Carnation residents have been waiting months for this, and now, it’s almost upon them. Something big is returning to this small town, something big, bad and hairy, and it’s bringing Alice Cooper, too.

It’s “Bigfoot,” a SyFy network original movie, about the missing link’s attack on an outdoor ’80s rock festival in, uh, the Black Hills of South Dakota, but filmed largely in Carnation last January. The movie premiers Saturday, June 30, at 9 p.m. and Pete’s Club Grill, one of the settings used in the movie, will host a viewing party for the public.

The movie is part of the “Big, Bad and Hairy” SyFy marathon of movies about the Northwest phenomenon also known as Sasquatch, but “Bigfoot” is the only one that stars Carnation.

“They used some of our streets, they used some of our businesses,” said City Manager Ken Carter, about the film crew, who came to the city in January after a location scout, who’d grown up near Carnation, suggested the city for a location.

“Evidently, there were  limits on how far away from Seattle they could go, in terms of both mileage and time,” Carter said. “I guess we met 90 percent of their criteria.”

Carter may have lacked the enthusiasm that others in the town had about the film, but he really didn’t get to see much of it, or of the stars, which included rockers Cooper and Billy Idol, Danny Bonaduce (The Partridge Family – Danny Partridge); Barry Williams (The Brady Bunch – Greg Brady), Howard Hesseman (WKRP in Cincinniatti – John Caravella, Dr. Fever); and Sherilyn Fenn (Twin Peaks – Audrey Horne).

The crew filmed a fight scene in Pete’s Club Grill, and sent one of the lead actors, Danny Bonaduce, into ID Tattoo to film a scene of him getting inked, but the closest they came to City Hall was an exterior shot of the door, planned, but never shot.

As for the title character, he said “They didn’t have a Bigfoot. What they did was they had some staff guy, carrying some 10, 12, or 15-foot pole…” for the actors to react to. “So this guy carrying this big, tall pole was Bigfoot.”

Most of the filming was done at Tolt-MacDonald Park, where King County Parks representatives kept a tight lid on the news of the filming.

“We were told that we had to keep the cone of silence on this project,” joked Parks spokesperson Ryan Dotson.

Since most of the filming was done without shutting down streets, or businesses — the fight scene in Pete’s went on during breakfast, so staff used paper plates to keep the noise level down during filming — the movie was hardly a secret.

It was exciting, though.

“Everybody just loved it,” said Pete’s manager and co-owner John Radovich, who gave the film crew the run of his place to film the scene. Regulars talked about the event for weeks afterward.

Sveta Barron, owner of ID Tattoo, was the only artist working the day the crew borrowed her shop for the tattoo scene, and she made the most of the experience, talking with Bonaduce between shots.

“He wouldn’t tell me if he was the bad guy,” she said.

Community members who knew about the movie were generally impressed with the film crew and its organization.

“They would stop filming to give people autographs!” Barron recalled. “It was weird.”

So, has Carnation ever had a Bigfoot sighting? No, but that didn’t keep the actors from expressing some concerns.

Dotson said on one of the first days of filming, one of them asked, “Are there any animals that could eat us out there (in the park)?”

His response was “Well, it’s been a mild winter, so the bears are pretty big…”