John Carradine stars as Jasper B. Hawks, a fast-talking operator who speeds through the forest in his car, flanked by his loyal sidekick Elmer Briggs, played by John Mitchum. At nearly the same moment, Joi Lansing portrays Joi Landis, piloting a small plane above the same stretch of woods. When Joi’s single-engine craft loses power, she parachutes to safety and lands near a tense encounter in the trees: a Bigfoot emerges and attacks her, setting off a chain of events that pull more people into the wilderness.
In the same verdant maze, a laconic biker named Rick arrives with his girlfriend Chris, portrayed by Judy Jordan. Chris happens upon a secluded Bigfoot burial ground and is instantly endangered by a second creature. The town’s authorities—an increasingly wary sheriff and a ranger’s station—receive word of the disappearances, but their search is half-hearted and quickly abandons the effort. Rick searches for help elsewhere, but only Jasper B. Hawks offers support, driven by a reckless plan to capture a Bigfoot for a notorious freak show financed by a deranged biology professor, Professor Blackthorne.
Meanwhile, Peggy is abducted and bound to a tree alongside Joi. The Bigfoot clan in this story isn’t a solitary monster; the creatures are depicted as half-human offspring of a towering 12-foot male, guarding the women with a protective ferocity. The dramatic moment arrives when the patriarch—referred to as “Dad” Bigfoot—appears to square off with a bear menacing the captured captives, and the women’s screams echo through the trees.
As the plot threads converge, Jasper, Elmer, and Rick trek toward the Bigfoot lair. The team schemes to gas the enormous captive and turn him into the centerpiece of the show Jasper intends to stage. The plan comes to a head when Rick’s biker allies unleash a gas barrage, allowing the team to seize “Dad” Bigfoot and haul him back toward town to be displayed. The creature does not go quietly into captivity; he fights and, in a brutal moment, steps on a local drunken man named Lucky Bob, who is killed in the process.
The town becomes a crucible of chaos as the Bigfoot rampage tears through streets, driving the residents into a frenzy. The climactic sequence shifts to the Bigfoot’s cave, where the collected menace is finally brought to a head. In a dramatic finale, the enraged creature is blown up by one of Rick’s dynamite-wielding bikers, destroying the spectacle that Jasper fought so hard to create.
With the threat neutralized and the show canceled by the very chaos it spawned, Jasper delivers a weary nod to the old cinema of monsters. He even borrows an iconic line, echoing a sentiment from the original King Kong (1933): > It was beauty that did him in. Then, in a quiet return to normalcy, the town resets around the new memories of a forest encounter that feels almost mythic in its scale.
In the aftermath, life roughly returns to its familiar rhythm. The forest recedes as a memory, but the encounter with the Bigfoot and the fragile edge between showmanship and danger linger as a cautionary tale. The characters who survived—[Joi Landis], [Rick], [Chris], and the others—drift back into their routines, each carrying the quiet aftertaste of what happened in the woods.
