Review of Terror in the Midnight Sun

Jerry Warren's second contribution to the 50's yeti creature feature cycle after the shockingly good "Man Beast" was this simply abysmal atrocity. This time Jerry took a '59 Swedish sci-fi/horror flick and shot crummy new footage with frequent co-star John Carradine in standard drippy uptight professorial mode for a shoddily slapped together mess which Warren callously released upon an unsuspecting world in '62. The only odd thing about this devious practice is that for once Jerry didn't butcher a south-of-the-border Mexican cheapie as was par for the course for Mr. Warren ("Attack of the Mayan Mummy" and "The Face of the Screaming Werewolf" are among the other cinematic crimes against humanity Jerry committed during his dubious career). The movie relates the insufferably talky'n'tedious tale of an attempted alien invasion force which sets loose a large, lumbering, murderous yeti-like beast who runs amok and wreaks the expected destructive havoc all over the desolate snow-covered Lapland countryside. An international team of scientists, complete with an annoyingly bitchy token female in tow, investigate the spaceship landing site and eventually thwart the nefarious extraterrestrials. The technical credits are strictly from hunger: the dark cinematography unleashes a hideous torrent of unsightly horrible fade-outs, the blaring score sporadically drowns out the banal dialogue (a minor blessing in disguise), screaming newspaper headlines are clumsily used to fill in gaping holes in the saggy story, the poky pace plods along with all the thrilling momentum of a snail on Quaaludes, the characters are all paper-thin cardboard cut-outs with all the appeal and charisma of a smelly dead skunk, most of the big scary moments take place off-screen, and the actors seem comatose throughout. Taking amphetamines prior to watching this clunker is optional, but nonetheless still strongly advised if you ever decide to give this stinker a stare.