“This May Be The Most Startling Film You Ever See….”
Posted by: Loren Coleman on December 21st, 2011
The quote, written for him, of course, is from the narrator. Does the film live up to its acclaim? Certainly, for its time, it was groundbreaking. And to some, startling, in its implications. Was the world still alive with monsters? Cryptozoology, as a field of study, remember, was in its infancy, in the crawling stage of its development.
The full and complete motion picture The Mysterious Monsters (1976), narrated by Peter Graves, has now appeared on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjVIX98wFN8
The movie and the book produced an image of a Bigfoot on a horizon that speaks to the iconic nature of the beast, the unknown creature in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.
The Sunn Classic film was a David L. Wolper production, in which an equally famous book was published as a tie-in. (Peter Graves and David L. Wolper both died in 2010.)
What symbolism do you see speaking to us across the decades from the cover of the book? In the poster of the movie?
The academic publishers of Dave Coleman’s new comprehensive encyclopedia decided to design his new 2012 book cover as a tribute to this now famous film and book. (The 1976 movie was written by Robert Guenette; the book was authored by Robert and Frances Guenette.)
The Bigfoot Filmography: Fictional and Documentary Appearances in Film and Television.
It is not a stretch to see how this iconic image, in various forms, presents itself, over and over again, in the recent past’s and today’s Bigfoot book covers and movie moments.
Even in the new breaking area of Sasquatch porn, the producers in that genre cannot avoid placing images such as the one above in their films.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Outside of the frame grab of Patty, I’d say the posters for The Legend Of Boggy Creek and The Mysterious Monsters are definitely the most iconic of the early days of Squatchdom… I’m lucky enough to have original one sheets from both films hanging in my home…
Great documentary of late 70s (those were really interesting!!) I remember a part on which Peter Graves takes a bigfoot footprint and takes it to a paranormalist (the kind of guy who’s usually hired by the police as a “clairvoyant” to find clues to solve crimes and mysteries). The footprint cast was hidden inside a box, the clairvoyant takes the books and tries to create a mental image of what is inside….
He described that the object was related with some kind of non-human creature, a wild animal-like creature living on the woods…he took a paper and makes an apemen sketch…
I saw this movie when I was four and it gave me nightmares for years!
The image actually looks like Mecheny as drawn by N. Potapov based on Maya Bykova’s description (page 135 of Dmitri Bayanov’s In The Footsteps Of The Russian Snowman).
Or maybe I should say the other way round seeing as the Potapov drawing dates later on from the 1980s. I doubt Potapov had seen the imagery for The Mysterious Monsters though so it’s a nice little coincidence.
Anyway, great film. Probably my absolute all time favourite bigfoot film/documentary and Peter Graves gives it an air of credibility.
Along with ‘Sasquatch: Legend of Bigfoot’, (Not to be confused with Ivan Marx’s film of a similar title released a year prior to ‘Sasquatch’) Mysterious Monsters is my favourite squatch’ related motion picture. The P/G Film analysis done by Dr. Grover Krantz (1931-2002), the shocking Minnesota Iceman segment and the Alan Berry/Ron Moorehead ‘Sierra Chatter’ recordings were all mind boggling and they must have been a real eye-opener to skeptics back in the day. Final Verdict……..10/10.
Yes, it had a lot of interesting accounts. I nabbed a copy of this a while back off of a site called “RetroFlicks.” Have no idea if they’re still around or if it’s still available, but…
Has anyone else noticed the Peter Graves Narrated film’s opening frames and how the soundtrack uncannily bears striking resemblance to Ron Moorehead’s “Sierra Sounds” audio of the alledged sasquatch vocalizations?
Opalman, there is no mystery here. Those are the Sierra Sounds recorded by Ron Morehead, et alii, which were obtained in 1971. This documentary was released in 1976.