I’m a graphic designer by trade so I always judge films based on their opening title designs. Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon, aka Yeti, starts with a black screen and a white “Yeti” written in a generic script font. The credits are the same font in white, but with the default drop shadow effect. This tells me that the producers knew the film was so great that they didn’t have to waste either time or money on talent.
Yeti is the 14th film in the critically acclaimed* ScyFi’s Maneater collection, which includes classics like Blood Monkey, Rise of the Gargoyles, Sand Serpents and Malibu Shark Attack. It features two actors I remember from 90s TV, Ed Marinaro who was one of the husbands on Sisters and Peter (son of Dom) DeLuise from SeaQuest 2032.
The film begins the same way as Alive—the movie about the real-life rugby team that crashed in the Andes and had to eat the dead to survive. Like, almost the exact same first few scenes. A team of some sort (I guess American football) is traveling over mountains with their coach over the Himalayas. Turbulence. Plane breaks in two. The plane crashes in the snowy isolated mountains. The only real difference is the budget, the competence, and the quality of actors.
Finally, at the 20-minute mark the film stops being a made-for-TV remake, and we see the yeti in all his glory. It doesn’t look half bad. It’s a man in a suit that looks more like an albino werewolf than a yeti, but that soap foam they used as snow isn’t cheap and they used what they had. I might have suggested to now show him in full blown snowy day brightness, but the script demands what it demands.
Speaking of the script. Not much happens. About 75% of the movie is the group of survivors who struggle to survive and get along in what appears to be mild cold, 10% is two mountain rangers trying to find the survivors, 10% is the yeti galloping about on the mountains, and then 4% actual yeti interacting with the survivors and 1% low quality footage of an avalanche.
The movie features a trope that I dislike. The “different species of animals are attracted to human women” trope. The yeti kidnaps one of the women and brings her to his cave. I don’t believe animals are attracted to humans, not King Kong, nor yetis.
Also, the yeti is bad CGI for two scenes.
*It’s not critically acclaimed.
