Cast:
Paul Langton (Frank Parrish), Leslie Denison (Peter Wells), Teru Shimada (Subra), William Phipps (Lt. Dunbar), Lock Martin (the Yeti), Rollin Moriyama (Leva), Robert Kino (Inspector Karma), George Douglas (Corey Jr), and Rudolf Anders (Dr. Louis DuPont), Produced and Directed by W. Lee Wilder (#1599 - Killers from Space)
Review:
Sure, it made sense to try and give another shot to W. Lee Wilder, who couldn't have just been a hack director that so generously gave us Killers From Space, the movie with googly-eyed monsters that came out in the same year as this movie. Yes, after six relatively normal-sounding noirs and dramas, he had turned to sci-fi stuff with Phantom from Space (1953). So anyway, here we are with a creature feature movie that might as well be called "Shadows and Blah Blah". You might wonder how many movies exist where you don't really see the monster too much, and, well, there are a few that don't dwell too much on effects and go with the idea of "imagination in terror" or something to that extent. But this film, as written by Myles Wilder (no points to the guess of his relation to W. Lee) has only one apparent sticking point: it was apparently among the first in a string of "yeti" (okay, it's just bigfoot but cold) movies that would come across in the next few years (well there is a film called Pekka ja Pätkä lumimiehen jäljillä [1954] that was released in Finland as a Yeti-themed comedy but I'm sure Ishiro Honda's Half Human [1955] just came out of the blue). Clearly it led to inspirational movies such as Man Beast (1956), as made by Jerry Warren. Actually, Wilder wasn't done with the noirs, as his next film was The Big Bluff (1955) in a career that saw him do more movies that I'm sure will be fun candidates to return to in late November.
Sure, 69 minutes might seem short enough for a straight-to-the-point movie. But the easiest thing to say about the movie is that nothing actually happens in this miserable pile of boredom. It actually resorts to narration to help try and set up its scenario and manages to never get going, particularly since you barely see the creature in actual detail while going around with a pastiche of movies that it happens to make one yearn to watch with the "getting the creature from abroad onto America" in King Kong (1933) or the sewer-side climax from Them! (1954). But nothing will prepare you for the sheer amount of nothing that happens, even with a miniscule body-count and characters that seem to believe that they are the living embodiment of cardboard and should therefore talk as routinely as possible (gotta love how the unnamed Himalayan country has Japanese-speaking actors, who are probably more committed to worrying about the boogeyman creature than the others). People walk, talk in winded sentences (the idea of wondering where it should be in immigration services is thought about and forgotten) and so on and so on. Maybe Phipps is the highlight of a bad bunch, because he doesn't have to go around doing monologues (our hero at one point refers to the sherpas as being like "human mules"!), but it can't make up to a movie that because of its public domain status is usually found in languishing quality. The only thing to say about the creature is that it was played by Martin, a 7ft tall man who had appeared in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), who probably was as cramped in that "suit" as one is when watching the movie. The movie ends with silly jokes about someone becoming a dad because they were too wrapped up in the hunt to see their wife give birth...funny stuff. As a whole, the purses made by Wilder probably seem more tantalizing than seeing another one of his dull movies.
Overall, I give it 2 out of 10 stars.
Next up: Saturday, Saturday, Saturday! Viva Knievel!
