The Mysterious Monsters

This may be the most startling film you'll ever see.
--Peter Graves

One of the many pseudo-documentaries exploring the Great Mysteries of the Unknown produced in the witchy 1970s, The Mysterious Monsters was a film I had long heard about but had never seen before; thanks to YouTube that has now been rectified.

This 1975 film from Schick Sun Classic Pictures practically invents the template that the long running television show In Search of... would replicate a year later in 1976, with Peter Graves--Captain Clarence Oveur himself--acting as your onscreen host to the investigatory proceedings, a role Leonard Nimoy would admirably fill for six seasons on In Search of...  The silver haired and humorously monotonic Graves interjects some welcome gravitas in between dramatic recreations of eyewitness encounters with the legendary Bigfoot along with just a bit of the Loch Ness Monster.  But whereas other low budget Sasquatch documentaries of this era might be content to merely suggest the existence of a mysterious monster through teasing glimpses of a beastly silhouette in the woods or film footage from the creature's point of view as it leers from behind dense shrubbery at skinny-dipping coeds or voluptuous snow bunnies frolicking in the woods oblivious to the prehistoric peeper lurking nearby, The Mysterious Monsters is proud to show off its top notch Bigfoot costume; the camera lingering lovingly and frequently on it like one of the weekly "bears" on an old episode of The Outer Limits, so that the viewer gets a good long look at the fine makeup job, one of the creepiest this reviewer has seen.

Though one of the very best films I've seen in the Bigfoot genre, I don't think The Mysterious Monsters ever manages to escape the gravitational bounds of the established tropes of the pseudoscience documentary genre to truly transcend into the refined aether of sublime weirdness that something like Overlords of the U.F.O. does, probably because it rationally sticks to the subject of mainly Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Abominable Snowman/Yeti-kind while only just dipping a big toe into the murky waters of the Loch Ness Monster mythos, choosing not to discuss any other of the Great Mysteries floating around in the 1970s or attempting to tie together all of these disparate threads into one Grand Unified Fortean Theory--so no ancient astronauts, UFOs, ghosts, or demonic possession here, thank you very much.  And there were a few characters and scenes in this film that I was sure I had seen in other documentaries--they all start to blend together after a while--but that could just be my advancing decrepitude and creeping senility.  But in spite of all that seems familiar in this type of film: the standard 1970s synthesized electronic musical score; the always memorable disembodied hairy Bigfoot arm through the window scene; the telegenic host as the voice of reason that surely the facts presented prove Bigfoot must really exist; the beautifully grainy 16 millimeter film look; all these are really first rate examples of the genre, and that's saying nothing of the abundant lens flare from shooting into the sun that would undoubtedly make J.J. Abrams figuratively (and possibly literally) cream his jeans.  To wit, I liked this movie a lot--it's pretty much a perfect example of a mid-1970s Bigfoot documentary.

There's just something about the great dark shape of the untamed Sasquatch that taps into some primal human fear of the unknown, which is probably why films about Bigfoot were so popular in the tumultuous, post 1960s Watergate/Vietnam War era when the whole world seemed turned upside down.  Bigfoot emerged into the collective consciousness of the 1970s as a "known unknown", to nick a term coined by that great American rascal Donny Rumsfeld; a dark and shaggy reflection of paradise lost, a dangerous and foul smelling but almost cuddly folk hero symbolic of our monstrous id.

Best line from this flick is from a pro-Bigfoot scientist defending the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film footage of a purported female Sasquatch:
"I don't know what the breasts of a Sasquatch ought to look like..."

Here's the trailer for your viewing pleasure: