Local horror movies, Oregon

I've seen two of the three regional horror movies made in my state, Unhinged (1982) and Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot (1977). The one I didn't see was Deafula (1975), a vampire movie performed in sign language.

I saw Unhinged on DVD. It turned out it was banned in Britian for some reason. It was about three girls who head to a rock concert. They wreck their car and are brought to a mansion built in the woods, completely isolated from the outside world. 

I watched it and thought it looked like Portland. When it got to the mansion, I wondered if it was the Pittock Mansion, the home of a rich family now a tourist attraction. I was only there once about forty years earlier. But it turned out I was right.

There was one bloody scene in it and a couple of gratuitous shots of the women showering. Other than that, it was pretty inoffensive. I don't know why the British were so upset by it.

There's a bonus feature on the DVD, an interview with the director and star on Portland TV. The director says that he thinks it's scarier not to show anything scary and to let the audience use their imagination.

Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot was a pseudo documentary. The director, Ed Ragozzino had been a high school drama teacher turned Community College drama teacher and voice-over actor. He was known here for directing lavish productions of broadway musicals. Local investors would invest. They were like really big high school plays but with non-high schoolers.  It surprised me how many serious local actors there were. He accepted the job directing this because he wanted to direct a movie. One of the producers was the daughter of a prominent local family that owned a chain of shoe stores---she went on to produce real documentaries. I was slightly acquainted with her. She liked telling people about her Sasquatch movie. 

It was four-walled. They would rent the whole theater and heavily advertise it hoping to draw large crowds and keep all the money from ticket sales rather than split it with the theaters. It didn't work. The movie bombed and took several ad agencies down with it.

I always wondered how people felt about their failed movies. Turns out they're amused by and secretly proud of them.

It's so easy to make a plausible fake documentary. But this one was obviously fiction. First they had people feeding data about Bigfoot into a computer---then the computer prints a picture of Bigfoot, and it looks just like Bigfoot! Then the computer directs them to the epicenter of Bigfoot activity. 

It was 1977. People knew nothing about computers buy they STILL knew how idiotic that was.

The Bigfoot investigators go to this spot. They have a chuckwagon and several stock western characters, like an old prospector whose only friend was his mule.

I've seen bigfoot documentaries that were far less ambitious and infinitely more convincing.