The Snow Creature

Most viewers and reviewers can't think of bad enough things to say about this film, and some of their barbs are justified: the film does take too long to get going, and the title creature (when he finally appears) is not an inspired creation. However, the film does offer certain rewards to patient viewers. The black & white photography is much better than one would expect, particularly the clever use of light and shadow during the film's second half. The use of the soundtrack shows imagination also. Case in point: the scene where the creature pays a late night visit to a cold storage warehouse, and is glimpsed briefly moving between the hanging sides of beef. There's no screaming or loud background music, only faint street sounds. Somehow, the silence of this scene makes it much more unsettling than it would have been otherwise.

The Snow Creature, half man, half monster. The snow creature monster's costume is a bad attempt to make him look scary and half monster. All it really does is make it look like a man going out trick or treating on Halloween. I think most of the acting was ok. It had a couple of small twists that were unexpected and I think that the second half of the movie outdid the beginning. I rated this movie a 5 but it barely made that 5. If I could, I would have called it a 4+. I bought this dvd expecting it to be a bad movie and was surprised to find that it was actually better than expected. I thought it was going to be worse. While looking back at the whole movie, I must say that I liked it.

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 lacks just about everything. A good story, a cool monster, a decent actor--all are absent from this baby! It is really a test of endurance to see if you can get through it. I picked it up because A. It was cheap and 2. it had a snow monster! Snow monsters are my personal favorite, which is tragic considering that nobody makes movies about them. In fact, the best screen Yeti yet is the Wampa from Empire Strikes Back . .. and it wasn't even a Yeti! The special effects are so terrible that the cornball director used the same exact shot of the monster over and over and over again. Nevertheless, three scenes stand out in my mind: 1. An attack on a female victim in a black alley 2. The monster seen weaving in and out of cattle carcasses in a meat plant 3. Coolest of all, this scene shows the monster trying to break out of the container that brought him to the US from the so-called Himilayas. Check out Wilder's Phantom from Space for a better time.