To Catch a Yeti

In 1994, Meat Loaf fiercely attempted to end his acting career by playing Big Jake Grizzly, a hunter who tries to catch a yeti.

Okay, brace yourselves, here it comes: the mighty yeti is about 20 inches tall and looks like the furry result of a disastrous love affair between a Gremlin and a Monchichi. Yikes.

The Yeti escapes to the big city and hides out with an American family. The whole thing is of course reminiscent of E. T. and ALF... if you subtract the homesickness drama and all the humor. The frazzled teddy doesn't talk, he just stares super cutely. He hardly ever moves, just squats around or is carried. The puppet animation is just lousy, so that there is no sympathy for the annoying sit-down monster.

This movie is so stupid that you wonder how something like this could ever be filmed. It thankfully only ran on TV and was released on VHS, but my goodness, real people watched this! The makers should be prosecuted for this.

I don't know why I thought this might be good. Turns out it's virtually comedy free and full of plot holes. There was one only funny moment in the entire movie. The best joke was when they were in the train station and they announced the last train to Clarksville, but it wasn't funny enough to make me laugh. You might like this if your are 8 years old but anyone older won't enjoy this for a minute.

To Catch a Yeti (1995)

BOMB (out of 4)

Incredibly horrid rip of E.T. has a big time hunter (Meat Loaf) tracking a yeti only to find it living with a family and beloved by the little girl. Even on a cute kids movie level, this film is quite horrid and comes off more creepy than sweet, which was its main goal. The movie is awful on every level and this includes the performances, which range from bad to suicide worthy. Meat Loaf has been good in several films but he's really bad here. The Loaf goes over the top and his performance is all over the place as if he doesn't know what to do. Chantellese Kent plays the young girl who befriends the yeti and she turns in one of the worst performances from a child actor. The screenplay is all over the place as well and the jokes are way too forced to work. The director apparently realized this was going to be junk because I can't see any signs of actual directing being done.

It doesn't get much worse than this folks. To Catch A Yeti is bad in every respect, beginning with the creature itself. The bug-eyed gooning animatronic representing said beast is an insult to cinema, with movement literally restricted to the thing being dragged along, on a poorly disguised sled, through the snow. Similarly the annoying coos which emanate from the Yeti's static plastic face are an annoying as they are bizarre.

Beyond that the production values are below par from children's television, never mind a movie, and its star, one Meat Loaf, though tasked with the difficult job astonishingly manages to be the worst feature in the entire film, proving once and for all that rock music saved many a movie audience from his bewilderingly insensate acting style.

Plot and characters, in as much as they exists, are instantly forgettable, and quite honestly you'll spend the entire film being obsessively irritated by the Yeti. Yes, it really is that lamentable.

Arguably children might get something out of this on a Saturday morning while mom and dad enjoy a lie in, but an enjoyable family film this isn't.

TO CATCH A YETI is an awful kid's adventure film about a baby Yeti that finds itself kidnapped by a pair of hunters and transported to America, where it falls in with your average family and yearns to get back home to the snow again. That's the entire plot of the film, which mainly consists of dumb scenes involving a model Yeti that rips off the look of Gizmo in the GREMLINS movies. Highlights of the film include the Yeti going on a skateboard ride through a local park and being smuggled in somebody's backpack. The animatronic effects are very poor, leaving this looking like a plastic model for the most part.

Even worse are the performances, especially those from a couple of the worst child actors I've seen in a while. A couple of the women seemed to have British accents and if they truly are British actors then I can only apologise for their presence here. Meat Loaf is the most fun actor as the stereotypical villain but even he's poor, just slightly less poor than everything and everyone else around him.