User Reviews

Snow creature started off looking like it might be alright, it was obviously low budget, but had some not bad acting, some good sets and a not too bad score. Then the so called "Snow Creature" makes an appearance, looking more like the rabbit from Donnie Darko, luckily we don't see that often. The film still manages to be entertaining, until we start seeing the creature more often, then it begins to get annoying, as the same shot of the creature emerging from the shadows and then immediately disappearing back into the darkness is re-used over and over countless times. Then it gets even worse once they capture the creature. Then, somehow, it manages to get worse, as they decide to take the creature back to America in a large fridge that they constructed especially for it. Once they get to U.S. the obvious happens and the creature escapes and goes for a wander. Then that same shot of the creature going in and out of the shadows comes back with a vengeance. Good God!!!!

Overall I could'nt possibly recommend the film. The first 35 minutes or so is watchable-ish, but it falls apart quickly and never manages to recover. 3/10.

W. Lee Wilder, older and far less talented brother of Billy Wilder; still he did make some memorable contributions to the b-movie genre. Has anyone who has seen KILLERS FROM SPACE ever forgotten it? Ditto PHANTOM FROM SPACE with its invisible alien? He even tackled to Abominable Snowman sub genre, alas with predictable results. This time the Yeti kidnaps the wife of a native guide and he (Teru Shimada) and his fellow Sherpas order the expedition leader (Leslie Dennison) to track the creature . . . or else. This would be a great plot device but it is not long before everyone forgets the main reason they are way up on the mountains and turns their attention to capturing the Yeti alive!

This Yeti is a tall skinny fellow whose "fur" looks like mismatched fur coats sewn together rather hastily. He is even a family man, we get a brief look at his mate and young child (so why did he kidnap the woman? To use her as a nanny perhaps?).

Okay this would be a pretty dull movie if the Yeti was not captured. Oh wait! This IS a pretty dull movie! Um . . . it would be an even duller movie if the Yeti were not captured, is that better? And of course he has to escape . . . I mean who wants to spend the second half of the movie watching him in a cage? He gets away because his entry into the U S of A is held up while Customs officials (get this!) determine his immigration status! Which means when he escapes the cops start hunting him because A. he is a dangerous monster on the loose and B. he is an illegal immigrant!

Mr. Wilder stretched his low budget by repeating the shot of the Snowman walking up a dark street 3 times. There are also seemingly endless shots of policemen running all over the place while searching for him.

KILLERS FROM SPACE is a lot more fun than SNOW CREATURE, hey don't take my word for it, see them both and then decide for yourself.

Oh and if you were wondering whatever happened to Myles Wilder who wrote the scripts for many of W. Lee's movies; he later went on to write scripts for Saturday morning cartoon shows like "Funky Phantom" and "Hong Kong Phooey".

Watch this movie closely (if you dare), and you will see certain of the same fairly long sequences repeated only a few minutes apart (such as when they are walking up the mountain and when they are searching the city sewers near the end), not including the ridiculous loop of the snow creature of which various short segments play now and then, both in forward and reverse, from start to finish (amazing how well he can walk backwards). Seriously, near the end, it is so awkward when you see random bits of the loop right close together which literally made a friend and I groan out of discomfort, almost as if the editor was trying to drive the viewer mad, especially when it sometimes freezes for a moment as if the projector just stopped, before the next scene begins.

The snow creature looks much like a man/poodle hybrid! It's true!

There are some really horrible elements of this movie, which are a mix of incoherence and that of the ludicrous:

1. I'm not quite sure what happens when they capture the snow creature. It seems he is trying to bring down the cave ceiling to kill the intruders, but his female and baby snow creature are killed instead and he knocks HIMSELF out to add insult to injury! (Or maybe it was some sort of suicidal act?) If he already had a female, then why did he kidnap the woman, and why did they give up the search for her so quickly?

2. The part where an inspector from the US Customs Service wants to know if the creature is a man or a beast after they arrive is ludicrous, and jaw-droppingly silly. That part alone makes the movie a joke.

3. I may be wrong on this, but why would the sewers be so much cooler, (even cold) for the snow creature to prefer being down there? Wouldn't they be a lot warmer? I know in most other movies, even if it is cold in the city, you see steam rising from the manholes. I am nitpicking perhaps, but I CAN see him hiding down there just because it is cave-like.

All of the ridiculous technical points, even as to why a botanist is freezing in heaps of snow and strong winds (maybe it was solely for the botanist-becomes-Yeti-hunter plot twist) and the shooting of the "radio machine" (and the exchanging of the booze and the radio in their respective containers to hide the damaged radio for fixing later) make this just a bit "too much" to enjoy.

1/10. I mean, they have got to be kidding. Like my friend's father used to say, "I know a poodle when I see one!"

The first part of this movie starts off like a "Wonderful World of Nature" type travelogue then quickly descends into awfulness.

A plant-hunting expedition sets out to explore the Himalayas. After trekking for two gruelling, tedious days they set up base camp. That night the head guide's wife is taken from his home village by a Yeti. Villagers cover the ground the expedition took two days to cover that same night - in the dark. Anyone think these scientists hired the wrong guides? The head guide takes the white scientists' guns and they trek endlessly around the mountains, past the same bunches of rocks time and time again. Yep - they hired the wrong guy. Eventually they find a cave. Inside they find a huge Muppet - sorry, Yeti family. The male Yeti, suddenly surprised in his own home by gun wielding Sherpas, decides to remodel the cave and causes a rockfall which knocks him unconscious and kills his mate and child. In the confusion the white guys get the guns back and, now that the natural order is restored, force the 'natives' to abandon the search for the Guide's wife (who, for all they know is somewhere in the cave, they just found her necklace after all) and cart the drugged Yeti back to Civilisation "Where he belongs." Back in town the scientists decide not to press charges against the Sherpas (Thank you, B'wana! Me glad not to be in gaol for trying to rescue my wife) and are allowed to take the Yeti away without even filling out any forms. Hello white people, please abuse our countrymen, abandon our women to die on mountainsides, and steal our national treasures. It's a pleasure to be abused by you, thank you. Do come again. Bring tanks next time.

The Yeti is shipped to LA via a long series of stock shots.

The head scientist arrives and is reunited with his wife, then gets into a dispute with the local immigration people about whether the Yeti is a man or an animal. As they debate the matter in a series of master-shots the Yeti escapes. The police are soon on the scene in the shape of a Lt. Dunbar an man who's screen presence is enhanced by the actor having an uncanny ability that enables him to actually upstage himself! Several times he needlessly turns his back to the audience before delivering lines and then occasionally, as a bonus, waits for other people to get between him and the camera before speaking. Maybe he was expecting there to be other takes - everything is shot in one wide take there are no other angles in any scene, or maybe he realised he was in a real stinker and was trying to hide, either way it is a genius performance.

The police search for the escaped Snow Man Beast Muppet thing using a variety of stock shots, sequences lifted from other movies, and sticking three push pins into the smallest map of L.A the producers could find.

All to no avail, the Yeti appears to be moving round the city with impunity. How is he getting about? Our scientist looks out of the window and sees a street sweeper sweeping garbage into a drain. Hmmmm. He wonders, Didn't he remember something about all rampaging monsters due to be let loose in the LA area being issued with maps of the storm drains a while back? The police wander around the storm drains (or to be more precise our leads and three extras in uniforms, wander around three or four yards of storm drain shot from at least, oh I'd say - two different angles). Endlessly they wander up and down the same three bits of drain hoping the audience don't notice because it is so dark. Suddenly they trap the Muppet in a net - and shoot it dead.

Stupid denouement - The End

This film was made so cheaply it hurts. The Mountain sequences alternate long tedious climbing sequences (shot without sound) followed by night-time sequences, for the most part in small tents, in which the story, such as it is, is progressed. The shots of the Snow beast looming into the camera and then retreating are repeated so often, and towards the end, so randomly, that it looks like the thing is doing the Hokey-Pokey. The same alley way is shot from the same angle over and over again and is the setting for the best, weird shot of the whole thing. A slow pan left to right of the empty alley, a scream, the camera stops and pans BACK across the still empty alley before revealing an altercation in a doorway we've never seen before.

On the positive side it is only 71 minutes long.

A poor man's Chewbacca, "The Snow Creature" gives literal meaning to the term 'walking carpet'. The Abominable Snowman concept gets off to an inauspicious screen start with this offering from 1954, but unlike the intrepid explorers who bring one back alive, you won't have to reach a high altitude to get dizzy watching this one. Instead you'll be mesmerized by the hypnotic dance of the Yeti as he moves with exact precision forward and back, a feat remarkably produced by replaying the same scene over and over again.

For something a little more original, you'll have to concentrate on Sherpa guide Subra (Teru Shimada), who hijacks a botanical expedition into the Himalayan Mountains after his wife is captured by a Yeti. An inspired scene has him taking out the party's lone short wave radio with a characteristic logical explanation - "Subra only want to kill radio machine".

Probably the most interesting part of the film was the brief geography lesson at the opening, focusing on a map of the Himalayas and a brief description of it's border with the Ganges and Brahmaputra. Even though the expedition makes it's way up mountains, it's mostly down hill for the participants in this clunker. The movie is best viewed in the same condition the Yeti was kept as he was transported down the mountain from his icy lair - upside down and in a semi conscious state.

This rock-bottom '54 cheapie clinker is the first and worst fright feature made in the 50's about the legendary Abominable Snowman. This paltry carbon copy of "King Kong" (natch), "The Werewolf of London," and even the exemplary giant ant humdinger "Them!" constitutes as a most unfortunate and inauspicious cinematic debut for the yeti.

A stuffed-shirt botanist, his comparably blah assistant, and a bunch of anonymous oriental extras embark on a perilous pilgrimage into the Himalayas to discover a rare plant species. The expedition stumbles across a predatory yeti (a very tall, gangly guy in a threadbare poorly stitched together mangy fur costume) who in tried'n'true B-movie monster fashion makes off with the first available female he can get his grubby paws on. The team members manage to get the fair damsel back and capture the humanoid beast. They bring it to Los Angeles, only to have the ratty hairball escape and seek refuge in the City of Angel's grimy sewers.

An air of total creative and budgetary impoverishment permeates every aspect of this sour lemon. There's lackluster direction by Billy Wilder's no-talent brother W. Lyle Wilder, lethargic pacing, primitive fade-outs, dry acting from a just-hitting-all-the-usual-preprogrammed-marks robotic cast, tedious running-off-at-the-mouth verbose narration ("The first few days were uneventful, monotonous and routine," the botanist comments early in the nonaction, a remark which serves as an apt concise critique of the film itself), a few stomach-knotting moments of goopy sentiment, and a pitifully unimpressive star monster. But what really deflates this celluloid lead balloon is its complete lack of any trashy vitality -- this excruciatingly sorry and static yeti stinker is so inert and lifeless that it just lies motionless on your TV screen for 71 painfully draggy and dreary minutes of sheer unbearable boredom.

W. Lee Wilder may not have had his brother's level of talent, but he did have enough to come up with interesting premises (in this case, what seems to be the first movie about the abominable snowman) and the occasional interesting shot or composition.

What he didn't seem to have, at least in this movie, was a sense of pacing, or a sense of what to include and omit, or (apparently) even a budget, given the incredibly annoying overuse of several completely unconvincing frames of his "creature" emerging from the darkness and then retreating back into it(seemingly by reversing the film). Seriously,they must have used this 3 second sequence 20 times or more, and it barely worked the first time. This is very symptomatic of the movie's poverty of invention.

The screenplay itself has plot holes you could drive a Himalayan expedition through. Most of the "action" in the first half of the movie consists of either silent climbing sequences, or master shots of people sleeping and talking inside their tents. And then after the creature is captured and shipped to Los Angeles, it escapes, and the whole thing turns into a police procedural/storm drain chase that would make the writers of "The Indestructible Man" giggle uncontrollably in derision. (At least IM had Lon Chaney Jr, and a flame thrower and a bazooka).

The actors don't have anything to work with here. Basically, every main character is either unlikable or dumber that dirt. The yeti itself is totally unconvincing - the costume appears to be a shaggy rug wrapped around a tall, slender actor.

Don't waste your time with this one. It's not good enough to watch as a movie, and it's not bad enough to be any fun.

Inexpensive does not have to mean bad, but it does mean being resourceful and clever. You want those qualities? Look elsewhere. W Lee Wilder makes the first modern Yeti movie and, there are a few good scenes. One of the expedition hears a strange noise at night and goes outside to investigate with a flashlight, and just misses seeing the creature. Fear and intensity make an appearance, and are then squandered by endlessly dull stock type shots of the expedition trudging through the snow. The lead guides "woman" is captured and he hijacks the expedition to find her. They find the Yeti, he tries to kill them, instead he accidentally kills his own mate and child, knocking himself out in the process. Forgetting the woman they came to rescue, they ship the creature to America in a Frigidaire. A customs official holds them up to investigate, and the thing escapes. They should have waited 40 years and had him come across the border as an undocumented worker! Of course the Police have to track him down, as he is killing folks in LA. To me the creature looks like a man wearing clothes who stuck some substance resembling fur on them. He is the worst 'Monster' I can recall, resembling not so much a poodle, but a mangy dog wearing levi's. Of course they kill him. So much opportunity to make a good movie gone to waste. Music was good, dialog weak and script pretty cornball. Has its moments, but they are few.

In this movie, a botanist captures a eight foot tall furry snow creature, and ships it to the US. There, apparently, the US Customs service brings up an interesting question, namely, what the #### is this thing? Only a government bureaucracy would care about insignificant details like that.

By the way, only a brilliant botanist would convince someone to fund a plant-finding expedition to the Hymalayn mountains, where there are no plants. Brilliant.

That's why I like this movie. This guy can do anything, like pick up the phone and order a customized, refrigerated, snow creature shipping box and have it delivered to nowhere, Nepal. And have a hand supply of snow creature tranquilizer on hand. And fix radio machines that have been shot by a rifle.

No sex, nudity, or common sense are to be found in this fun caper.

Enjoy.

Dismally made sci-fi yarn of a trek to the Himalayas to search for rare flora and fauna which (in addition to have been a more interesting plot possibility than this one) leads to the discovery of a Yeti seen in the constantly repeated same shot with a bad edit as it is continuously repeated every time this solitary creature appears. When the Yeti is captured (and kept in something that looks like an antique phone booth), it is flown to civilization, and escapes with nowhere to hide. Since they obviously didn't give the poor creature a credit card, I guess he/it couldn't check into a hotel.

This is another example of human beings going where they shouldn't be and thinking that they have the right to capture a creature like this, take it away from the only home it has ever known, and bring it back to what we call civilization in order to further research it. Lousy photography makes this one almost impossible to watch at any rate, with the acting ludicrously amateurish and the script so bad it feels like it was written in crayon. Filmmakers should be given a list in cinema school of "What not to do" and ordered to watch them. This would be near the top of the list.