L'Abominable Homme des neiges

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.

The legendary Toho Studios unleashed another sinisterly soul-slashing cinematic sensation in the far-flung, fear-bitten, diabolically deep-frozen 1950s fear-fest Half-Human! An avalanche of hirsute mountain-sized horror haunts some weekend skiers who have the grave misfortune of transgressing the subzero territory of some Half-Human horror beyond their ken! No abomination is too grisly for this howlingly maniacal alpine assassin! This 9ft tall, 1800 living pounds of crushing bone-shattering horror is TOO much monster for any puny human to handle!!! Beloved horror icon John Carradine narrates 'The Abominable Snowman' in his own inimitable spine-chilling fashion. And not since the lurid legend of the Peking Man has there EVER been such a perfidiously perambulating horror as witnessed in 'Half-Human'!

Could the missing link in this malevolent chain of eerie events be...'The Abominable Snowman'???. So, don't monkey about!!! Get your B-Movie bicuspids deep into a thick hairy slice of blissful Big Foot-Stomping Mayhem! Snowman has ever seen such towering, tooth-chattering terror as this glacier-dwelling, blood-thirsty behemoth! While the text is leaden and largely expository in nature, this curiously engaging midnight movie nonetheless engenders a great pathos for the plight of the beleaguered yeti and his no less hirsute, button-cute progeny! The quality analogue effects remain quite delightful to behold and the man-tormented cryptid has a weird animal magnetism sorely lacking in CGI-rendered beasties!

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.

It is a very unfortunate thing that Toho has decided to pull _Jû jin yuki otoko_ from its catalog based on Ainu lobbyists. Had Akira Ifukube scored the film, rather than Masaru Sato, he might have said something against it because he lived among the Ainu and knew the culture presented in this film bears little resemblance to the Ainu.

Instead, we are left with this badly edited mess because an American producer got his hands on it, and inserted scenes with American actors that give away the story before we can actually be shown it. Ostensibly this footage was shot to increase Americans' interest in the Japanese production. Instead it brings the action screeching to a halt and we are given glimpses of what is obviously a much better film, with one of the most convincing yet-teh costumes of all time. The older one has a very lifelike face that is showing signs of balding.

Because of Toho's quarantine on the original film, one has to sit through a lot of drek to have any film at all, since the 98 minute film runs 63 minutes in this version, even after all the boring footage was added. The sound quality is poor as well, and all (or most) of Masaru Sato's score as been replaced with library music. It's too short to fast-forward through all the nonsense and too dull to sit through it.

The only redeeming element of the film are the exquisite Japanese scenes that we hear John Carradine talking over. This film is utterly ruined, thereby demonstrating Gresham's law. The good version is unavailable, and only the bad version can be seen.

This is a tale of two movies... Back in the days, before they decided to redub foreign movies they did this. Strip the original movie, in this case, Ju Jin Yuki Otoko, down to its basic storyline and better scenes (and in this case remove the sound too), then add segue segments where a narrator tells the story. So here you have John Carradine playing Dr John Rayburn, an anthropologist, who is relating his latest adventure in the Orient to two of his esteemed colleagues. A story about a group of friends holidaying when they come across "The Snowman".

The major drawback is the commentary given by Carradine. Unfortunately, it's very badly written and flatly delivered. So even when we meet the hulking creature we are neither in awe or in fear since we've been lulled into boredom by the dialogue.

To be honest, even the direction and acting given in the American sections of this film are below par. Whereas the opening sequence of the skiers on the mountainside is breathtaking and thought-provoking, even though it's in black and white and not been remastered that well. In fact, all of the original movie scenes are far superior to the added American sets. Not only in filming, which has some really nice shots, both iconic and scenic, but also in the acting. Even though they've diluted the sound the expressions on the actors and actresses faces say's it all.

And for those reasons, I would recommend trying to find a dubbed or subbed version of the original instead of watching this as it looks more entertaining... and so much better.