Snow Monster

This is a B movie, the kind many of us used to watch Saturday afternoons/evenings. It's not a bad movie, it's just basic, I suppose it had to be since the running time is 1 hour and 15 minutes not including end credits. It has the usual we need the broken hero to save his ex-girlfriend, the overweight comic relief, the beautiful damsel in distress and the evil dude. The synopsis doesn't clearly state what's going on, as I said our hero is convinced to help but not until he hears his ex (who he is still pining for) is in trouble. They then have a heavily armed group to find this damsel in distress and get into trouble a couple of times, then get taken in by an ancient tribe that worship the titular snow monster. Then the bad guys show up, surprise I'm not the nice guy you thought I was. And then there are a few short action scenes for the finale.

The CGI is adequate for a movie like this, and the snow monster is some sort of hugongous combination of cat and goat. The action scenes are also adequate. Think a Chinese Sy-Fy/Asylum/FulllMoon production. And it did remind me of the movie 'Mojin' in many parts, especially the three main characters. It's fine if you want to waste an hour or so, but don't expect much, it's fun but forgettable.

These Chinese sci-fi films get crazier and crazier, and sometimes can be done quite well. This is not one of them. Done well, that is. A problem these films have is a lack of new approaches. They seem to have a young woman scientist who gets into trouble, and she is always related to one of the top scientists, so needs to be rescued no matter what. And they throw in a rather obese man as comic relief, but that is starting to get stale. In this story, a group of scientists are traveling across the snowy Arctic, in a normal van with apparently normal tires, not a snow-cat. Of course it falls into a suddenly opening crevasse. So they have to be rescued, and naturally only one person can do that rescue. The rescue team gets there, falls into a hole, does battle with some really strange beaked birds, and escapes out onto the snow. A monstrous snow monster comes out of the snow, to battle a huge shark that is apparently swimming under the snow. The snow monster seems to be several hundred feet tall, so not a typical Yeti. And the shark is pretty big also. Absolutely nuts.

Another shark movie ... in the snowy mountains? Hey they made it work! I would not miss this one.

This was obviously not a low budget film as you can tell by the quality and the thoroughness of the sets, scenery, and CGI. And someone actually spent time to make a script and scene scripting that worked real well.

The actors actually seemed to know their stuff, unlike other shark movies that seem to be more ad-lib and bikinis than actual story and acting.

All-in-all I am impressed. This team both in front off and behind the cameras made this work wonderfully. But next time, can the antagonist be a little more 'expected' than a shark swimming in snow?

I have to say that I was definitely lured in by this 2019 movie's cover. I picked up the movie and was immediately drawn in by the movie's interesting cover, and thus I opted to sit down and watch this 2019 Chinese action movie, without ever having heard about it, or knowing what it was about.

I have to admit that I was definitely astonished by how writers Shengfan Zhang and Pianjia Leng could manage to put together such a dumpster fire of a storyline. The storyline in "Snow Monster" was just utter rubbish. I kid you not when I say that there literally was no contents to the script and storyline presented here. This was just merely CGI eye-candy.

I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in "Snow Monster", nor can I say that I am able to pinpoint anyone for putting on a memorable performance. First of all, the actors and actresses literally had nothing to work with in terms of a properly written script and storyline. And the dialogue was every bit as shallow and horrible as the characters were flaccid and one-dimensional. So the actors and actresses in "Snow Monster" didn't stand a snowballs chance in Hell of putting on anything worthwhile or memorable.

What makes "Snow Monster" bearable to watch is the CGI and special effects. And that was essentially all that the movie had to offer, sadly so. The creatures looked nice and had interesting designs, but it just simply couldn't make up for the utter lack of an interesting storyline.

Don't waste your time with "Snow Monster", because this simply isn't worth the effort. Some of us suffered through this ordeal from director Huang He, so you don't have to. I managed to endure all 83 minutes of slow paced nonsense, but let me just say that I will never return to this movie a second time.

My rating of "Snow Monster" lands on a two out of ten stars.

No pun intended - and bats are not the only ... well monsters in this. Actually the Snow Monster may be the biggest thing the movie has to show you (yes I know another pun). Try to enjoy this and the mayhem it unleashes! It can be fun - though we have seen better monster (dare I say kaiju?) movies.

There are also many other monsters and the CGI is decent enough - at least that's how I felt. But while you may expect certain monsters in caves, you would not expect ... shark monsters where they pop up (again sorry for the pun) ... actually thinking about it, this may have too many different things. Well it will be up to you, if this is overload or it just barely works as it is ... just have fun with it.