John Rollason is a scientist studying the ecosystems in the frozen Himalayan mountains. He joins a team led by Tom Friend, an ambitious adventurer who wants to trap the elusive creature known as the Yeti. Will they return from this perilous expedition ?
This minor black-and-white creature feature, made by the same team responsible for the two excellent Quatermass films of the fifties (director Guest, writer Nigel Kneale and production company Hammer) is an agreeable and intelligent if undistinguished genre flick. The obvious approach would be to do a simple monster movie with the standard ten-little-Indians setup; instead, Kneale's intelligent script approaches both the locating of the creature and its evolutionary position with sympathetic and scientific detachment. The movie is more a critique of the commercial exploitation of such a phenomenon, and the lengths Friend will go to in pursuing it. Cushing and Tucker exploit these ideas very well in their performances, and the support cast is good, including a nice turn by a young Brown (better known as spy boss M in four eighties James Bond movies) as the trapper. While the film has its budgetary limitations it's still good to look at, mixing second unit work shot in the French Pyrenees with some cool looking sets, and it manages to evoke the mystique and sense of mourning the script is aiming for. A thoughtful little flick, and one of a trio of agreeable horror movies American star Tucker made in Britain at the time, the other two being the oddball The Strange World Of Planet X and the not-to-be-missed cult favourite The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye).
This minor black-and-white creature feature, made by the same team responsible for the two excellent Quatermass films of the fifties (director Guest, writer Nigel Kneale and production company Hammer) is an agreeable and intelligent if undistinguished genre flick. The obvious approach would be to do a simple monster movie with the standard ten-little-Indians setup; instead, Kneale's intelligent script approaches both the locating of the creature and its evolutionary position with sympathetic and scientific detachment. The movie is more a critique of the commercial exploitation of such a phenomenon, and the lengths Friend will go to in pursuing it. Cushing and Tucker exploit these ideas very well in their performances, and the support cast is good, including a nice turn by a young Brown (better known as spy boss M in four eighties James Bond movies) as the trapper. While the film has its budgetary limitations it's still good to look at, mixing second unit work shot in the French Pyrenees with some cool looking sets, and it manages to evoke the mystique and sense of mourning the script is aiming for. A thoughtful little flick, and one of a trio of agreeable horror movies American star Tucker made in Britain at the time, the other two being the oddball The Strange World Of Planet X and the not-to-be-missed cult favourite The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye).