Snowbeast (1977)

          Bigfoot was so ubiquitous in mid-’70s pop culture, you can’t blame the guy for wanting to take a vacation. So instead of thumping around the forests of the Pacific Northwest, as he did in countless movies and TV shows during this period, the Artist Sometimes Known as Sasquatch spends Snowbeast chilling at a ski resort. Made for TV and running a brisk 86 minutes, this low-budget thriller boasts a coherent script by Joseph Stefano (who, in better times, wrote Psycho for Alfred Hitchcock), and features a handful of competent actors who keep things lively. Robert Logan, star of the Wilderness Family movies, plays Tony, the manager of a Colorado ski resort owned by his tough grandmother, Carrie (Sylvia Sidney). When a terrified skier reports an attack by a mysterious creature on a ski slope, Carrie (in true Jaws rip-off fashion) demands the incident be kept quiet so panic doesn’t derail the resort’s upcoming winter carnival. Tony starts to investigate the attack, but he’s distracted by the arrival of one-time Olympic skiing champ Gar (Bo Svenson) and Gar’s wife, investigative reporter Ellen (Yvette Mimieux). Cue the psychodrama!

          It turns out Tony once dated Ellen, and Gar has been gun-shy about skiing since his Olympic success. So, in addition to the usual business of a monster attack every 10 minutes or so and semi-suspenseful scenes of Our Heroes snowmobiling around the woods and looking for Bigfoot, Snowbeast features the type of contrived character interplay one usually finds in Irwin Allen disaster movies. The sheer number or events in Stefano’s script sorta makes up for the film’s lack of genuine terror, and even though Snowbeastfeels padded—a sequence of Mimieux snooping around the woods goes on far too long—Snowbeast basically delivers the B-movie goods by introducing archetypal characters and then keeping the audience guessing about who will survive. The monster stuff is disappointing, of course, but director Herb Wallerstein wisely limits our glimpses of the titular critter to flashes of claws and feet, plus one or two split-second peeks at the creature’s hairy face. This is cheesy stuff, without question, but by the low standards of ’70s Bigfoot cinema, Snowbeast is fairly entertaining.

Snowbeast: FUNKY

Across the Great Divide (1976)

After scoring a moderate success with The Adventures of the Wilderness Family (1975), a handsomely photographed Disney-style saga about a contemporary clan roughing it in the Rockies, producer Arthur R. Dubs and leading man Robert Logan reteamed for Across the Great Divide, a family-friendly survival story set in the Old West era. Logan plays Zachariah Coop, a dishonest gambler who flees into the wilderness with a posse in pursuit. While making his escape, he stumbles across teenager Holly Smith (Heather Rattray) and her little brother Jason (Mark Edward Hall), orphans trying to make their way toward relatives in Oregon. Coop steals a horse from the kids, but the resourceful Holly gets it back; later, Coop earns the kids’ trust by saving them from Indians and by rescuing Jason from white-water rapids. Faster than you can say “plot contrivance,” the characters join forces during run-ins with bears, snowstorms, wolves, and the like. Although the animal footage and outdoor photography in Across the Great Divide are strong, writer-director Stewart Raffill can’t muster a single original idea. The plot is a string of clichés, the characterizations are vapid, and the dialogue is absurd. At one point, Holly berates Coop thusly: “I’d sooner face 1,000 heathen Blackfeet than deal another second with you, you verminous creature, you thievin’ trickster!” Even if Rattray could act, which she can’t, this stuff would be deadly. Whereas producer Dubs more or less simulated the vibe of a generic Disney movie with the first Wilderness Family outing (its sequels, not so much), he descends into generic mediocrity with Across the Great Divide. On a technical level, the picture is highly competent, but on every other level, it’s utterly negligible, albeit harmless.

Across the Great Divide: FUNKY

The Adventures of the Wilderness Family (1975) & The Further Adventures of the Wilderness Family (1978) & Mountain Family Robinson (1979)

          Writer-producer Arthur R. Dubs carved a minor niche for himself in ’70s by making a series of documentaries and fiction films celebrating the American frontier, and his most enduring creation is a three-movie series about a modern family that moves from Los Angeles to the Rocky Mountains. Harmless and well-meaning, these G-rated pictures boast spectacular location photography and terrific footage of real animals, even if the acting and storytelling leave a bit to be desired. The first and best picture in the series is The Adventures of the Wilderness Family, which does a solid job of emulating the Disney nature-flick formula, but without the sickly-sweet extremes that make some Disney pictures unpalatable.

          The movie begins in smog- and traffic-shrouded L.A., where construction worker Skip Robinson (Robert Logan) realizes he’s had enough. Skip asks his wife, Pam (Susan Damante Shaw), if she’s willing to leave city life behind, and she says yes. The Robinsons pack up their two young children and their dog, and then relocate to a remote lakeside homestead. During the first movie, which takes place over a summer and early fall, the Robinsons build a cabin, survive close encounters with bears and cougars, and take in stray animals including a pair of orphaned bear cubs and a raccoon. They also forge a friendship with a mountain man named Boomer (George “Buck” Flower).

          Excepting some awful songs played over montages, The Adventures of the Wilderness Familytells a simple story without distracting adornment, and the respect both the characters and the filmmakers show for the dangers of the wilderness grounds the piece in a gentle version of reality. Additionally, the film’s breathtaking Colorado locations make it easy to understand why the Robinsons decide, at the end of the picture, to stay in their new home despite the impending arrival of winter and all the challenges that implies.

          Three years passed before Dubs and his crew returned to Colorado to film the lackluster sequel The Further Adventures of the Wilderness Family. Although the second movie supposedly picks up just weeks after the end of the first film, the actress playing the Robinson daughter was recast, and the replacement performer is about six years older than her predecessor. Huh? Worse, the second movie includes the kinds of syrupy excesses Dubs avoided the first time around. Way too much time is spent on cutesy animal antics and sentimental Boomer scenes (his crusty old heart melts when he becomes a surrogate grandfather to the Robinson kids).

          Furthermore, the crises powering the storyline are beyond contrived. The climax is especially absurd—when Skip leaves the house after a blizzard to fetch help for Pam, who is suffering from pneumonia, wolves attack the cabin and one of the Robinsons’ pets knocks over a lamp, starting a fire, so a bedridden Pam and her two children are left alone to fight flames and ravening predators. The only reason the second movie is borderline passable is the presence of still-impressive production values.

          However, it all goes wrong in the third flick, Mountain Family Robinson, which is so lacking in narrative substance that Dubs pads the running time with endless montages of things like full-costume Fourth of July picnics; gardening sessions livened up with square dancing; and idyllic runs through fields of flowers. Worse, the songs—which are never good in Wilderness Familymovies—become truly noxious in Mountain Family Robinson, with a cloying vocal group proclaiming again and again how wonderful it is for wonderful people to live a wonderful life in a wonderful place. Yeah, we got it, already.

The Adventures of the Wilderness Family: GROOVY

The Further Adventures of the Wilderness Family: FUNKY

 Mountain Family Robinson: LAME