B-Sides: The Ballad of Bigfoot on Blood Mountain
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Tim York is the man heard crooning about Bigfoot during the opening credits of Blood Beast of Monster Mountain AKA Monster Mountain AKA The Legend of McCullough’s Mountain. The lyrics talk of how the tale of the creature changes. Not nearly as many changes as the movie itself went through.
The 1976 docudrama Blood Beast of Monster Mountain is actually the 1965 horror comedy Demon Hunter: The Legend of Blood Mountain retitled and chopped up with new footage inserted by Donn Davison, who appears in the film billed as “World Traveler, Lecturer, and Psychic Investigator”. Really more like a producer who made a go of it in the Seventies repackaging obscure, older movies with new footage for re-release.
Demon Hunter: The Legend of Blood Mountain was the starring vehicle for a little known 1960’s Georgia horror movie host who went by the name “Bestoink Dooley”. Sort of a bumbling stooge who looked like a Hasidic version of Popeye’s hamburger loving pal Wimpy, the plot followed him as he tried to fulfill his dream of becoming a newspaper reporter by breaking the big story about a monster lurking on a nearby mountain.
For Blood Beast of Monster Mountain, Davison edited out all of the footage of the original monster (a warthog-like demon head on a fat guy in caveman garb) and replaced it with shots of a Bigfoot-looking creature obscured almost entirely in shadow and fog. He then edited the movie down to make room to insert new footage of him conducting staged interviews with locals that claimed to have encountered the creature on the mountain. The whole thing was then patched together and resold to cash-in on the Bigfoot craze of the 1970’s and assuming nobody will notice the drastic change in film stock when it jumps between the documentary and “dramatic reenactment” portions of the film.
The story behind Blood Beast of Monster Mountain is probably more interesting than either version of the film and even this opening credits ballad about the Bigfoot said to lurk somewhere on McCullough’s Mountain.
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Categorized:B-Sides
