Identified! Curse of Bigfoot (1975)

Remember that film I came into part way through on a streaming channel and couldn't identify? No, you probably don't, (unless you are an obsessive reader of this blog and, apart from me, I refuse to believe that such people exist).  It was a while ago now and I haven't referred to it since.  To recap, it was of bloody awful quality featuring what looked like a semi-professional (at best) cast and seemed to involve a bunch of students in the US finding a mummy which, when dug up, transforms into some kind of furry faced monster that goes on a rampage.  Anyway, I've finally been able to identify it and guess what?  All of my suppositions about it turned out to be wrong.  I had speculated that had been made in the sixties, (based on the fact that it was in colour - ultra low budget B-movies were only routinely shot in colour from the mid to late sixties onward) and that it had been shot in Florida, (the presence of swamps and the fact that there was a thriving low budget film industry in this State during the sixties and seventies).  In reality, it turns out that most of it was filmed in 1958, in California (the orange tree orchards should have been a giveaway).  But what threw me most was the film's title, when I finally identified it: Curse of Bigfoot.  I'd been busy searching for movies with the word 'mummy' in the title, as this seemed more logical.  I mean, who'd have thought that the hairy thing was meant to be Bigfoot?

Not the original makers, that's for sure.  The bulk of the footage comes from a 59 minute 1958 film called Teenagers Battle the Thing, which, apparently, was only ever shown in the makers' home town.  Fast forward nearly twenty years to 1975, when, in order to sell it to TV, it was decided to bring it up to feature length, by adding nearly thirty minutes of new footage as a framing story.  This actually featured two of the teenagers from the original footage as adults, telling a class of modern teenagers about their encounter with Bigfoot - with the original film presented as a flashback.  Now, in the original, the creature was just some kind of unidentified prehistoric beast, the 'Bigfoot' angle in the new footage presumably being added to cash in on a slew of Bigfoot-related titles which had appeared in the seventies.  Regardless of the monster's identity, the film is pretty awful, its most notable feature being the use of colour in a fifties low-budget feature.  The fact that it was originally shown only locally reinforces the impression one gets while viewing the film that it is, in essence, a home movie.  The graininess of the original footage presumably the result of it having been shot on 8mm and subsequently blown up. The original footage, without the framing story, was released on VHS in the nineties, under the original title. Regardless of the poor quality and misleading title, I'm glad to have finally identified this movie - I can be very obsessive about this sort of thing and it is like scratching a persistent itch: very satisfying.  Just in case you are interested, here's a DVD trailer: