Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon – 2008

Since the full title of this movie – Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon is a bit long, I will keep referring to it as plain and simple Yeti. It’s a creature I was always fascinated by. I know that there are multiple names for this mythical creature. And, it also depends on where in the world it’s claimed to live. In the United States, it’s either Bigfoot or Sasquatch. But in the Himalayas it’s Yeti. Of course, as it is with mythological creatures, who knows whether it’s the same species or not?

But Yeti is not only a tale about the abominable Snowman. The main plot is about a plane crash where a whole college team of football players crashes in the Himalayas. I think that there’s more than a small chance that this is inspired by the same true story that inspired Alive from 1993 and more recently Society of the Snow, where a Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the Andes and are forced to cannibalism for their survival. If it’s not, then I guess that Yeti was inspired by Alive, which in turn was inspired by the real events that took place in 1972. If they had explored the cannibalistic themes further in Yeti though, it would have been more or less a copy of the previous film. Nobody wants that. And, besides, it would be hard to top Alive anyway!

Small Budget

In either case, the plane crashes and we can tell early on that this is a small-budget film. The plane crash itself doesn’t look very good. Neither does any of the special effects in the movie for that matter. But at least they had the decency to use practical effects for the gore scenes. Well, maybe calling them gore scenes is to stretch it a little. But you know what I mean. If there’s a creature there, and it’s eating the plane crash victims and even hunting the survivors there’s bound to be some blood in there. And there is.

When it comes to movies played out in extreme cold I always tend to see if smoke is coming out of the actors’ mouths or not. If it’s really cold, the breath should create that if it’s genuine. At first, I didn’t see it at all, but then I noticed that in certain scenes there really is hot air coming out of the mouths of the actors. But not all the time, that’s a little strange. So, they filmed some of the scenes genuinely and some in a studio? Possibly using a green screen in some scenes. It’s no big deal really. I just tend to look for that.

Ugly

The creature is ugly. And it’s not ugly in the good sense of the word. It looks just as if they put a mask and fur on a man and then let him run around and look like a creature. There are some sequences when it looks even worse. I don’t know why they made the Yeti so fast and why it can take jumps for 15-20 meters at a time. It doesn’t look natural. It would have made more sense to make it scary and more realistic. But that’s seldom the case when it comes to creature features. Either they make the monster too big or too ridiculous.

But it’s not all bad. It’s kind of entertaining even though it doesn’t bring anything new to the screen. The acting is quite bad but not all of the time. In fact, some of it is pretty decent. We have the mandatory struggle between the self-acclaimed leader since the crash (the captain of the football team) and the guy who really wants to run the show himself and has totally other ideas but can’t get the other on his side. We also have the part where someone is egocentric enough to hide food for his own good, not thinking about the group.

All in all, it’s a film about survival. It’s a film about doing the right thing, not leaving anyone behind. And it’s a film exploiting the Yeti myth to some extent. I just wish they could have made it better.