El terror del Himalaya

"The Snow Creature" (1954) is a black & white picture notable as the first film to address the topic of Bigfoot or, in this case, Yeti. The atmospheric beginning segues into a relatively dull story about a fake-looking Yeti brought to America from the Himilayas, which ends up languishing in customs while officials debate whether or not the creature is a passenger or cargo, i.e. animal or human. I'm not making this up. Then the creature gets loose in the city a la "King Kong."

"The Snow Creature" is worthwhile only for historical reasons or as an interesting period piece and people smitten with the Sasquatch legend.

The film runs 71 minutes and was shot in Bronson Caves, Bronson Canyon, Griffith Park, Los Angeles, California, USA

GRADE: D+

I went on Wilder bender and watched three of his movies in a row, but the bender stopped here. The yeti suit is bad and to make matters worse most of the footage of the yeti is the same shot used over and over again and run backwards and forwards to make him step in and out of the light and then sometimes freeze frame him in place. The copy I saw was so poor it was at times hard to tell if it was the Yeti or just one of the other characters wearing a furry hat.

In some wide shots, the Yeti at least looks really tall and they seem to have designed some kind of a monkey butt type butt. Then again most Yeti suits are bad, this one is of a kind.

But wow this movie is certainly among the worst of the pre-Sci-Fi channel bigfoot movies, all of which are the worst of a lousy genre and unfairly treated monster. One of the riddles of film. Why is it there are virtually no good bigfoot movies?

The movie turns into sort of The Third Man with the police chasing the Yeti around in the Sewers, here boring shots get repeated and some lighting gear gets into one shot.

Acting from the leads is OK and the opening Tibet section is slow but kind of decent, when the Yeti gets to America it's all over though.

Scene in the meat locker is one of the few effective scenes. Director of photography Crosby who shot Corman's good films can't do much with this one. It's not good, then gets bad when Yeti hits the streets. The suit does look like a poodle and it seems like they forgot to shoot any footage of it then had to reuse stuff to be able to edit the scenes together properly.

Big Wilder mis-step this go round.

Some of the Himalayan scenes are interesting. There is a conflict as to who is running the show. It's typical of Westerners to try to run roughshod over their "inferiors." Anyway, the Yeti is out there and if we bring him (or her) back, we can make a bundle. Everything works out pretty well and they order his refrigerated box. The problem is the customs guys don't know whether he's human or not. In most respects he is. He lives in a family setting. He has tools. He walks upright and is built pretty much like most homo sapiens. What are his rights? Nobody says anything about just barging into his domain and killing off his family. So, like every good monster movie (or bad one), the "guy" gets loose in the city and wastes a couple of people. What should he do? He's trying to survive. While there are issues that keep this interesting, it doesn't sustain itself very well. There are unanswered questions that are forgotten as soon as the Yeti escapes from his box. A film with some courage might have gone beyond what it does, but money or talent got in the way. The monster looks pretty much like a man with a beard (we never get a good look at him in daylight). Pretty poor with a few perks.

I suppose you should approach this stuff with an open mind, but I have difficulty doing that. Those words written, my expectations for this were, quite frankly, pretty low. I knew that it was a 1954, low-budget production. Therefore, I was prepared to tolerate the cheap old costumes and over-abundance of no-action dialogue. I wanted to subject myself to this fillage of time. Sure, some of the responses were totally unrealistic. But, looking past all the negatives, I still found some pros that, in my opinion, offset the anticipated cons. Some of that dialogue, to me, actually represented a try. Maybe I give it a (barely) passing grade because even this simpleton could follow the extremely UNcomplex plot: Scientist captures living snow creature in Himalayas and is able to return it to LA, where it escapes. Perhaps I would feel ripped off if I spent too much money to purchase a tape of this movie. But having seen it on satellite TV - which I think of as a more-INdirect flow of my dollars - my concern was mostly for my time, which I did not find totally wasted.

This film really isn't all that bad. The photography is moody and atmospheric. The music is sometimes quite good. Director W.Lee Wilder occasionally shows some visual flair. The cast is at worst adequate. The snowman is another story. It it simply a very tall man wrapped in what looks like rabbit fur. Granted, director W. Lee Wilder tries to keep the snowman hidden in the shadows most of the time. But when he is seen full view it looks amazingly unconvincing. Had this film not employed such a poor snowman costume, it probably would have been regarded as a slightly better than average low budget early fifties monster picture.