THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT / Palladium Productions - 1976

It's another Friday Night Drive-In with Tabonga, here at The Dungeon!.. Our feature is a 'documentary' about the mysterious Bigfoot. The taglines scream... Startling new motion picture footage of the elusive creature! and Never before seen footage of the Giant of the North! This movie was completed over a 10 year period.

The prolific LA musician Don Peake did the music for this film, Don began his long and distinguished music career in 1961 as a lead guitarist for the Everly Brothers!!.. He holds the distinction of being the first white guitarist to ever play with the Ray Charles Orchestra, for which he recorded and toured with for ten years!!.. He played guitar on the classic Phil Spector recordings "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" by the Righteous Brothers and "River Deep, Mountain High" by Ike and Tina Turner!!..

He's even the lead guitarist on the Jackson Five hit songs "ABC" and "I Want You Back!" Among the other artists Don has played guitar for are John Lennon, the Commodores, Jan and Dean, the Mamas and the Papas, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, the Beach Boys, Billy Preston, Diana Ross, and Sonny and Cher!!.. He's also a member of an elite group of musicians known as "The Wrecking Crew!" The amazing list goes on and on, go to IMDb to check out his complete bio!!

Letz get the show off the toad, sooooo, push the big red 'GO' button there beside the sculpture shelf, NOW, Rufus The Gnat! Here's our soundclip for... THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT!

This is executive producer and actor, Ivan Marx, a dude obsessed with the idea that Bigfoot is actually the missing link! He's telling you all about his theory.

You see a lot of Ivan's little red Vee-Dub as he tours around looking for all the wilderness areas where Bigfoot has supposedly been spotted.

He believes that the American Indians depicted Bigfoot in their rock drawings and he even finds some hand and footprints he makes plaster casts of!

I dunno... What do you think?

There are lots of shots of forests, mountains, lakes and wildlife.

Oh-Mah means... Boss Of The Woods!

They basically analyze all of the different Bigfoot videos available at the time throughout the film.

There are lots of interesting places shown as Ivan travels from one location to another in search of the big guy.

Local artesians think there's money to be made exploiting his legend. You know, like, in the title! Weird, TOTAL DRAMA ISLAND is playing in the background, it's the episode with Bigfoot in it!

No doubt, it's very possible that a Bigfoot may have been buried here!

Thrown in for it's WTF value!

So, Ivan is out there somewhere, hiding, stalking, peeking, sneaking or creeping around in his never-ending pursuit to be able to say... I saw Bigfoot!!

Okay, here's whut I gots to say about Bigfoot... If they actually existed, come on, someone would have found at least some freakin' bones by now, case closed!

OTOSHIANA - "Pitfall" - Toshi Ichiyanagi -Yuji Takahashi -Tôru Takemitsu - (1962)

This movie is DEEP, and I'm going to be honest, I fell asleep the first two times I tried to watch it, but it was late, and I blame El Blanco, not "Pitfall" but let me tell you this, on a film like this, the third time's the charm anyway! The very strange music, if that's what you want to call it, is a combination of the talents of Toshi (Eros Plus Massacre) Ichiyanagi, Yuji (Pale Flower) Takahashi, and Tôru (Crazed Fruit) Takemitsu!

"Pitfall" starts off a little slow,with a couple of hard working guys and a kid in postwar Japan. Life is Rice, but WTF is really going on? Dig a little deeper and we see maybe everything is not as it seems!

The main guy here is Hisashi Igawa, a man with 124 acting credits, without even one giant monster among them! Hisashi has just got a letter beckoning him to show up at a certain spot, and he will supposedly be assured a better job!

The place he goes to is nothing but a ghost town, with nothing but one woman still trying to keep her candy store open! The irony of it being a ghost town will soon be understood!

Flies, ants, and snakes are frequent fliers in this reality! In the previous 10 years Director Hiroshi Teshigahara only had a chance to do a handful of short documentaries, and "Pitfall" was his first real chance to show the world what he had, and he wasn't going to blow the opportunity!

For whatever reason, Hisashi has been set up! He's out in the middle of nowhere and this cat all dressed in white is tailing him. It's not long before the cat catches and disposes of it's prey! And the viewer says, What in the Hell is going on??

Hisashi's son witnesses the whole thing! The boy was played by Kazuo Miyahara in his only film appearance ever!

Hisashi literally appears to spring back to life after being viciously attacked and stabbed, but in reality.........

......HE'S DEAD!! He's now a ghost unable to be seen or heard by humans, but he's still walking the planet!

Hisashi meets another ghost whose neck is permanently broken for eternity! This ghost asks Hisashi if he ate before he was killed, and when he says No, he's informed that he's going to be permanently starving forever!!!

So as it turns out, what all this was leading up to, is, the Pit Boss for one of the local unions just happens to look just like Hisashi, and he was also supposed to be in that same area at the same time, so they assume, not knowing that Hisashi was summoned to come to that spot, that it was just a case of mistaken identity!

Hisashi has a different take on the whole situation!!!

In the meantime, the candy shop owner, Sumie Sasaki, who is still working in Japanese TV today, gets raped by an ignorant rogue cop, and then the man in white comes back and kills her, even though she did everything he asked of her, like physically describing Hisashi's killer as the leader of the opposing union pit crew!

The leaders of the two opposing unions have a conversation that I'm sure is still going on today!!

Then right about F'ing here it really starts to get confusing! Otsuka, the Pit Boss goes to the abandoned town where the guy that looked like him was killed, and he finds the dead shopkeeper, and she thinks he's the dead Hisashi, but he can only have contact with her dead body as she watches on helplessly! What a Fustercluck!!!

The two ghosts watch on helplessly as the two Pit Bosses come to the final determination that they can never come to any agreement!!

One guy stabs the other before the other guy gets drowned! It's a draw! The final draw, and unfortunately for both, this is now their stupid life together for eternity!

If the man in white has all the answers, he's not telling, because the questions are coming from ghosts, and he can't hear them!!

Hiroshi Teshigahara idolized the work of Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel, and I think it's pretty self evident in this painting of his, and in "Pitfall!" If you don't like intelligent black and white foreign flicks with sub-titles, then avoid this movie like the plague, but if that's your cup of green tea, you can get this DVD from Netflix for some reason you should be thankful for!

FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH / Hammer Film Productions - 1967

It's Monster Monday with Tabonga, here at The Dungeon!.. We have a great movie to check out this time, one that I saw when it came out. The Quatermass series is one of my favorites, there are four titles... THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT aka THE CREEPING UNKNOWN, QUATERMASS II aka ENEMY FROM SPACE, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT aka FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH and QUATERMASS, all written by Nigel Kneale. Three of the titles were also TV mini-series. Interesting, the TV versions are 4 hours in length, over twice as long as the movies, so, in QUATERMASS II Professor Quatermass has time to go into space! QUATERMASS (takes place after a nuclear war) was never made into a movie.

The story's about a mysterious object unearthed during work on a London underground subway station, the authorities try to explain it away as an unexploded German weapon from WWII, but, Professors Quatermass & Dr. Rowney discover that it's actually of very ancient origin and has a threatening potential.

Eegah!! sent us over a very cool lil' soundclip for our listening satisfaction, soooo, go ahead and push the big red 'GO' button located directly across from the thingamajigger, NOW, Ralphie The Tarantula! Here's music and more from... FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH!

This is where all the trouble starts, Hobbs End, a place with a long history of weird events and happenings...

During the digging, a worker uncovers a freakin' skeleton!

James Donald plays Dr. Mathew Roney, expert on prehistoric man, here he is commenting on the find. We remember James from THE GREAT ESCAPE.

The Army takes over the digging operation and the troopers come across a five million year old spaceship with dead Martians inside! Not that that's what they think it is, though.

They quickly take the creatures back to the lab to try and save as much as they can, but, they're turning into a big pile o' yetch! You'd probably hurl if you actually imagined what that putrid stench must smell like!.. Green fluids, eek!

Julian (BLOOD FIEND) Glover plays Colonel 'by the book' Breen, he's convinced it's a 'terror weapon' used by the Nazis near the end of the war, and, the Martian insects are fake. Andrew Keir plays Professor Quatermass, he was also in DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS and DALEKS INVASION EARTH: 2150 A. D., Brian Donlevy will always be the professor for me.

They find out that the doctor's helper, Barbara, is the most receptive so they hook her up to the mental image recorder. Later, they play a tape of what she had recorded, that's so cool! Barbara (BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE) Shelley plays the helper.

The images show thousands of marching insects as they appeared on Mars five million years ago! The viewers are totally bewildered.

Back at the ranch the ship's starting to glow and all Hell's breaking loose!! Just check out old Colonel Breen, there.

Then, the image of a huge Martian devil demon appears in the sky, causing most people to go totally insane, running aimlessly through the streets as the gate to Hell seems to have been thrown open!

Dr. Roney is one of the few people that are not affected by the monster, so, he comes up with a clever plan to end the insanity...

He gives his life as he careens the crane into the thing, short circuiting it and ending it's evil influence!