SHRIEK OF THE MUTILATED (1974)
Article 2792 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-30-2008
Posting Date: 4-5-2009
Directed by Michael Findlay
Featuring Alan Brock, Jennifer Stock, Tawm Ellis
Country: USA

A group of college students go to an island to get a photograph of the Yeti. They begin dying one by one.

I first heard about this movie from Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Movie Guide. Weldon claims at one point of the book that he never gives away the ending of a good movie. He gives the ending away to this one.

I next encountered this title after having watched the wretched INVASION OF THE BLOOD FARMERS. That movie was directed by Ed Adlum. I looked up his full credits on IMDB, and found out he also had prominent credits in another genre movie – this one. He doesn’t direct, but he produces, writes and acts in this one.

One of the early scenes of this movie consists of couple. The man scours the kitchen for a drink and finds a beer. The woman gets into a fight with him, and he attacks her with a serrated knife, leaving her for dead. We next see him lying fully clothed in a full bathtub, drinking his beer and lazily trying to rub the bloodstains off of his shirt. The woman is, however, not quite dead. We see her crawling to the bathroom with a toaster. With her last ounce of energy, she plugs it in and dumps it in the bathtub.

Any one of the above things would have prepared me for a truly awful movie, and I was well-prepared; this is a stinker of the first order. I’m not giving away the twist ending, though practically everyone else does; I’m just going to say that an early restaurant scene in which a special meal not on the menu is prepared for one of the servants is indeed relevant to the plot. The rest is consummate silliness. Though it doesn’t quite reach the insane levels of INVASION OF THE BLOOD FARMERS, it still earns its place in the annals of bad moviedom and gets weirder as it goes along. But then, what do you expect of a Yeti movie which doesn’t feature an ounce of snow in it?