Hubrisween 2018 :: B is for The Boogens (1981)

With one of the cleverest uses of the old spinning newspaper headline gag, our latest feature gets a huge chunk of its backstory out of the way early through a vintage photo montage from the mining boomtown of Silver City, Colorado, intermixed with headlines from the local paper, which begins with news of a massive silver strike in the area back in the spring of 1888, the resulting rush of prospectors, hitting the mother-lode, and the prosperity this wrought over the next two decades until things took a sinister turn as more headlines appear touting a pox of deadly cave-ins, safety inspectors due, and culminating with the biggest disaster to date when 27 men get trapped in the mine by the worst cave-in yet. And as the days and editions pass, with rescue efforts proving futile, and reports of mysterious attacks by something unknown from the lone survivor who managed to escape, the rescue is called off, the miners are declared dead, and this cursed mine is closed and officially sealed off for good in late 1912, where it sat undisturbed -- until now.

Here, the movie picks up some seventy years later, where a couple of men working for Syndicated Mines Inc. are charged with opening up the old derelict Silver City mine, assess the condition, collect rock samples to see what precious minerals are present, and determine if it’s worth exploiting any further with a full crew. And so, for now, it’s just Brian Deering (Crawford) and Dan Ostroff (Flory), a couple of grizzled company men who’ve explored hundreds of abandoned mines just like this one. Joining these two men are a couple of fresh-faced transplants from Pennsylvania mining country, Roger Lowrie (Harlan) and Mark Kinner (McCarren). And after breaching the entrance, the older men get to inspecting the timbers in the main shaft, which are in pretty sad shape, leaving the shit-work to the two newbies, who schlep the heavy equipment around and string wire to hang lights as they move deeper into the tunnel.

Meantime, a Martha Chapman (Dangerfield) is not having a very good day. The landlord of the property Lowrie and Kinner will take possession of tomorrow when Lowrie’s girlfriend, Jessica Ford (Martin), arrives, Martha is on the way to light the pilots of the furnace and hot-water heater for her new tenants when she runs her car off the road to avoid a deer. Then, after walking the rest of the way to the secluded house in the bitter cold, over snow and ice -- all under the lurking surveillance of the same creepy old man (Lormer) who was spying on those at the mine earlier that day, Martha finishes the prep work and makes a few futile calls for help, saying she will just spend the night at the house and beg a ride back into town tomorrow. But her stay is short-lived as she’s soon drawn back into the basement by some mysterious noises, which appear to be emanating from behind a shabbily boarded-up hole in the wall near the bottom of the steps, where the woman is violently attacked and drug off into the hole, kicking and screaming, by some unseen horror.

Back at the mine, work comes to a halt when they find evidence of a branching tunnel that doesn’t appear on any of their maps, blocked off by rubble from one of those long-ago cave-ins. Curious to see what’s on the other side, Deering and Ostroff use controlled blasts to remove the obstruction. And what they find is a huge natural cavern dominated by an underground lake. Scattered around the shore they also find huge piles of bones; the skeletal remains of all those lost miners, they figure.

Now, there are three huge clues our four explorers miss, here: One, it seemed awful easy to get into the chamber where those missing bodies were found, making one wonder why they weren’t just as easily rescued back in 1912. And I think the answer to that is the second clue: the condition of those skeletons, and how the bones are a jumbled mess and not somewhat intact and still clothed in the remnants as you’d expect if 27 trapped men laid down and asphyxiated -- more like stripped clean and discarded. So maybe there was something to those hush-upped reports of an attack in the mine. And thirdly, if you’re still not convinced something strange is going on, there’s some kinda something lurking in the water just below the surface that’s obviously stalking our obtuse protagonists, who’d best start paying more attention and put all of this together soon before they all wind up as just another pile of bones, too...

Ever since I began raking my knuckles over the keyboard and started posting the resulting nonsense on the wild world of the web some twenty years ago, I have been singing the praises for one of my personal patron saints of schlock cinema, Charles E. Sellier Jr.. But that was usually focused on his barrage of cryptozoological, strange phenomenon, and eccentric historical docudramas he unleashed for Sunn Classic Pictures back in the 1970s, where Sellier found kindred spirits of unknown phenomenon with filmmakers, Robert Guenette and James Conway.

And for a glorious period between 1975 and 1981 these three would conspire in the producing, directing, and writing of The Mysterious Monsters (1975), The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena (1976), The Unexplained: The UFO Connection (1976), In Search of Noah's Ark (1976), The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977), Beyond and Back (1977), The Bermuda Triangle (1979), Encounter with Disaster (1979), Beyond Death’s Door (1979), and The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (1981) in some capacity, where the likes of Brad Crandall, Peter Graves, or Orson Welles would guide us on a personal tour of the inexplicably unexplained, throw a lot of conjecture at the screen, make dubious assumptions and hypothesis, and then tout their cock-eyed conclusions as fact, much to audiences’ delight.

But today we’re gonna explore the period when Sellier started working outside his faux doc comfort zone, which would ultimately result in the near Christmas ruination with the release of Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), which Sellier had only directed as a favor, and whose resultant backlash over the marketing campaign and blasphemous content of a homicidal Santa Claus marked a decisive end to the first wave of the slasher boom of the early 1980s as studios quickly ran for cover and distanced themselves from all the blood and boobs. Before that, however, Sellier and Sunn were looking for the next hot trend at the dawn of the ‘80s, when the market for their quaint documentaries and matinee friendly family fare started drying up. And there was nothing hotter at the time than independently produced horror films with high body counts.

Charles E. Sellier Jr.

Based out of Salt Lake City, Utah, Sunn Classics, a subsidiary of Schick Enterprises, was purchased by Taft International Pictures in 1980, who would take over production and distribution of their films to help combat Hollywood’s efforts to squeeze-out old school roadshowers and four-wallers like Sunn. And so it was Taft who greenlit Sellier’s first R-rated feature, The Boogens (1981). Sellier would produce the film, while his old friend, and lifelong horror nut, Conway, would direct from a story concocted by Tom Chapman and David O’Malley, which was later hammered into a shooting script by O’Malley and Bob Hunt.

And while this script shares several of the newly minted and rapidly solidifying slasher movie tropes -- horny youths, horny youths dying first, old coots lurking and warning of imminent danger and curses, which go unheeded, rogue POV shots representing whoever is doing the killing, red herrings, pet stranger danger, prolonged stalking, gory deaths, all in service of the systematic reduction of the cast, The Boogens is, at its heart, despite some clumsy misdirection, nothing more than a good old-fashioned monster movie as it quickly becomes apparent that something inhuman attacked and most likely killed the landlord, and was also responsible for all those bones. And worse yet, it’s still hungry as Jessica arrives at the rental house with her old college friend, Trish Michaels (Balding), in tow.

Seems Jessica and her boyfriend, Roger, have been scheming to bring their mutual friends, Trish and Mark, together for awhile now, feeling they’d be perfect for each other. But this was the worst kept secret and both victims of these machinations are having cold feet; but their inevitable meet-cute shows a definite romance in their future, which is confirmed when this relationship is consummated later. Meantime, Jessica and Roger’s debaucherous reunion in the sack is brought to a screeching halt not once, but twice. First, when a Deputy Greenwalt (Wilkinson) shows up looking for the missing Martha Chapman, whom none of them have seen. And second, when Roger draws the short-straw and gets “nominated” to drive into Denver long before the sun comes up to secure an upgraded map of the mine. And so, Roger leaves Jessica and the others in Silver City -- which also pretty much died when the mine shut down from what we see, with Deering and Ostroff at the local saloon so he can go catch a few hours sleep without the temptation of sex before heading out, only to promptly get attacked in the garage by some horrible, tentacled thing that slashes his throat open with the deadly barbed end of this appendage once it takes his legs out.

The following morning, thinking Roger is on his way to Denver, not realizing his truck and the bloody evidence of his demise is still in the closed up garage, Jessica starts tackling a few domestic chores while Trish, a cub reporter for the Denver Post, heads into town to check out the local paper and do some research on the old mine disaster, hoping a story will come out of it. And as she digs through the morgue, Trish becomes intrigued by several accounts about the lone survivor; a man named Blanchard, who claimed the mine was occupied by something evil. There’s hints this man caused the cave-in on purpose to stop this phantom menace from spreading and the other miners were already dead; but this line of inquiry peters out with an article stating Greenwalt was deemed crazy and committed to an asylum. Is this the old man that’s been lurking about? Maybe. What we do know for sure is what most likely happened in the mine back in 1912:

When the cavern was first discovered, the miners found something deadly waiting inside, which attacked them. Blanchard managed to get away and resealed the entrance to the cavern with dynamite. And in an effort to hush this up and prevent several lawsuits, the lone survivor was blamed for the disaster, declared insane, and committed. Now, of course, this cavern has once more been broken into, giving the monster (or monsters) free access to a maze of ventilation shafts that surface all over the town -- including one in the basement of the rental house our protagonists are occupying.

But Trish doesn’t quite have all of these clues put together yet as she heads back to the house. Meanwhile, realizing her dog, Tiger, has been missing all morning, Jessica discovers Roger’s truck is still there and calls the mine-works to alert Mark, who calls the Denver office. And though he should’ve been there hours ago, Roger never showed up. Mike calls Jessica back, saying he doesn’t know where their friend is but not to worry -- not realizing Deering and Ostroff just found Roger’s torn up body floating in that underground lake. Then, after Mark joins them as they pull the body to shore, the old coot shows up with a sack full of dynamite, who rants at them for letting the evil loose. Seems this man is Blanchard’s son. And unlike everyone else, he believed his old man’s tale of the Boogens and took it upon himself to keep watch on the mine and the ventilation shafts around town to make sure they never got out. And as he threatens to blow up the entrance, one of the creatures strikes from the water and kills Olstroff, causing a panicked Blanchard to seal himself and Deering inside the cavern with the massing creatures.

Mark, realizing the girls were in danger, had already fled before the explosion to get Jessica and Trish out of the house. But he’s already too late as Trish returns first, finds signs of a struggle and the shower still running, but can’t get a response from her friend. Here, she retraces Jessica’s terrified flight from one of the creatures, who attacked while she was in the shower. And after a harrowing chase, Jessica was trapped in the pantry and killed. Following the smeared blood evidence down to the basement, Trish finds Jessica’s mutilated body. Turns out the monster was still down there, too, and we finally get a good look at this misshapen mutant amphibian from hell as it attacks her, too. Luckily, Mark and the deputy, whom he called after giving up trying to reach the girls on the phone, arrive in time.

Greenwalt empties his revolver into the monster, which seemingly falls dead. The deputy then makes a tragic mistake by going in for a closer look only to have the critter spring to life and bite his face off. In the ensuing melee with Mark and Trish, the fuel line for the heater is severed, flooding the basement with kerosene. Mark puts a match to this, hoping to kill the creature. And while that mission was accomplished, the resulting inferno soon engulfs the stairs, trapping them in the burning basement with the only way out being the mine-shaft. So in it they go, where after a few suspenseful turns they run into Olstroff, whose bloodied but still breathing. Blanchard? Not so much. But as Olstrroff points the way to the surface, he is attacked and killed by another creature -- but not before he gives Mark the rest of Blanchard’s dynamite and orders him to get out and seal the mine for good. And this Mark and Trish do, barely staying ahead of what sounds like a whole horde of these creepy crawlies. And despite the last second suspense of a stubborn lighter, the fuse it lit, the dynamite goes boom, the shaft is sealed, and the day is saved but not without great cost.

Like those Sunn docs of old, the slow and deliberate pace director Conway and company deliver in The Boogens might be too much for some horror fans to overcome. The story structure is pretty clumsy, too, and pretty loose with no coherent timeline, meaning it probably would’ve been better served to open with the death of the landlord instead of taking that night-time sequence and shoe-horning it into the middle of the initial opening of the mine sequence, which all takes place during the day. This same script also relies way too heavily on Jessica’s dog for both comedy relief and for the entirety of the suspense for the whole middle third of the movie as the cantankerous canine is stalked by the unseen menace constantly, and is presumed dead a couple of times, before the Boogens finally get him. Kudos to the two pups who played Tiger and their trainers. Always in the scene, and, yeah, kinda carries the movie in spots.

Still, despite these glaring mistakes, I think this hybridization of monster and slasher movie works overall thanks in most part to a likeable cast, well-defined and likeable characters, that taps into a nice blue collar vibe. These are the same working stiffs we saw in My Bloody Valentine (1981), which I feel is the best slasher movie ever made, and helps ground the film considerably. Anchored by solid character actors, John Crawford and Med Flory, who definitely add some weight and humor (“How ‘bout we jog?”), the cast was rounded out by a couple of genre vets with Anne-Marie Martin and Rebecca Balding. Martin didn’t survive Prom Night (1980), while Balding was the final girl in Silent Scream (1980). Balding also fulfilled her contractual obligation to go nude while Martin did not. I always thought Balding was adorable in Lou Grant before she got fired off the TV show after only six episodes because the producers suddenly felt she wasn’t right for the part, which freed her up to be in Silent Scream and The Boogens. Director Conway agreed with me, apparently, as the two fell hard for each other during this production and would be married four weeks after the film wrapped.

While set in Colorado the movie was shot in and around Park City, Utah, utilizing several abandoned mines and an unused grocery store, where the cavern and lake interiors were constructed. And apparently, while filming the climax, the explosions got out of hand and the whole building and all the standing sets inside went up in flames, forcing cast and crew into one of those real mines to finish shooting the ending. Also of production note, seems there was a reason why we never got a really good look at the monsters in The Boogens. Seems despite the best efforts of William Munns and Ken Horn, veteran make-up and prosthetic makers for The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Swamp Thing (1982), and Return of the Living Dead (1985), who both built the animatronic monster and provided the bloody wounds the fanged and tentacled amphibians inflicted, the monster’s rubbery origins didn’t pass muster with Conway, who wound up taking the less-is-more Spielberg route and relied heavily on his POV-cam and the sound-design of Jeffrey Sandler, who took a recording of a dog and cat fighting, looped it backwards, and then slowed it down to realize the monster's hideous roar, to make it appear there were hundreds of Boogens in the mine and not just the one working prop they had, to maintain the dread.

After its limited theatrical release in 1981 -- and I have a vague, vague recollection of seeing this as a second feature at the drive-in on a dark and stormy night, The Boogens became a bit of an enigma because no one was able to see the damned thing for the longest time as the film essentially disappeared off the face of the earth, propagated by vague memories and a favorable review by Stephen King in the July, 1982, edition of The Twilight Zone magazine. And the film stayed lost for nearly twenty years until a very limited and very shitty pan ‘n’ scan VHS release in 1998 through Republic Pictures Home Video just as the format was dying out to make way for DVDs. And just when it appeared ready to disappear back into obscurity, Olive Films secured the rights and released The Boogens on DVD and Bluray in all its glory in 2012 to satiate many a curious fan. Myself included. Was it worth the wait? Well, expectations be a bitch and all that, but I found The Boogens’ novelties refreshing enough to easily overlook any of its shortcomings, though many they were.

What is Hubrisween? This is Hubrisween. And now, Boils and Ghouls, be sure to follow this linkage to keep track of the whole conglomeration of reviews for Hubrisween right here. Or you can always follow the collective head of knuckle on Letterboxd. That's two reviews down with 24 to go! Up Next: The Exorcist by way of a highway safety film! Buckle up, buttercups!

The Boogens (1981) Taft International Pictures :: Jensen Farley Pictures / P: Charles E. Sellier Jr. / AP: Bill Cornford, Carole Fontana, Cliff Osmond / D: James L. Conway / W: Thomas C. Chapman, David O'Malley, Jim Kouf / C: Paul Hipp / E: Michael Spence / M: Bob Summers / S: Rebecca Balding, Fred McCarren, Anne-Marie Martin, Jeff Harlan, John Crawford, Med Flory, Scott Wilkinson, Marcia Dangerfield, Jon Lormer

Hubrisween 2016 :: M is for The Mysterious Monsters (1976)

While the first documented evidence of Bigfoot dates back to 1811, found within the journals of noted explorer and surveyor David Thompson, who came upon some strange footprints in the snow in what was to become Alberta, Canada, that he nor his Indian guides could identify, the idea that some monstrous biped was roaming the backwoods of North America really didn’t get any traction until 1955, when William Roe hiked up Mica Mountain in British Columbia and came back with a whopper of a tale. Apparently, Roe had an encounter with "a creature between six and seven feet tall that was hairy all over, had large breasts, a Negroid-shaped head, and walked on two legs."

This was the first widely reported domestic sighting of a large hairy cryptid since the world became Abominable Snowman-addled when Sir Edmund Hillary brought tales of the Himalayan Yeti back with him after he conquered Mount Everest in 1953. And as these things made headlines, Albert Ostman came forward and detailed an encounter he had with the creatures back in 1924, where he claimed to have been kidnapped and held captive by a family of Bigfoot (Bigfeet?) for nearly a week before he engineered an escape. That same year also unearthed the Ape Canyon attack, which also took place in 1924, where several miners allegedly killed one of the creatures and then spent a harrowing night in a cabin near Mount St. Helens, Washington, while several other creatures hurled rocks at them and tried to break in to avenge the dead.

But it wasn't until about two years later in 1958, when several tracks of large, humanoid footprints were found in the soft loam along the logging trails around Bluff Creek, California, that the notion of “Bigfoot” as we’ve come to know it was really born. And it was these very same tracks that later brought Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin to the area in 1967, where they managed to capture what is probably the most infamous 16 seconds of footage ever committed to film; and with that footage, the legend of Bigfoot absolutely exploded in the national consciousness, creating a voracious appetite for more evidence of the creature that a lot of folks were happy to provide -- some more reputable than others.

One of the quieter patron saints of schlock cinema, Charles E. Sellier Jr. is probably best known to the masses for the ruination of Christmas with his controversial but, in the end, harmless holiday slasher, Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), but we children of the 1970s remember him more for a rash of crypto-zoological, strange phenomenon, and eccentric historical docudramas he produced for the Salt Lake City based Sunn Classic Pictures, where Sellier Jr. found a kindred spirit with filmmaker Robert Guenette, who is credited for introducing a distinctive “newsreel style” to the documentary format. And for a glorious period between 1975 and 1981 these two would conspire in the making of The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena (1976), The Unexplained: The UFO Connection (1976), In Search of Noah's Ark (1976), The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977)’, Beyond and Back (1977), The Bermuda Triangle (1979), Encounter with Disaster (1979), Beyond Death’s Door (1979) and The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (1981), where the likes of Brad Crandall or Orson Welles would guide us on a tour of the inexplicably unexplained. But this whole journey into the unknown began with a little pseudo documentary called The Mysterious Monsters (1975), which, perhaps inspired by the success of Charles B. Pierce’s The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), purported to present evidence that proved the existence of Bigfoot.

To set the proper studious mood, our delightful little cryptid doc opens with the Graves known as Peter going mano a mano with the audience, ensuring all the facts about to be presented were true based on gathered evidence and sworn testimony, and the conclusions reached astounding, making this the most startling picture the audience will ever see. And after the credits proper conclude, played over our first re-created sighting of a Bigfoot, Graves, our designated narrator and guide, admits he was skeptical at first but tantalized by the body of evidence of the mythical creature’s hotly contested existence; and so, acting as our surrogate, he will sift through all the exhibits and then draw a conclusion once all the evidence is in.

Since the dawn of creation, man has created monsters to explain away or embellish the unknown. But if the Bigfoot is just a figment of our collective imagination, Graves argues, why are all the eyewitness accounts, from all over the country, essentially the same: tall, hairy, ape-like, with an unholy stench. Perhaps the elusive creatures just haven’t been properly catalogued yet, like the gorilla, giant panda, or komodo dragons, who all use to be essentially myths until western eyes saw them. Is it some form of anthropoid, an offshoot of the gigantopithecus? Or is it some form of primitive man, a relative of the Yeti, who crossed over the Bering land bridge and managed to survive in seclusion until these modern times?

Here, the film takes a hilarious left turn for a bit, focusing on tales of the Abominable Snowman and, believe it or not, an extended take on the Loch Ness Monster; and using the same dubious evidence that doesn’t pass muster when talking about proof of Bigfoot and applying them to its mythical brethren, Graves concludes that both the Yeti and Nessie definitely exist; and therefore, since they exist, Bigfoot must exist as well; a mind-blowing circle of self-citation and fractured logic of ipso facto what the hell-o that will assuredly leave you giggling.

So what is this much ballyhooed evidence? Well, the film lays out its haphazard exhibits from A through H, skipping a few letters here and there and circling back to a few others, starting with all those eyewitness reports. But the experts believe these to be unreliable and demand concrete proof, asking why has no one ever found the remains of a Bigfoot. Counter-arguments involve the whole circle of life thing, saying nature serves as its own disposal service. There is even some arguments that Bigfoot bury their dead. 

Exhibit B does concern such physical evidence, such as all the giant footprints, hairs that defy scientific analysis, and the huge piles of scat-of-unknown-origin collected over the years. Again, this runs into the problem of overzealous monster hunters and hoaxers, which is countered by famed cryptozoologist, Grover Krantz, who shows off the notorious Bossburg print, which he claims shows some form of arthritic deformity that no hoaxer could ever concoct.

Exhibit C is more physical evidence, namely a recording of a Bigfoot howling in the wild. Graves takes this to be analyzed at the same vocal lab from that one episode of 3-2-1 Contact, where it’s run through a computer, which determines the subject lacks a certain “articulatory flexibility” and, judging by its vocal tract, it must be 50% larger than your average human being.

I honestly don’t know what happened to exhibit D, but exhibit E involves the tale of Jacko, a juvenile Bigfoot caught in British Columbia back in 1884; sourced from a single newspaper clipping unearthed by a reporter digging into the history of Bigfoot sightings back in the 1950s. And then there’s the notorious Minnesota Iceman, where carnival huckster Frank Hansen claimed to have a corpse of a Siberian Bigfoot trapped in a block of ice. An exhibit that mysteriously disappeared in 1968 when calls to defrost it for study got too loud, bringing into question the validity of exhibit E. 

Exhibit F takes us on another detour and a psychic consultation with famed psychometrist, Peter Hurkos, a consultant on the Boston Strangler case, who divines a picture of a large hairy creature, half man, half ape, based on unseen evidence locked in a briefcase.

Exhibit G ups the ante with multiple corroborative witnesses when a town was besieged with a rash of Bigfoot sightings over the course of three weeks, with several of those eyewitnesses passing polygraph tests or volunteering to go through hypnosis to bring out more details of these encounters (-- which, speaking honestly, comes off as more creepy and sad than factual).
 

Which finally brings us to exhibit H, photographic evidence, which also brings us full circle back to the Patterson film, which leads to a hilarious exchange between true-believer Krantz and the highly skeptical Dr. Geoffrey Bourne, who get into a heated point, counterpoint discussion over the validity of the footage -- an argument I think Krantz wins because, really, who really does know what the breast of a Bigfoot ought to look like?

And so, with all the evidence presented, the documentary wraps up with Graves coming to the conclusion that, without a doubt, Bigfoot does indeed exist. And now that that’s settled, he direly intones as we try to decide what exactly a Bigfoot is we must be careful not to destroy what we seek to understand.

Now, those of you who’ve followed my ramblings on the web over the years are probably keenly aware of my irrational fear of Bigfoot. And this doc, right here, is the root cause of my psyche-trauma: at the ripe old age of six, Peter Graves took me by the hand and asked me if I liked to watch gladiator movies. No. Wait … That’s not right. Wait. Got it. He asked me if I believed in the Loch Ness Monster, Yetis and peeping tom Bigfoot (Bigfoots? Bigfeet?), and then showed me all the proof I needed that there was something sinister lurking in the large shelter-belt of Evergreen trees just outside our house like my elder brothers always said -- the jerks. And then there was that pothole near my grandma’s house that inexplicably looked just like a huge footprint sunk in the asphalt. I shit you not. Yep. Bigfoot was a very real thing back then. Hell, I even remember being disappointed when I found out Chewbacca was just a Wookie and not a Sasquatch when Star Wars (1977) hit a couple of years later.

Like a lot of cryptid docs the backbone of The Mysterious Monsters are the dramatic reenactments, re-created from first hand accounts as the witnesses are interviewed on camera. Some of these are hilariously laughable, like the Boy Scout’s encounter, while others are startlingly effective, namely the scene where a Bigfoot stalks outside a house while a woman watches TV, unaware as a huge hairy shadow falls across the curtain of the picture window behind her -- a picture window not unlike the one in my house, by the Evergreens, which only reinforced my case of the induced drizzles and confirmed my older brothers were a couple of assholes. She hears a noise outside but takes a look out the wrong window as the creature crashes in from another; chaos ensues as her screams brings her husband running, armed with a rifle, and when he opens the front door comes face to face with the monster and, end of scene. GAH!

I don’t know what it is about these things that puts such a damned hypno-whammy on me, making me believe these things are not only possible but plausible. Guenette's mix of talking head experts, stock footage, and cagey staging of the sightings are bizarrely effective. 

Helping to sell all of this is some pretty spiffy work by The Burman Studio, who provided all the Bigfoot costumes that hold up well even in the light of day; and these technicians would go on to provide creatures and aliens for feature films ranging from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Prophecy (1978), The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), Waterworld (1995) and six seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And Ruby Raskin’s soundtrack runs the range from silent film melodrama and organ stings to the grandiose bombast of an industrial travelogue that constantly lulls you into things only to whack you upside the head to keep your eyes and ears open for what’s lurking in those bushes.

Personally, I like to believe more in the possibility of Bigfoot than its actual existence. Remember those footprints found around Bluff Creek that started all the initial Bigfoot hysteria back in the 1950s? Well, turns out those were all faked. This hoax was revealed with the death of Ray Wallace in 2002, who “found” these prints and, in accordance with his final wishes, Wallace’s family came forward with the molds and rubber casts used to make all of the fake prints. And if we follow the fruit of this poisoned tree, that probably means the much contested Patterson footage, shot in the same area, and corroborated by several footprints that bear a striking similarity to Wallace's forgeries, is cast into even further doubt. Say it ain’t so, Pete. Say it ain’t so. 

Other Points of Interest:

Newspaper ads for The Mysterious Monsters at the Morgue.  
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What is Hubrisween? This is Hubrisween. And now, Boils and Ghouls, be sure to follow this linkage to keep track of the whole conglomeration of reviews for Hubrisween right here. Or you can always follow we collective head of knuckle on Letterboxd. That's 13 down with 13 to go! Halfway! Woohoo!

The Mysterious Monsters (1976) Schick Sunn Classic Pictures / EP: David L. Wolper, Raylan D. Jensen / P: Charles E. Sellier Jr., Robert Guenette / AP: James L. Conway, Frances Guenette / D: Robert Guenette / W: Robert Guenette / C: Tony Coggans, Erik Daarstad, David MyersFrances Guenette / E: Earle Herdan, Robert K. Lambert / M: Ruby Raksin / S: Peter Graves