L'Abominable Homme des neiges

Toho got drunk with stupidity and Inoshiro Honda suffered for it. Toho got a worldwide hit when 20 minutes of inserts featuring Raymond Burr were added to "Gojira" and retitled as "Godzilla, King of the Monsters." Unfortunately, studio execs overlooked the fact that it was Burr's superior acting and stark narration that got the attention. They added inserts of American actor Myron Healey to Honda's "Varan, the Unbelievable" and it tanked. They did the same to "Half Human," giving rights to an American producer who added boring clips of John Carradine and Forrest Tucker ("F-Troop"). The library music-style score for the American insert clashed horribly with the original score and Carradine's narration seems out of place since he appears in absolutely no scenes in Japan.

Sadly, after the utter disaster of this flick, Toho took the negatives of the original and locked them away. Even though "Gojira" and "Varan" have made it to American television, albeit only once, in their original forms, this film is still not available to the public.

Half Human (1957)

** (out of 4)

Scientist John Carradine tells the story of how an abominable snowman was killed in Japan. As was the case with Godzilla, the producer's of this film bought the rights to the Japanese film Ju jin Yuki Otoko (1955), cut out around an hour and then added some twenty minutes worth of footage dealing with Carradine. This is certainly a cut and paste hack job but sadly Toho pulled the original film so it's nearly impossible to see outside of this movie. The American footage is all rather silly but it's always fun seeing Carradine and he has a good voice for narration. The Japanese segment of the film makes me really want to see the original movie because there's some nice, intense moments including the first encounter with the Yeti. I've seen countless films on the Yeti but the costumes here are the greatest I've ever seen. The monster actually looks real, which makes this entertaining enough.

HALF HUMAN was originally a Japanese monster flick from Toho before US distributors got their hands on it and proceeded to mutilate it. In doing so, they exercised about half of the original footage, added in a sappy voice-over narration, and included lots of extraneous scenes with American actors.

I'm a fan of John Carradine but he has a nothing role as the desk-bound professor. Obviously this kind of cut-and-paste nonsense had worked with GODZILLA - another film directed by Ishiro Honda - but it's a waste of time here, because the viewer only gets the occasional glimpse of goodness from the original Japanese footage. I won't attempt to review that here, only to say that there's a lot of action and incident, and the Yeti costume looks great; I hope to track down the original film at some point to check it out properly.

Not bad programmer, but lousy, cheap. It is however entertaining, full of stock shots, footage stuff, with an off voice to explain situations. I expected far worse, I confess. Some good suspense and in a way it can hold comparison with Val Guest's THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN, produced by Hammer films, comparison in terms not quality of course, but I repeat entertainment. I guess it is because of the fast paced and short length of this film. No useless talkative sequences, more excetly not that much, just the necessary. Good acting for this kind of movie.

Japanese Abominable Snowman movie from 1955 cut up and narrated by horror icon John Carradine to some fellow Americans, all of whom smoke throughout. The creature is meant to stand 9 feet high but obviously doesn't. Slightly plodding effort that is sadly completely devoid of all its original Japanese dialect. The monster and his son (elements of King Kong) are fairly good fun, but where was Mother Abominable? We get to see several people thrown off cliffs, so quite violent for the time. I would like to see the Japanese original.