User Reviews

I just saw "The Abominable Snowman" today and was pleasantly surprised by the film. When I read the preview for it on the TV it was under the Horror category, and knowing it was made in 1957, I wasn't sure I wanted to see it in fear that it would be too out-dated to be enjoyable. But what the movie did was, at a relatively quick pace, told a story of 5 men who travel into the Himmalayin mountains in search of a Yeti. As our travelers progress, we find out that not everyone has the same intentions for this creature. One thing I liked about this movie is how they don't show the creature fully, allowing people to enjoy the movie years later without ever having to worry about why the Yeti looks so stupid and fake.

*Possible Spoilers* In my opinion, one of the best things about the movie was how the entire plot set up the Yeti to be a fierce and man-eating creature. But the doctor realizes that the creature may not be this terrible monster but instead, a species that is saddened and hidden away in the cold mountains, away from humans. The final encounter with the creature proves this, when we see that their face doesn't resemble a monster but much more human-like.

Overall, I give this movie a 7.5/10 and I recommend it because it makes you think at the end, something most horror movies truly don't.

So as the title of this movie suggests, this is all about the mysterious age-old legend that is the Yeti. A fabled creature that dwells within the snowy Himalayas. And again as you may well have guessed already, this movie is all about trying to capture said creature (think 'King Kong'). Hey, its a 50's flick people.

Dr. Rollason (Peter Cushing) and his wife Helen (Maureen Connell) are on a botanical expedition in the Himalayas and are staying within a monastery. Everything is going swimmingly until a second US expedition arrives lead by Dr. Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker) who are wanting to hunt down the Yeti. At first Rollason isn't convinced about going off in search of the mythical beast, but eventually he succumbs to his scientific curiosity and agrees to accompany them. Rollason thinks this is an expedition to learn and study, he is unaware that Friend wants to capture the creature for fame fortune and American way dagnabbit! As you can imagine things don't go as planned, team members start getting killed and Rollason learns Friend's true goal.

So again, as you can imagine, there is a lot of dialog in this film. This film takes its time getting going with a long slow laborious build up. The monastery we find our protagonists in is of course a mixture of sets, matte paintings, and some locale work. Of course its all gonna be rather charming by today's standards but overall it's actually pretty top stuff all things considered. The sets are really quite good and atmospheric. Sure you can tell its all a set but it still looks really well detailed from the basic structure of the monastery to the intricate internal decorations and various traditional carvings. The external distance matte painting was glorious, a lovely cliff edge setting highlighted by the black and white film (always helps these old films).

These sets were later utilised for a few 'Fu Manchu' films throughout the 60's which is no surprise considering how well designed and built they were. Apparently production designer Bernard Robinson, art director Ted Marshall, and draughtsman Don Mingaye studied and researched numerous books to get the look just right. I find that so darn adorable.

I was quite surprised to actually see a lot of very good location work here too. I knew there would be some of course but I really just expected the bare minimum and a load of stock footage. But no director Val Guest actually did some shooting in the French Pyrenees with a team of professional climbers and a helicopter for the panoramic shots. They even used a cable car for some shots whilst going up and down the mountainous region (Pic du Midi Bigorre). Overall they did a great job with the actors all dressed correctly matching the stunt doubles footage; and the actual real climbing footage looks perfectly believable (well snowy mountains are snowy mountains).

Obviously when we see the actors they are on somewhat obvious sets with somewhat obvious snow. These tend to range from not too bad looking to really quite obvious looking. Its here when the quality of the acting is really put to the test (as with all these old flicks). Can the actors make the hokey sets come alive? Can they make them come across as believable? For the most part that's a no in all honesty, but that's all part of the charm with these movies.

The basic story is of course rather bland and predictable. Cushing is his usual well-spoken, gentlemanly self and never puts a foot wrong. The man is always totally engaging but if I dare to make one negative point, he (generally) always looks and sounds the same. This could be any one of his many horror/thriller characters because he generally plays the same type of chap (wonderfully of course). The rest of the team are kinda your stereotypical Yanks to be honest. They are played as somewhat aggressive, eager to set traps and use guns, no real interest in learning from this marvel of nature. As I've already mentioned it's your typical giant gorilla scenario really, the gun-toting Yanks just wanna make big money and are completely blasè over little things like safety.

One good choice by Guest was to keep the Yeti hidden from view for almost the entire film. We only get to see little snippets of the animal, the odd hand, leg, arm, footprint etc...They don't reveal anything right up until the finale when we see a couple large lumbering humanoid creatures hidden by shadows. Then just when you think we won't see anything at all, we get a closeup of one Yeti's eyes and surrounding fur. I think this was perfect because chances are the entire Yeti suit may have looked crap, plus it leaves more to the imagination. I should point out that the bit of face we do see is actually pretty good, some very good prosthetic work (for the time).

All in all I was relatively engaged here, but I have to admit it was a tad slow. It is entirely predictable in every way and it's not really very creepy or eerie (probably because everything was light and white). I also didn't really like the last part of the story surrounding Rollason, bit silly. Its certainly a well made production with quality acting and direction all round, just not overly exciting truth be told. Still worth a watch if you like Hammer productions.

6.5/10

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).

Two very different leading men offer memorable performances in this adventure yarn that focuses on the search for the Yeti in the Himalayas. Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker are very different in every way possible, but they must work together to survive the natural dangers of the mountains covered and slippery slopes and possible avalanches while dealing with bandits and the Unseen creature called a Yeti. You hear the growl of something but are never quite sure what it is, and when they do entrap something that they think is a Yeti, it is quickly proving that they are wrong. But something is indeed out there, and that's where the mystery lies.

While their team consists of more than just the two of them, there are several fatalities along the way, and some of the victims look on at what will be the cause of their deaths, basically accepting it even if fearing it. One of the victims Falls many feet to the rocky slopes below, and there is no way that anybody can survive a fall like that.

There are caves, mystery creatures, mystery men and of course the bandits shooting at them randomly. When the Yetis finally do appear, it's like Richard Conway in Shangri La finding his lost horizon. The danger comes from the unknown and the natural environment which does not discriminate, only taking those who do not follow their rules. Even though there are long periods without dialogue and just the sound of the mountainous wins, the film never becomes dull or ponderous, and I have to say that this is the best of the dozen or so Yeti movies that I have seen.

Right around the time this film came out, I would have been a kid voraciously reading anything I could get my hands on regarding fabled creatures like the Loch Ness Monster, The Abominable Snowman, and it's American cousin Bigfoot/Sasquatch. Their names still pop up from time to time, and Bigfoot even had his own TV series on Animal Planet. It must be some primordial urge in Man to keep these mythical beasts going from generation to generation, and if you ever see one, let me know.

Considering the subject matter, this was a pretty decent flick from the Hammer folks, showing up on one of my cable channels as "The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas". More adventure film than horror, once the thing gets going most of the fear factor is supplied by the power of suggestion. One cool element in all this had to do with the idea that the remote mountain location where the Rong-Kuk Monastery was located gave it's head Lhama (Arnold Marle) some sort of clairvoyant power to see events in the future and warn Dr. John Rollason (Peter Cushing) not to venture forth for a creature that didn't exist, lest it lead to disaster.

I was surprised to see Forrest Tucker top billed over Peter Cushing here since he wasn't a Hammer mainstay, but then again, Hammer Productions was just starting out. It turns out that Tom Friend (Tucker) had a prior reputation as a huckster, passing off mental defectives as Indian Wolf Children, so it didn't seem to matter much to him that the expedition's capture of a Himalayan langur monkey would have served his purpose well enough. That was a bit of a let down for me at that point in the story because other members of the team correctly identified it, and Friend should have realized he'd be harming his reputation once again.

Director Val Guest did the right thing here to tease the appearance of the yeti creatures, revealing only an arm of the one shot by Ed Shelley (Robert Brown), and later when Rollason was confronted by two of the giants in the cave, their features were hidden in shadow. This is one picture where it was convenient to let the viewer's imagination take over instead of going for cheesy monster effects. Especially after the dead Yeti was described as ten and a half feet tall and weighing six hundred fifty pounds. There's a lot of room there for the imagination.

If you go for this stuff, maybe you'd like to try a 1954 film with the same subject matter going by the name of "The Snow Creature". It's a lot goofier than this one, in fact, this picture plays almost scientifically plausible by comparison. It's only the grand Lhama who brings things back to reality at the end of the story when he tells Rollason - "It is not possible to bend the destiny of Man."

I enjoy most Hammer pictures for their skillful storytelling and good production values, but this is that rare Hammer film that seems to me incompetently made.

We wait and wait for a glimpse of the Yeti--even after one has been killed and is lying there in the pursuers' camp, we do not see what it looks like. Finally two live Yeti show up for a brief "cameo," and they look like two guys in gorilla suits.

The Yeti hunters include Forrest Tucker as a pushy, loud-mouthed American and Peter Cushing, an English gentleman who by comparison seems rather prissy. (No stereotypes in this film!) These two and their three sidekicks climb a mountain with enough equipment for an army--guns, oxygen canisters, steel traps, a cage, and much else. There follows a series of foolish or stupid actions, with people raging at each other and at the mountain in general, firing off rifles, and so forth. One Yeti hunter sets what amounts to a bear trap and catches a member of his party instead. Forrest Tucker hunts for a missing member of the group by firing of round after round with his pistol, thereby killing himself by means of an avalanche.

Meanwhile, Cushing's wife realizes that the hunting party is in trouble and simply rushes off to climb the glaciated mountain to find her husband. She did take time to put on a coat.

Tucker intends to capture a Yeti alive and bring it back home to exhibit it and make a lot of money. I kept wondering how he planned to climb back down the mountain with a live Yeti. Perhaps they would loan him some of their gear.

It was as if the movie were really "Laurel and Hardy Hunt the Yeti," only without the laughs.