Friday, October 9, 2020

October Horror Movie Challenge: Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot (1976)

I talked about this movie back in June. So I added it to my Amazon watchlist.  And then I forgot about it.  I decided to pull it up for today.

This one can only be described as Previously Watched.  I think I might have watched it a few dozen times back when my family got Showtime back when it was new to our town.  Not a bad choice though for my first re-watch of the season.

The movie is a pseudo-documentary about the "North American Wildlife Research" group taking a group into British Columbia. It had the same feel of a lot of pseudo-documentaries on various "alternative science" that were popular in the late 70s. 

Watching it then, when I was about 10 or so, it seemed like the real deal.  Watching it now? Yeah, I am a little embarrassed I was taken in.

The movie is not great, or even good, but it was a good distraction.  And for a G-rated movie it has some scares in it.  I still remember that howl of the Bigfoots.

The ending is still surprisingly scary.

Watched: 10
New: 9

It is not a stretch of the imagination at all to consider this movie the "Event Zero" of what became my Valhalla, AK game.  Of course, the sasquatch in Valhalla is a bit different than this one.  
In a normal NIGHT SHIFT game, the Sasquatch would be more of a threat, like this movie.  In my Valhalla, AK game...well the sasquatch was more of a nuisance.  

Every night the townspeople of Valhalla would be awoken by the sounds of moose braying in the night followed by the unholy sound of something else. I would play the sasquatch sounds at this point.  The old locals of course know this is a sasquatch.  So the PCs investigate, expecting to find dead moose. They don't find any at all.  Quite the opposite really, they find all these female moose just hanging about this one strange clearing.  Turns out that there is a young male sasquatch, a teen really, and has been having sex with the female moose (mooses, moosen, miice?) after the sun goes down.  The townsfolk have been hearing his amorous escapades.  The adventure resolves when they can lure the sasquatch back to his own people.

A bit silly? Yes.  A bit ribald? Sure. But that is exactly the sort of thing I want to happen in Valhalla, AK.



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