L'Abominable homme des neiges

I've just watched The Snow Creature for the first time and thought it wasn't too bad, despite being a grade Z movie which stands out a mile.

An expedition travels to the Himalayas to search for Yetis and plan to bring one back to America. They come across a family of them in a cave, two parents and young. After the mother and child are killed, the dad is captured and brought to Los Angeles, but he escapes and goes on the rampage, murdering people who get in his way. He then meets his death in the Los Angeles Storm Drains after being tracked down by coppers.

Despite the ultra low budget, this isn't as bad as you may think with some fairly creepy music to help it along. Worth checking out.

Rating: 2 and a half stars out of 5.

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.

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.

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.

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.