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.

MANSON

d. Laurence Merrick / Robert Hendrickson (1973)

I actually first watched this a few weeks before Charles Manson died, so maybe I inadvertently dialled up the cosmos and reminded it that Manson was still around and needn’t be.  I don't feel bad, by the way, Manson was a nuisance, and never did anything good for anybody, least of all himself.

This well-made documentary, which benefits from archive footage made by The Manson Family themselves, was released two years after the longest trial in American history, a fraught, complex thing in which a man was convicted of heinous crimes which he encouraged but took no physical part in. Manson was the ultimate bad influence, a lifelong criminal and misfit who collected hippies and runaway kids and brainwashed them into becoming a nihilistic death cult using sex, drugs and endless rambling monologues / lectures about race wars, societal breakdown and how Hollywood needed to pay for ignoring his musical genius.*

If you were wondering how Manson, a short, scruffy bloke with anger issues (a bit like Hitler) managed to keep at least thirty people under his thrall, ultimately getting them to kill for him, just watch  the interview footage with some of the fringe Family members, the ones that didn’t murder anyone and drifted away from the core soon after. One of the guys tells a rambling and obviously untrue story about how he talked to squirrels and rabbits in the desert while his audience, a gang of barefoot, snaggle toothed long hairs, none older than 25, sit agape, occasionally guffawing with raucous laughter. They are either cretins who genuinely find this bullshit interesting and funny, or they’re too scared to show that they’re not hip enough to be in on the joke. Chemicals play a part, of course, but there’s also an active disavowal of intelligence, a suspension of disbelief and critical faculties in order to be part of something, to be included, to belong. For someone like Manson, 'a Venus Flytrap amongst the flower children', they were easy pickings.

We also see the girls Manson left behind, those fizzing with resentment at not being in jail but still worshipping at their guru’s feet. They pontificate and philosophise, posturing with weapons and acting tough. One of them, Squeaky Fromme, gives us a lecture about how you should know every part of your weapon intimately as she struggles to pull her knife out of its scabbard. In 1975, Fromme tried to shoot President Ford, but her gun didn’t go off.  

Cannily, the film makers withhold Manson's voice from us until the very end. When he speaks, you hear exactly where his acolytes have got their opinions, their attitudes, their words, even their intonations, cadences and pronunciations. Yes, he is charismatic, not least because he is deeply unusual and utterly self-possessed, but I don’t feel like I want to carve the word ‘pig’ on anyone’s stomach for him. Perhaps I need more drugs. Send more drugs. 

* There is a persistent rumour that Manson auditioned for The Monkees. He was actually in prison at the time. I don’t think he’d have got the job, anyway, they already had Davy Jones.

PURE SHIT

d. Bert Deling (1975)

The darkly playful title refers to Heroin, a drug that continues to polarise public and private opinion but is universally agreed to be extremely more-ish. This very Australian fly on the wall documentary style film, compiled from real life junkie war stories, attracted major controversy in its time, with the censor forcing a name change to Pure S and the Vice Squad raiding the premiere. Watching it now, it’s easy to see what shook up the powers that were: the star of the film is Heroin, the pursuit of it, the taking of it, the dirty pleasure of it; when it's not onscreen the characters talk about it and crave its presence more than food, money, sex and love. 'H' is the sort of role the brilliant but ruthless egomaniac Kirk Douglas would have enjoyed playing: the undisputed centre of attention. 

The users live entirely outside of 'normal' society, only engaging with non-junkies and non-dealers when they are robbing pharmacies or prostituting themselves for cash. They are unwashed, extremely foul mouthed, obsessed with double denim and so trapped on the hamster wheel of addiction that they have no time for anything else, least of all dreams of a better future. There are no poetic and wistful monologues here: these junkies like being junkies and, of the alternatives, even a sudden puke covered death seems preferable to the hell of rehab and Methadone treatment.

It gets shrill and repetitive and muddled quite quickly, especially when the early narrative about the protagonists seeking heroin and never quite getting it goes off track. Within twenty minutes they all start clumsily and repeatedly jabbing needles into their scabby arms (I assumed that junkies would be better at injecting, or perhaps I’ve just seen too many glossy drugs films) and vomiting into buckets, revealing the full  scuzz of their grim drug addled life for all to see. These scenes are given added impact by apparently being real or, at least, seeming real, which is, after all, what cinema is about. I suppose the Aussie authorities were worried that Pure Shit might glamourise drug addiction or even provide step by step instructions on how to score and shoot up but, seriously, if you watch this film and think ‘cor, I don’t half fancy some Heroin’ you pretty much deserve what comes next.