SASQUATCH: THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT

d. Ed Ragozzino (1976)

Cryptozoology was all the rage in the mid 70s, and Big Foot was very big news in entertainment indeed, like a hairier Elton John. This curious film follows an expedition to find the legendary man of the woods, bringing together a motley group of scientists and native guides who spend months travelling into the heart of British Columbia, a densely forested wilderness covering 365,000 square miles*: the perfect place for a furry hominid who has absolutely no interest in being captured, prodded about and put into a zoo.

The film is documentary style, interspersed with recreations of famous Big Foot sightings and attacks. It's a mix of travelogue and nature film, and is really rather restful. There's some light comedy at the expense of the comical cook (who is, nevertheless, a crack shot), but mainly its just sun dappled shots of men on horses making their way carefully and slowly through a succession of beautiful, lonely settings.

There are a couple of animal attacks: a bobcat tries to eat a horse and is shot (the attack is staged, but the shooting looks authentic and leaves a bad taste) and a grizzly bear attacks an inattentive sentry (this was apparently achieved by putting Tootsie Rolls on a stuntman's shoulders, and letting the trained bear have a nibble). This latter sequence is hard to watch without smiling, probably not the intention.    

After a long while, the expedition hears a piercing and blood-chilling scream: finally, they are in Big Foot country. Big Foot clearly doesn't like visitors as he and a few friends very quickly trash the camp, throwing boulders and tree trunks with insouciant ease and breaking all the high tech equipment and a few limbs. The expeditions plan to shoot one with a tranquiliser dart comes to precisely naught, and, in the blessed relief of the morning, thoroughly defeated and lucky to be alive, they pack their smashed up shit and head for home.

We don't see much of Big Foot, just some huge, shaggy, shadowy figures in the dark, but it's enough. I don't necessarily believe in Sasquatch, but I don't necessarily disbelieve, if you know what I mean. If there is something out there, and there just might be, it will come and say 'hi' when it's ready, maybe never, which, ultimately, seems to be the moral of this tale: Big Foot likes its privacy, so don't mess with it. 

* To put this into perspective, this is the equivalent area of the entire British Isles and surrounding sea, half of Belgium, all of Luxembourg and France as far as Paris. It not only makes you realise that Big Foot could hide there indefinitely but also makes you wonder what else is in there.

THE COUCH

d. Owen Crump (1962)

Charles Campbell (Grant Williams) has issues: he's a thief and a fantasist with delusions of grandeur; he's choking with anger and sexual rage; he pretends that his hated dead father is alive, and his beloved alive sister is dead, and, every night at seven pm, he goes into the busy streets of the city and stabs a stranger to death with an ice pick. He's also in love with his psychiatrist's niece and, god help her, she feels the same way about him.

Nearly noir, nowhere near normal, most of the action takes place in public places rendered desolate and full of shadows: out of hours offices, a lonely spot overlooking the neon lit city, the busy streets at night where thousands of people walk shoulder to shoulder and fail to notice one another. No wonder some of them go a little crazy although, to be fair, our protagonist takes it as far as he can without actually falling off the edge of the planet.  

Grant Williams is a favourite actor of mine. He's somewhere between a matinee idol and a method actor, although he has a curiously pitted face, and his skin looks like a sheet of low density sandpaper. Williams plays the psycho killer as charming and weird, managing to keep his character constantly off beam but without ever rolling his eyes, gnashing his teeth and playing the obvious villain. You even feel sorry for him. When he hears something he doesn't like he shoves his fist in his mouth and bites down on it, a fairly standard bit of dramatic business apart from the fact that, when you see his hand a little later, he has actual bite marks on his knuckles. It's not necessarily acting, but it is impressive.

THE HYPNOTIC EYE

d. George Blair (1960)

The Hypnotic Eye is a hybrid film: part shock horror, part psycho thriller, part film noir. It’s also fairly nasty, being concerned with a series a horrible ‘accidents’ that befall young, beautiful women. In an arresting opening sequence, a pretty blonde happily shampoos her hair – over a gas stove.  The poor girl dies in the ensuing conflagration, the eleventh victim of who knows what, who knows who, and who knows why. The Police, as they so often are, are baffled.  

Completely coincidentally, the city is currently hosting a famous French hypnotist called Desmond, a man who can make anybody do anything just by flexing the power of his mind. Is there a connection between this suave mesmerist and a woman washing her face in sulphuric acid as if she believed it was soapy water? Or another drinking drain cleaner thinking it was coffee? And what, if anything, does his glamorous but permanently scowling assistant Justine have to do with it? You’ll just have to watch it and find out. Seriously, you should see it.

The most far out non-mutilation sequences are delivered in fabulous HypnoMagic. Not actually a cinematic variation on 3D as the poster might lead you to believe, but a dramatic style. Desmond’s act is mainly delivered direct to camera (by French actor Jacques Bergerac who is so good at it that it’s a shock to realise that he wasn’t really a hypnotist). It’s very effective and, apparently, in some cases led to some low level trance states amongst susceptible cinema goers. Don't worry, like all intelligent people I am immune to such psychic manipulation, although since watching this film I have started eating raw onions as if they were Granny Smiths.    

I DRINK YOUR BLOOD

d. David E. Durston (1970)

From the sensational title down, this fun and fast moving film is not what you’d call family viewing,  but the violence - a severed foot, a severed hand, a severed head - a stabbing where some guts falls out of the hole - is almost quaint, relying on unconvincing paper mache body parts and chunks of raw liver. Despite this, it has a reputation as a nasty film, perhaps because its main plot point is that a child injects meat pies with the dirty blood of a rabid dog in order to get his own back on the Satan worshipping hippies who raped his sister and made his granddad take LSD. That's the most unsavoury sentence I have ever written.

The Satan worshipping hippies are a multiracial Mansonesque group of scumbags who travel around backwoods America in a smelly black van stealing, squatting and spreading STDs. They’re despicable and cruel people who, in their desire to be utterly free, oppress everybody they come across, including  rats, which they hunt down and kill with great glee and sadistic violence. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t condone infecting anyone with a fatal disease but, in this case, they more than deserve it. Justice is a fickle thing, however, as the rabies doesn’t kill them straight away, instead turning them into dribbling kill and sex crazy zombie death bombs, staggering about biting people and spreading the infection like wildfire. Like all hippies, rabid or otherwise, they retain a great fear of running water, and this comes in handy for the few beleaguered residents that they haven’t managed to nibble on, include the ingenious lad who put the poison in the pie in the first place. Let’s hope somebody calls the army or, at the very least, the dog pound.   

Obviously cheap but well made, with some surprisingly good performances, I Drink Your Blood is trashy, and not exactly nice, but neither is it nasty, so pantomimic and gleeful is it in its mayhem and gore. I really enjoyed it, but then there’s something wrong with me. Fact.    

A special note about the film’s earthy synthesizer score, which is smeared all over and is completely off the chain. It was written and performed by Clay Pitts, who usually worked on Christian rock records and was clearly not a man afraid to diversify. Good work, Clay.