There was a time in the 1970's when pseudo-science was pretty big in the US.  Chariots of the Gods, a book revealing that alien had supposedly visited Earth in the distant past, was a best seller and so were books on the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs.  I read my share of these books in my pre-teen years, and was fairly convinced for a short time.  (Until I discovered that there were much more mundane explanations for most of the phenomena that was touted as proof.  Something the authors neglected to mention.)  But even at 12 years old, I thought the idea of Bigfoot was a little far fetched.  Here was a creature over six-feet tall, living in the woods of North America that leaves no evidence of its existence save for a few murky footprints and no organic remains when it dies.  Yeah right.  I had assumed that belief in this creature had died out, but apparently not as the 1999 documentary Sasquatch Odyssey: The Hunt for Bigfoot shows.  This short movie (it runs about 70 minutes long) looks at four people who have devoted their life to finding proof of Bigfoot's existence, and is now available on DVD.

Sasquatch Odyssey isn't an examination of the evidence that has been gathered about Bigfoot, rather it is an examination of four people who have spent years tracking this elusive creature.  John Green, Peter Byrne, Rene Dahinden and Dr. Grover Krantz all have a sincere conviction that there is a giant hairy creature living in the woods of North America, and they've all tried to prove it over the years.  Through their recollections and interviews a history of Bigfoot 'research' in the latter half of the 20th Century is given, along with some of the evidence that has been discovered.

The show deals more with the hunter's personalities and beliefs than with an actual assessment of the data, and that is both its strength and weakness.  While I found the various subjects interesting and colorful, I was left with more questions about them than answers.  Their stories and anecdotes were fun to listen to, but I found myself wondering about what drives these people.  Peter Byrne has been searching for Bigfoot for 38 years at the time this movie was filmed, and in all that time he has found a total of five sets of footprints.  That's it!  Most people would have given up after a decade or two, but they never asked these people why they kept on going.

One of the people who gets the most screen time is also one of the very few scientists to publically state that he believes in the existence of Bigfoot.  Dr. Krantz, a Physical Anthropologist at Washington State University, has taken a lot of criticism from his colleges and associates, but continues to lecture at Bigfoot conventions and has written books on the subject.  At one convention he is showing a frame from the Patterson video (the only film reportedly of Bigfoot taken in 1967) and showing how he has calculated some figure for the creature, when Rene Dahinden points out rather forcefully that Krantz is making an error by assuming that everything is in one plane when clearly it isn't.  Krantz doesn't have an answer for this seemingly valid argument, which makes one question how strong of a scientist he is.

In the end, this was an enjoyable film, but one which I felt was incomplete.  I don't feel that I got to really know much about any of the subjects, just that they all had a passion when it came to Bigfoot creatures.  What drove them, more importantly, why they still believed in this creature after decades of negative results, was more interesting to me than their anecdotes.

Audio:

The two channel soundtrack was about average for a documentary.  The audio quality varied between interviews, but overall everything was clearly audible and clean.  There were no subtitles.

Video:

The full frame typical low budget documentary; not bad, but not anything to get excited about.  Some of the colors were a little too bright, and there was occasional cross colorization but nothing too glaring.  An average picture.

Extras:

The main bonus material is three short interviews with special effects creators.  SFX guru Stan Winston, who has worked on such notable movies as The Terminator, Alien, and Jurassic Park takes up two of the 3-minute interviews.  He views the Patterson film of Bigfoot, and concludes that it's a man in a cheap costume.  He closes the first segment with a great quote: "If one of my colleges created this for a movie they'd be out of business."

In addition to Stan's two interviews, there is also some archival footage with Janos Prohaska, a Hollywood ape suit designer, who concludes that the Patterson footage is real.

There is also a ten-minute featurette, Rick Noll - Bigfoot Hunter.  This is a series of unedited footage with a younger man who looks for the mysterious creature.  There is a segment where Rick takes the film crew out to look for tracks and finds two in less than a minute.  He doesn't seem too surprised or excited when he comes across them, and that whole segment had the feeling that it was all set-up.

There is also a minute's worth of photos of the featured hunters and a few Bigfoot tracks.

Final Thoughts:

While this is an enjoyable film to watch, in the end it is lacking.  It doesn't really look at the question of whether there is such a creature as Bigfoot, rather it looks at people who have devoted their lives to the legendary beast.  However as a character profile I found it lacking in depth, with just the surface of these people's personalities being scratched.  Rent it.