Cinema

RARE DRAMATIC BIGFOOT MOVIE POSTER, Ellman Film Enterprises. 1970. The over-the-top film, BIGFOOT, produced in 1970 by Anthony Cardoza and Bill Reardon, was panned by everyone, with virtually no one saying it was any good. One wag said that it would be the only opportunity to see John Carradine, Joi Lansing, Judy Jordan, John Mitchum, James Craig, and several other actors all together in one movie, so you better see it anyway! The only poster for this film that one finds for sale is the common one that you can buy on several websites for very little money. But that one is like cheap, 3-year old Scotch compared with 50-year old good stuff that you will find in Edinburgh whisky shops under lock and key and that I cannot afford. I frankly don’t know about this poster in terms of whether it was an advance or trial poster that didn’t make the cut, or wasn’t produced en masse for some other reason. It is far more classical in appearance than the cheap cartoonish one you can still get for a few bucks. Unrolled to a size of 27 ¼” x 39 ¾”, it takes up almost all of my golden oak antique kitchen table and half of my standard-size bed! It is professionally backed on linen. In spite of one long tear and several short tears, all of which are professionally and archivally repaired, this poster ends up being showy, good-looking, and impossible to ignore, a poster that would dominate the conversation of any beer and brats forest cookout-“Have you seen that poster?!” It will bust the balls of any hairy-chested man-cave dweller and, because it is also a “biker” film, salt the seats of Harley-Davidson rally-goers on their way to Sturgis! Bigfoot filmography author David Coleman in his massive book, 2012 book, The Bigfoot Filmography: Fictional and Documentary Appearances in Film and Television, devotes two quarto pages to description of the film. He includes these gems: “Bigfoot is perhaps the most entertainingly bad Bigfoot movie of the entire ‘cycle’ . . . given the strange blending of motorcycles, ridiculously bad Bigfoot costumes, has-been actors, bikini babes, and a mutant music score, the entire enterprise is truly a slow-paced, stupefying descent into all things torpid, but with a camp sensibility that redeems Bigfoot from total boredom. Then, from a historical perspective, he concludes: the film “marks the beginning of a new era in the genre that draws a clean dividing line between the earlier film incarnations of the ‘wild man’ cryptid appearing mostly in snow settings as a Yeti (and) set(s) the stage for the plethora of Big-foot focused movies to follow in the 1970s.” This is an essential poster for few people who have the wall-space to hang it. It would be one the poster you would frame and hang front and center over your giant fieldstone fireplace at one end of your room with the 20-foot vaulted ceiling. Unquestionably rare. less