Director: Val Guest
Year: 1957
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Bigfoot/Sasquatch
Plot:
Visiting a Tibetan monastery, a British botanist and his assistant, gathering information on the plant life of the area, leave with a friend on an expedition to capture an Abominable Snowman, but as a series of pitfalls plague the crew, they all try to escape the mountain alive.
Review:
This wasn't all that bad of a film. One of the best features is the wonderful mood in this film, as snow is featured often and has a powerful effect on the environment. The mountain scenes are very well done, and the high altitudes, driving thunderstorm, and the blinding snow lend a really impressive aura to the feeling throughout. This also helps with its brilliant, masterful job of building terror and suspense early on and maintaining it through to the climax. Among the key ingredients to this is the fact that it never shows the Yeti in its entirety. All we ever see of the creature are its hairy and wickedly clawed hands and large footprints, and when the whole thing is shown, it is always in shadow or obscured by driving snow. Instead of looking cheap, this technique goes a long way in making this movie scarier than it would have otherwise been, as the descriptions given by the characters in their dialogue, the glimpses we see, and the haunting, chilling cry of the Yeti are incredibly effective.
By also keeping them off-screen for most of the film and only showing them vaguely before that, it can make a series of scenes that pull off its scariness without actually showing it, from the scene where we see the creature's hand creeping under a tent to the later attack on the camp on the highest peaks of the mountain during the driving snowstorm. These are what work for the film, as there isn't a lot wrong with this one. The main issue is that the creature itself is rarely even in the film, as it's almost an hour into the film before we even see any hint of the famed snowman. It's fun to watch at times, but that's almost an unbearable amount of time before the creature even appears, for the main factor in this is the adventure storyline rather than a horror one. Far too much of the film plays out with them trying to climb the mountain rather than deal with the creatures, so it takes a while to even get going.
The script here, while tightly built and well characterized, unfortunately disappoints in the ending. The whole film is built to an expected confrontation with the Yeti, but at this very point, the film then enigmatically fades out with the meeting at the end, which contains only a brief glimpse of the Yeti. While not a cop-out, it's a little hard to swallow and gets some real head-scratching moments. The biggest flaw in the film, though, is the behavior in relation to their environment, which is unbelievable. Every time spent in the snowy mountaintops is full of moments where someone would run around without a coat or gloves in a blizzard and not seem to notice the cold. If they were really in the Himalayas, they'd be far more reluctant to take off their gloves. These are pretty minor problems, though.
Overview: ***/5
A highly underrated effort, even with some big flaws present, this one manages to be quite likable and holds itself up enough against a few slight flaws that are present in here. Those with an appreciation for this style of genre fare, who are curious about it, or who are fans of the creative crew, will have a lot to like here, while most others might want to heed caution.
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