and some time carnival huckster Jasper B. Hawks (John Carradine) and his sidekick Elmer Briggs (John Mitchum) arrive at the out of the way general store run by Mr Bennett (Ken Maynard, a one-time huge star of Hollywood westerns) where they hear of several disappearances in the area. Even as they speak, Rick (Christopher Mitchum, John’s nephew and Robert’s son) a member of a feeble biker gang, turns up ion a lather to report the disappearance of his girlfriend Chris (Judith Jordan). Both women have been tied to a tree by a tribe of bigfoots (bigfeet?) who are awaiting the return of the larger male bigfoot. Hawks, Chris and co wander through the woods taking their own sweet time in getting anywhere before they corner the animal in a cave and break out the explosives.

Bigfoot owes more to King Kong (1933) than to the sasquatch of legend, taking the bare bones of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s masterpiece, transplanting it to northern California and introducing not only an oversized male bigfoot but a whole family of mini-sasquatches. When captured and put on display in Hawks’ carnival it’s advertised as “the eight wonder of the world,” a claim that Kong can more justifiably lay claim to than this sorry, flea-bitten monstrosity. And at the climax, Carradine manages to utter the deathless “it was beauty that did him in” while keeping a straight face – except of course it had nothing to do with “beauty” and quite a lot to do with a ton of dynamite. By constantly quoting from King Kong it only serves to expose further the chasm in quality between the two films.

Technically the film is shoddy in the extreme. Much of it seems to have been shot without synchronised sound and strangely echoey dialogue was dubbed in later. Traipsing about in the woods is de rigeur for this sort of thing but here we get a lot of traipsing around in a cramped and echoey studio set dressed to vaguely resemble the great outdoors instead.

But there are incidental if very minor pleasures to be found – Carradine’s extraordinary necktie loud enough to frighten off even the fiercest of forest creatures; the world’s least terrifying biker gang (when not pootling about on identical Yamaha bikes – the company gets a prominent thank you in the end credits – they spend their time go-go dancing); and a whole litany of questionable fashion decisions. Was this meant to be a comedy? The inappropriately jaunty, atmosphere-killing hillbilly score suggests that perhaps it was. Which is doubly disappointing as, apart from the accidental laughs mentioned earlier, it’s as unfunny as it its unscary.

Slatzer was, it’ll come as no great surprise, a director of few films – he shot female bike gang film The Hellcats in 1968 and made, uncredited, a documentary called No Substitute for Victory in 1971, a pro-Vietnam war propaganda piece starring John Wayne. And that was it. And while Bigfoot did nothing to stop the downward trajectory of John Carradine’s career (amazingly, he went on even worse things – Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970), Blood Legacy (1971)) it did signal the end of careers for Joi Lansing and Ken Maynard, neither of who worked in films again.

A final, rather optimistic, caption reads “The end… or is this just the beginning?” Sadly it was indeed just the start of a long and disappointing trail of Bigfoot films (its sibling in cryptozoology, the yeti, had already appeared on screen a few times) though thankfully, no matter how bad the subsequent films were, few were as gormless and rubbish as this nonsense.