The Crater Lake Monster (1977)

On July 5th, 1977 a woman named Sandra Mansi claimed to have photographed "Champ", the resident monster purported to haunt the depths of Lake Champlain near the U.S.-Canadian border. The admittedly cool photograph, which has now been thoroughly debunked, was pretty big deal at the time and breathed new life into the public's on again, off again fascination with lake monsters.  Real or not, lake monsters are big business - From the Loch Ness Monster to Champ to Ogopogo, folks just can't get their fill of tales about prehistoric plesiosaurs gliding silently through tourist-laden public waterways.

 By the late 1970s lake monsters, especially "Nessie", had been the subject of countless books and had made appearances on TV series such as In Search Of... and even Bewitched.  Still, for all the public interest in the beasts, they didn't get much love at the box office in the 60s and 70s.  Sure, you had aquatic monsters on the silver screen, from Gozilla to the Beast From 20,000 Fathoms to The Giant Behemoth, but these were sea monsters and, well, that's just not the same.  Oh sure, attempts had been made to get lake monsters into theaters.  As far back as 1976, Toho and Hammer had collaborated on a movie about the Loch Ness Monster, but the project never made to the screen.¹  Still, theatergoers with taste for plesiosaur-on-human violence were pretty much out of luck..

That all changed in March 1977, just a few months before the Mansi photo appeared on the scene, when a low-budget yarn about about a killer dinosaur called The Crater Lake Monster trundled its way into theaters.²  Produced by Crown International Pictures, which readers will no doubt recognize as the company responsible for the bizarre U.S. localization of Varan the Unbelievable as well as such tasteful films as Orgy of the Dead, The Crater Lake Monster is known for its great monster effects and...er...terrible everything else.

The film opens as a team of archaeologists discover an ancient Indian cave painting in a heretofore inaccessible cavern.  Depicting a group of warriors fighting (what else?) a dinosaur, the painting would clearly be grounds for a dramatic rethinking of human history...except that the cavern hit by a freaking meteor that same night!  Soon hikers, fishermen, and cattle go missing and it quickly becomes obvious that the meteor has...done what exactly?  Released a full-grown dinosaur that was somehow living without food for thousands of years inside an early American Indian cave dwelling?  Awakened a comatose dinosaur that was sleeping for centuries at the bottom of the lake?  Brought a space dinosaur from the stars to wreak havoc on mankind?  Okay, so nothing's obvious except that a dinosaur is eating people.  What else do we need to know anyway?

The monster itself is a pretty cool effect...sometimes.  Distance shots of the beast are accomplished with pretty slick stop-motion effects by David W. Allen, who would later go on to work on films such as Q - The Winged Serpent, The Howling, and the Puppet Master series. Close shots of the creature use a gigantic prop head that, depending on the scene, looks either fairly good or like a lawn chair wrapped in a garbage bag.  Weirdly, the monster also seems to change colors from one scene to the next.  In the stop motion sequences it's clearly brown, but in some of the prop shots it seems very green to me.  (Maybe it's a lighting issue?)  Legend has it that CIP brutally slashed the budget of the movie midway through production, which accounts for the uneven visual effects.

Okay, so maybe it looks kind of like a titanic turd.

I swear it looks pretty good in motion.

Budget troubles also account for the film's famously atrocious soundtrack.  Due to underfunding, the originally planned score was priced out of reach and (apparently random) stock music was used instead.  As a result, half of the music sounds like it came from 1950s space invader flicks and the other half sounds like it came from The Hair Bear Bunch.  If you've never thought about how much sound design can effect the feel of a film, The Crater Lake Monster will be more than happy to show you.

In any event, the movie doesn't offer a lot of nuance plot-wise.  People go to the lake, the monster eats them.  There's a brief subplot about an armed robber being pursued by the sheriff which culminates in the only car chase in movie history in which a vehicle flies off a 30-foot cliff and doesn't explode on impact.  Escaping the wreck, the robber flees towards to lake only to be (wait for it...) eaten by the monster.  Hunting for the suspect, the sheriff encounters the behemoth and from there the film races to its climax - a duel between bulldozer and beast at a local logging camp.  Sadly, the final battle appears of the have been one of the scenes most hobbled by budget woes and the intriguing premise is reduced to a few seconds of awful jump cuts.

I'll be honest, I actually only bought The Crater Lake Monster because I confused it with the even more awful 1981 film The Loch Ness Horror.³  Crater Lake is the better of the two films, if only by virtue of the fact that the monster in Loch Ness Horror is more or less just a big gator grabber toy, but it's by no means a great movie.  Still, it's worth a look you're a big stop-motion fan or you're looking for fodder for a bad movie night.  It recently got the Rifftrax treatment if that's your thing, and it also came out on Blu-Ray last year as a double feature with the 1980 sci-fi/comedy Galaxina.

If you have any interest in reading up on "real" lake monsters, I recommend checking out Lake Monster Mysteries by Bejamin Radford and Joe Nickell.  Although it's not exhaustive, it offers a nice, concise overview of the folklore and facts surrounding a number of famous (and not-so-famous) lake monsters.

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1.) Nessie, as the Toho project was purported to have bee called, wheezed along in development hell until 1979 before finally being laid to rest.  A prop for the monster had already bee created and was later used in the 1987 fantasy film Princess From the Moon.  For the curious, the prominent kaiju website Toho Kingdom has a brief article on the project.


2.) The box art for the home release of The Crater Lake Monster seems to be inspired by the Mansi photo.  The actual posters for the film at the time look quite different. 

3.) I have very hazy memories of having seen The Loch Ness Horror on TV as a child.  I've long-remembered a ridiculous scene of the monster attacking a Volkswagen van and only recently figured out what film it was from.

Big Surprise: Sasquatch Corpse a Hoax...

As if the craptacular press conference last Friday left anyone with any doubts as to whether or not the Sasquatch corpse supposedly discovered in Georgia a few weeks ago was a crude hoax, a notice on Bigfoot hunter Tom Biscardi's website today confirmed that the carcass was a fake. This comes several days after the announcement that the DNA retrieved from the "body" was actually that of a possum. As I remarked in another post, the only thing open to question since Friday has been whether or not Biscardi himself was in on the deception. At this point it appears that he was not.

According to fellow Sasquatch enthusiast Steve Kull, who runs the Squatch Detective website and is the host of the radio show on which hoaxers Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer made their original claims about having a Bigfoot corpse, Biscardi paid the pair of hucksters an "undisclosed sum" (read: lots) of money in advance of the press conference and examination of the "remains". Over the weekend Sasquatch researchers, working for Biscardi's Searching for Bigfoot Inc., thawed out the frozen "carcass" that Whitton and Dyer turned over to them, only to find that it was in reality...wait for it...a stuffed Bigfoot suit with some animal entrails on it. Both Biscardi and Kull reportedly took part in this examination, and I can only imagine the mood in the room when they discovered that the body was, as Kull put it, "a costume".

Since the (Bigfoot) shit has begun to hit the fan, Whitton and Dyer have dropped off the radar and taken Biscardi's money with them. Biscardi was apparently briefly in contact with them before they left California and, according to Kull, they owned up to the hoax and agreed to return the money Biscardi paid for the fake Bigfoot. To absolutely no one's surprise, Biscardi arrived at their hotel only to find that they had checked out and fled for parts unknown.

According to an article by Loren Coleman over at Cryptomundo, Biscardi embarked on a similar adventure in 2005 when he pre-sold numerous passes to view a pair of live Sasquatches that had allegedly been captured by "a woman in Nevada". It came out rather quickly that the animals were, in fact, not real. Biscardi has spent the last several years in a state of almost perpetual damage control because of the incident and now it looks as if he'll be spending the next several years doing about the same thing.

This incident is almost sad because Biscardi himself honestly seemed sincere in the press conference and apparently ponied up no small amount of his own money to secure the right to examine the "body". On the other hand, I think most of us with so much as an iota of critical thinking power recognized that corpse as a cheap Halloween costume within the first few minutes of seeing pictures of it...so how exactly is Biscardi one of the "world's top Bigfoot researchers" if he couldn't recognize it as such? Was he, perhaps, blinded to the obvious signs of deception by his own wishful thinking. I think we all know the answer to that one.

Embedded below is a Fox News clip in which one of Searching For Bigfoot Inc.'s members discusses the hoax.

Bigfoot Hunters Allegedly Find Sasquatch Carcass...

Update: I've added an embedded picture of the "carcass" below the rest of the post because Cryptomundo and some of the other cryptozoology sites are getting so much traffic that they're crashing left and right.

I just finished watching that Yang Huei guy kick everyone else's ass in the men's all-round gymnastics competition, and I have to say that the last thing I expected to see upon hopping online to check the other Olympics results was this. Apparently a group of Sasquatch hunters claim to have a Bigfoot carcass, which they further claim to have just found out in the Georgia woods. The two men involved, policeman Matthew Whitton and one-time corrections officer Rick Dyer, are being backed up by Tom Biscardi, the guy out in California who runs Searching for Bigfoot, Inc. They'll be holding a press conference on Friday during which they say they'll produce the carcass and "DNA evidence" that will prove that it's a Sasquatch. (Biscardi is apparently a big name in Sasquatch hunting, at least according to the 3rd-person accolades about him on his website, but he's apparently not quite big enough to have his own Wikipedia page.)

Dyer and Whitton claim to have found the body several weeks ago after sighting numerous other Sasquatches milling about in the general area. Luckily they had a Sasquatch-sized ice chest (a deep freezer, I guess) at their disposal, and they've been keeping the carcass buried in ice ever since. It is perhaps worth noting that Whitton and Dyer also happen to own a company that sells Bigfoot expeditions, and further that they have announced plans to go capture one of the other Sasquatches alive, since they know where they all hang out now. That should be good.

Cyrptomundo.com has a bigger pic than the images on Searching for Bigfoot, but the site has been flooded with traffic and thus may be down at any given time. The picture is also available here. Honestly I'm not especially impressed with the picture and somehow I suspect that the "carcass" will not be made available for study, but I guess there'll be more to talk about on Friday. Two things of note - The first picture on Biscardi's site shows the body completely buried in ice, while the picture from Cryptomundo (a fancier version also released by Biscardi) shows the animal not only uncovered ("thawed") but completely dry, which seems a little off. Note that the fur is even dry enough to be wispy and sticking up. Secondly, that fur looks an awful lot to me like the fur on a gorilla costume, and I say that with some authority because I own a rather expensive one. Costume fur gets kind of a weird, bed-head sort of look that doesn't actually resemble ape hair all that much. My prediction is that this is either a stuffed costume or some combination of regular animal remains mixed with a healthy dose of contrivance. In any event, I think Friday should be pretty interesting, if not for the reasons Biscardi intends.

Oh, and Loren Coleman over at Cryptomundo, who penned the article I linked to above, has also pointed out this. Looks a little...familiar...


This is a picture of the supposed carcass. I believe that Tom Biscardi holds the copyright to it, but I've provided it here as a service for the curious.

The Montauk...Raccoon...?

I'm a couple of days late here, but did anyone else see all the news play that "Montauk Monster" photo got on Friday? That was actually the first thing I saw when I woke up on Friday morning. (Seriously. I fell asleep watching CNN Thursday night.) The story behind it is that a dead monster washed ashore on a beach in Long Island and a lady took a pair of photographs of the carcass. (Without thinking to lay down anything next to the beast to establish any sense of scale, of course.) All of this apparently took place a couple of weeks ago and the story slowly gained traction in the local press before somehow breaking into the national news on Friday. CNN spent the whole day perseverating about it and by the end of the day I'd also seen the story on MSNBC, Fox, and, as always, Above Top Secret. More fuel was added to the fire when a group of young men claimed to have recovered the monster's corpse, noting breathlessly that "all the flesh just melted off into black goo" without paying much attention to the fact that, well, that's what happens to dead things.

Terrifying monster or just a dead varmint?

In any event, the "monster" is pretty weird looking, especially the "beak-like" bit at the tip of the snout. After looking at it for a while, it seemed to me like that was probably just an exposed bit of skull protruding through the flesh. I was leaning towards "dead dog" as an explanation, but without any sense of scale I couldn't say it with certainty. Plus the thing has kind of funny looking forelimbs. Soon, however, various folks, such as Animal Planet's Jeff Corwin, started noting that the thing looks kind of like a raccoon, and that explanation now seems to easily be the most robust. That assessment is strongly bolstered by the second picture of the "monster", a straight-on shot that has barely gotten any attention from the media. From this angle the "beak" disappears and it becomes pretty obvious that we're just plain looking at a dead coon.

The shot you didn't see: No beak, just a very dead raccoon.

What bugs me about this whole debacle really isn't a lady took a picture of some gross thing that washed up on the beach only to have a news story sprung up around it, it's that the news media had access to two pictures of the creature in question and elected to only publicize the one that looked bizarre. Watch the news report I linked to above and see how much they play up the whole "beak" angle in order to make the creature seem more mysterious. Anyone looking at the second picture would know in a second that the animal didn't have a beak, but much of the media neglected to mention that. Instead they decided to go with breathless gee-whiz journalism and turn an ordinary, if gross, pair of photos into a monster.

Local Flavor Pt. I: The Sasquatch In My Backyard...

Today I stumbled upon the website for the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization and just for fun I went to their geographical database and looked for local Sasquatch attacks and whatnot. Turns out that there's a recorded Sasquatch event not only in my city, but in the very neighborhood where I grew up. Alas, it pre-dates me by 11 years or so, but according to the report, eerie Sasquatch calls where throughout my neighborhood during the summer of 1971. Now, this isn't a "sighting" mind you, since the guy reporting it didn't see anything, he just heard some spooky noises, -but- he's pretty sure it was a Sasquatch.

To give you an idea of the area we're talking about, Pleasure Ridge Park is, even in 2008, not entirely suburbs. A few blocks down from my parents' house is a set of yards chock full of horses and goats. As a child, my next door neighbors had a pony (with a penchant for escaping his enclosure and munching on my mom's plants), and the people across the street from us kept chickens until I was in middle school. Two sides of the neighborhood are cut off by a large flood ditch, which figures prominently in the report, and there are still woods there to this day. PRP isn't farmland by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a different sort of suburbs than most folks are used to.

One thing that I should point out that is not mentioned at all in this fellow's report is that PRP is also filled to the brim with dogs. At least every second house in the neighborhood has one or two of the things, and most of them run free at night. My childhood was terrorized by one such creature, a neighborhood Doberman named Adolf who was easily capable of clearing his owner's fence. Dogs account for most of the sounds you hear at night in Pleasure Ridge Park, with the rest accounted for by frogs and drunk folks.

While the fellow who reported the 1971 Sasquatch didn't manage to record the incident, he does say the the noise he heard was strikingly similar to this noise archived on the website. One thing of note is that there is a barking dog in the recording, along with what sounds, to me anyway, a lot like another dog lowing in the distance. I have to suspect, based on reading the report and the fellow recounting it noting that he had forgotten about the event until listening to the above recording, that maybe some of the details are being distorted through the lens of memory. There's a lot of scary noises at night when you're a 10 year-old kid (as the guy who submitting this "sighting" was when the event happened), but a scary noise does not a Sasquatch make.

Ilya Ivanov and Stalin's Ape-man Army...

I have mixed feelings about that History Channel show "Monster Quest". It often comes down more-or-less on the skeptical side of things, but it usually waits until the last five minutes to do so, occasionally leading the casual, channel-surfing viewer to erroneous conclusions. A recent episode detailed claims that Josef Stalin and his goons attempted to create an army of ape-men (replete with bad CGI representations of gorilla soldiers marching through Red Square in bright red body armor). A friend of mine at work asked be about this the other day and I was taken aback - it really isn't a claim that I've ever heard before. It's a bit of a strange situation, since Stalin was batshit insane and Soviet "science" during the early days of the USSR was also, well, batshit insane, so it almost sounds plausible, but the whole "army of gorilla warriors" thing seems more in line with the Shredder or Lex Luthor than Josef Stalin. Naturally I had to look into it.

Plugging "Josef Stalin ape-man army" in Google, which is not something I ever expected to do, brings up a raft of strange websites, from Stormfront's empty-headed white supremacist rantings to UFO Digest's hilarious story about how these experiments took place but failed because humans themselves were created by genetic manipulation on the part of the Zeta Reticulans. Unfortunately, most of the sites I found exclusively use the History Channel show as their source, or refer to a pair of articles from the New York Times and the Scotsman that I can't find anymore.

As far as I have been able to determine, the meat of the matter is this - A scientist named Ilya Ivanov was one of the pioneers of the use of artificial insemination to breed horses. After a while he got the idea to create other hybrid animals, which is fair enough I suppose. He even succeeded in creating a hybrid zebra-donkey and a hybrid cow-bison, both of which look and function exactly as you'd expect. He also apparently created a guinea pig-rabbit, which I'd think would have remarkable commercial appeal. He had toyed with the idea of a human-chimp hybrid for years, not to create a super soldier but (apparently) purely out of theoretical interest, but didn't secure funding for it until around 1925.

His first attempts utilized human sperm, female chimps, and (I guess) something akin to a turkey baster. There may have also been some Kenny G music involved. He was able to obtain and experiment on three sexually mature chimps but failed to impregnate any of them. He eventually decided to try inseminating human females with chimp sperm but, amazingly, was unable to find any great number of volunteers among either group. (Seriously. Even though in this day and age you can just walk into Walgreens and get sexually mature male chimps right off the the rack next to the disposable cameras, they were hard to come by in 1920s Communist Russia.) This particular set of experiments never got off the ground at all - the sudden Soviet backlash against "western science", genetics prominently included, led to Inanov's arrest and banishment to either Kazakhstan or the Phantom Zone (my sources conflict on this issue), where he died in 1932.

Interestingly, Monster Quest eventually notes that Stalin had only a passing interest in the project and never came close to supporting it in the way that some folks would have us believe. Strangely though, a lot of the folks discussing the matter online seem to have missed the last 5 minutes (literally) of the show. Monster Quest has impressed me (a bit) with its treatment of "skyfish" (or "rods") and of giant bird sightings, but its strange attempt to create drama by withholding critical information until the end of any given episode seems to be a stumbling block non-critical viewers. Folks will catch ten minutes of the middle of the show and come away with the impression that something the show eventually discredits is being presented as fact. It's a strange situation, but not as a strange as an army of ape-men.

Another weird monster...

My brother recently clued me in on the existence of something called a goblin shark. I'd never heard of the things before, though I'd unknowingly seen one portrayed in a movie. Looking at the thing, it strikes me that if I'd happened to encounter one of those on a trip the beach or something I'd have probably described it as some kind of monster. Seriously - it looks like a big shark with a mutant human head. I can only suspect that I'd have had a full pair of trunks after seeing unexpectedly something like that.

There's a lot of freaky stuff cruising around there in the ocean, and I suspect that large numbers of monster sightings are really just peculiar critters that us landlubbers just aren't used to seeing.

(I'm aware that there's not a lot of content to this post, but I'm continually amazed by the variety and sheer weirdness sea life and I wanted to immortalize the goblin shark before real life made me forget about it.)

Of Sasquatch and Giant Squids...

Cyptozoologists, such as they are, point to two great "success stories" in their field - the coelacanth and the giant squid. The existence of these creatures, many say, grants a certain respectability to their field and gives credence to their tales of the Sasquatch and El Chupacabra. You see, cryptos look for new animals, sometimes new animals get discovered, ergo all postulated new creature must exist. Man, I guess I'd better go back and remove all my posts bashing the cryptos...

Wait, no, the logic behind that argument is pure bollocks. Let's have a closer look at the discoveries of these two beasts and see if they really mean what the cryptos say they mean.

The coelacanth (as an order of fish rather than what we specifically call a coelacanth today) was known to science for years in the form of fossils. The surprise was not so much that the coelacanth existed at all, but rather that they still exist. The discovery of the coelacanth is then more akin to, say, the discovery of a live thylacine than the discovery of a dragon. The coelacanth represents not the discovery of a creature unknown to science, but rather that discovery of a known creature previously thought to be extinct.

Likewise the giant squid. Strong circumstantial evidence of the giant squid has long existed. While some (many? most?) historical sightings of the beasts are likely apocryphal, evidence such as battle scars observed on sperm whales and the occasional washed up bit on a beach constituted a much stronger case for the giant squid than, say, Bigfoot. That would be akin to a Bigfoot researcher coming out of the woods covered in Sasquatch bites and carrying the beast's severed arm. (Shades of Beowulf and Grendel.) Zoologists and biologists, that is to say folks that are actually trained in research methodology rather than self-proclaimed experts like these guys, have seriously entertained the possibility of giant squids for years. The confirmation of the existence of these creatures a few years ago by a Japanese research team was no bolt from the blue - it was the culmination of decades of serious investigation.

What this means, of course, is that while cryptozoologists would like to claim these two beasts as victories, they're actually just two more points for the other team. An uncomfortable majority of cryptozoologists, like the folks at the Center for Fortean Zoology, only like to say they're doing science. Real science is boring, difficult, methodologically rigorous, and completely lacking the Indiana Jones style romance that a lot of cryptos would prefer. Real science brings in real discoveries, like the coelacanth, giant squid, and the (relatively) giant elephant shrew. Cryptozoology only gives us grainy Bigfoot photos, out of focus Loch Ness Monster videos, and an endless library of books in which this insular pseudo-discipline expounds endlessly upon itself. Oh, and that old show "Sightings", too.

Look closely, Cryptos - Awesome new mammal discovered!

Elephant shrews are peculiar monsters, looking as if someone tried to draw a cross between an elephant and a deer and messed up. We have one at the Louisville Zoo and, along with its hyrax roommate, it comprises one of the zoo's more fascinating exhibits. Well, a new species of elephant shrew, a giant elephant shrew no less, has been discovered in Tanzania. Giant is a relative term here - the critter is around the size of a house cat- but this is still fascinating because it's pretty rare to see the discovery of a new kind of mammal. The article about the discovery is here, and I got the link from this thread on the Internet Infidels Discussion Board.

The point of this, I think, is to illustrate that science is still looking for new creatures, not resting on its laurels with its hands over its eyes as some cryptozoologists seem to think. Think about it for a moment- something as tiny and obscure as a new species of elephant shrew deep in the wilds of Tanzania has now been uncovered by a small team of dedicated scientific researchers, whereas all the pseudoscientists and would-be Indiana Jones-es out there have still yet to uncover solid evidence of the holy trinity of Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, and El Chupacabra.

I wonder why...?