THE SNOW CREATURE (1954)
Article #129 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 7-23-2001
Posting date: 12-6-2001

An abominable snow man is captured in the Himalayas and is taken to the United States. There it breaks loose and terrorizes a city.

In general, I think yeti movies were a shade better than sasquatch movies, though not by much; even this one, arguably the weakest yeti movie I’ve seen (I think Jerry Warren’s MAN BEAST is much better) does have at least one interesting moment. It occurs in the middle of the movie, after the monster has been captured and before it escapes; the monster is held up in customs until they can decide its immigration status, a touch that, though it seems ridiculous on the surface, actually seems to me to be well thought out and a legitimate issue to be addressed if this happened in real life.

The beginning of the movie is okay, but the movie falls apart completely once the monster escapes; one suspects that W. Lee Wilder (producer and director, and who had a more famous brother named Billy) ran out of money at this point. The movie has some of the dullest police investigation work I’ve ever seen, and the shots of the monster at large seem to be largely the same shot (the monster comes out of the darkness out of a totally black background), which is used repeatedly, and sometimes in reverse. This is certainly not the abominable snowman movie of choice.