Our film opens with plaid-clad outdoorsmen Ivan Marx waxing on about that what we are about to see is both true and authentic. And to prove this point, we're first entreated to several sequences of Marx tracking down and killing some renegade bears -- but only the guilty bears, mind you, not the innocent ones (-- but I point out most of the bears were not given proper due process), then he's off capturing a cougar for a zoo exhibit, and finally, a javelina is run down and hog-tied for some diabolical college experiment. With his great outdoorsmen street-cred now firmly established, Marx is brought to Alaska to track down a rogue Kodiak that's been depleting the local cattle population. When Marx proves the bear innocent (-- lucky bear), the rancher claims it never was a bear to begin with but a Bigfoot that was killing off his herd. A skeptical Marx had heard the legend of this creature before, dating back some 700 years, and the Native American tales of Stickmen and Oh-man and Sasquatch -- verified, somewhat, with some native etchings of a creature with big hands and massive clod-hoppers that, according to folklore, had a bad habit of raiding villages and stealing children.

Intrigued, but still unconvinced, Marx continues jumping around the country for various jobs, and with each successive stop, finds more and more evidence of this mysterious creature -- mostly foot and hand prints, and some coarse hair that he sends off for testing at some undisclosed lab. The hair-test results are in before Marx goes out on his next job -- another guilty bear, I guess -- and the tests reveal that whatever left the prints and hair wasn't human; species unknown. His skepticism slowly devolving into apprehension, Marx finds the bear he's been looking for dead, it's neck snapped, surrounded by the telltale footprints. Convinced now that the creature really does exist, Marx sets out to separate fact from fiction, and, come hell or high-water, capture the beast -- on film...

It was back in 1955, while hiking up Mica Mountain somewhere in the Rockies of British Columbia, when William 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 North American sighting of a Sasquatch since the world became yeti-addled when Sir Edmund Hillary brought tales of an Abominable Snowman back with him after he conquered Mount Everest. But it wasn't until about two years later, 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 was 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 probably is the most infamous 16 seconds of footage ever committed to film; and with that footage, the legend of Bigfoot absolutely exploded into the national consciousness, creating a voracious appetite for more evidence that a lot of folks were happy to oblige -- some more reputable than others.

Enter amateur filmmaker, naturalist, and self-proclaimed Bigfoot expert Ivan Marx. Marx claimed his first encounter with Bigfoot was back in 1951, when he found his first set of footprints around Dead Horse Summit in northern California. And he also claims to have snagged his first Bigfoot photos several years later while hunting cougar in Nevada in 1958. And it was about the same time the Patterson footage was making waves when Marx found the dubious Bossburg Prints, which showed an "arthritic deformity," giving them an air of authenticity. Then in 1973, Marx received a call from a train engineer, who claimed that his engine had clipped one of the creatures in the same area east of Bossburg, Washington, near the Canadian border. (All of this is depending on which version you hear. Other accounts say a man in a pick-up hit the creature.) It wasn't a fatal collision, however, and the creature crawled away. Marx got the general location, found a blood trail, and with his wife, Peggy, tracked the injured beast for several days -- and finally overtook the crippled creature and managed to not only get the encounter caught on film, but also managed to snap off several still-pictures before it limped off into the trees and disappeared.

It was this footage, and several more alleged encounters that Marx filmed in Alaska, that formed the backbone for 1976's The Legend of Bigfoot. Coming on the heels of Charles B. Pierce's highly profitable The Legend of Boggy Creek, a tale of a bayou Bigfoot that terrorizes the folks around Fouke, Arkansas, producer Marx and director Harry Winer used that film as a template, splicing together about two decades worth of nature stock, punctuated with a smattering of "authentic" Bigfoot footage to give it some pop.

The search to get to this footage was a long an arduous one, though, with several false leads, hoaxes, and tantalizing glimpses to keep trailing narrator Marx -- and us -- along for the ride. But then suddenly, Marx finds some deformed footprints, and while tracking them, catches up with what left them! And here, finally, we get to see some clear footage of Marx's Bigfoot -- that I assume was the footage of the creature hit by a train, but here, Marx claims that it has polio. Whuzzawhat? Claiming the footage was confirmed to be real by several experts, Marx scoffs at the detractors and searches for more evidence to prove these doubters wrong. And that's basically how the rest of the film plays out, with Marx gone Melville, looking for his personal white whale. And as a viewer, as we watch Marx spout off some cock-eyed theories about the Bigfoot's migratory patterns, you have to wonder if our expert has been out in the woods a little too long and is starting to get a little barmy in the old brainpan. 

As evidence, your honors, take a look at that whole, and embarrassingly long, law of nature sequence, where Marx uses a mortally wounded squirrel, stalked by an ever-circling chicken hawk, to illustrate that survival is the only law a Bigfoot has to abide by. Whuzzawhatthe@#%*?

Next, things continue to unravel with a visit to Alaska to see Yukon Frieda and her gallery of Bigfoot paintings, where Marx gets a tip that the local Indians have a legend about "a friend" who returns all who die out on the frozen tundra to be buried with their own kind. When Marx asks them where he can find this friend, the natives say to look for him in The Land of Shining Eyes. (Isn't that near Skagway?) But before he embarks, Marx is taught a ritual song to be sung during the next full moon that will guarantee a sighting of the glowing eyes of Bigfoot. This proves too goofy even for Marx, who refuses to play along; but after several days pass with no sighting, he breaks out the old tom-tom and whacks away. Sure enough, lured by this siren call, something flashes its high-beams over a nearby hill -- and with that sequence, we've quickly taken a long walk off a terminally-short credulity pier.

Even with all of these sightings, Marx still has no solid proof of Bigfoot's existence. And as our nature-boy gives in to despair, he goes out for one final look before chucking it in and just happens to stumble upon not one, but two, Bigfoot splashing around in a nearby creek! Watching these creatures at play, Marx seems to come to terms with the fact that he may never have all of the answers to his questions about Bigfoot. Content in the fact that he no longer cares about such questions, he will instead bask in the sheer wonderment of these mysterious creatures.

The End

Often confused with the similarly themed Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot, in which another expedition of experts head off into the wilderness to track down some rock-chucking Sasquatch, The Legend of Bigfoot is fairly effective as a documentary. Sure, it's probably a tad too long, and too repetitive in spots, but Marx has a real eye for scenery, he isn't shy about getting up close and personal with the animals, and he comes off as a rather affable -- okay, sometimes irascible, narrator. It's just too bad that all of his "actual" Bigfoot footage, which is set-up brilliantly, allowing it to creep up on us through the trees, is about as convincing as three dollar bill when the camera steadies and the creature comes into focus.

Yeah, big surprise, it's all bull#@*%.

Rumors abound that Marx and his wife bought a bunch of fur coats at a Goodwill before his first Bigfoot pictures started to surface. And the fact that when the location of the footage is checked for scale, the creature wasn't seven to eight feet tall as Marx claimed, but about the same height as his wife, Peggy. All the disparaging comments and increasingly bad rep in the Bigfoot community didn't seem to matter as Marx became sort of a Bigfoot media celebrity, appearing on several TV shows, including an episode of You Asked for It -- where they developed some raw footage and screened it for the audience, which showed an albino Bigfoot frolicking in the snow, and a Smithsonian documentary narrated by Rod Serling that featured all of Marx's footage and photos. And then there's this, here, full-length feature documentary, made to feed the resurgent Bigfoot-mania sweeping the country in the late 1970s.

I was proud to be a part of that Bigfoot-mania that gripped America back then. And there's still a part of my brain that houses an irrational fear of this creature that surfaces and taps me on the shoulder and says "Booga-booga!" whenever I watch any of these old mockumentaries, and frankly, they still tend to creep the living poop out of me. They don't call it irrational for nothing, folks.

But as time passed, more and more of Marx's photos, footage and findings were called into question and exposed as fakes (-- like the one on the right.) Even his most staunchest defenders claimed most of his evidence was probably staged, and now, these days, with his reputation in tatters, Marx is usually singled out as the worst huckster to ever huck a hoax, and blamed for setting the science of crypto-zoology back several decades with his shenanigans. But he wasn't alone. In fact, it's been a bad couple of years for Bigfoot enthusiasts. Those Bluff Creek footprints found back in the '50s that started all the initial hysteria turned out to be fakes, too. The hoax was revealed with the death of Ray Wallace in 2002; after which, 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 unfortunately, 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.

Do I believe in Bigfoot? Well, I like to believe in the idea of Bigfoot, and lake monsters, and the Bermuda Triangle. I like the idea that there's still some stuff out there that we can't explain. And the more people debunk them with irrefutable evidence and hard facts, confident -- most times arrogant, in their science, calling us idiots for believing in such nonsense, I'll only stubbornly believe in them more; and I also get all warm and fuzzy knowing these ass-hats have no clue how a bumblebee or a hummingbird can fly. 

But fly they do.