Snowbeast |
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USA • 1977 • 86m •
   • Directed by: Herb Wallerstein. • Starring: Bo Svenson, Yvette Mimieux, Robert Logan, Clint Walker, Sylvia Sidney, Thomas Babson, Jacquie Botts, Kathy Christopher, Jamie Jamison, Richard Jamison, Liz Jury, Richard Jury, Rob McClung. • Music by: Robert Prince.      An enormous and angry bigfoot creature begins to terrorize a Colorado Ski Resort during a winter carnival, by eating several skiers. At first everyone insists it is just a bear, until ski patrolman Tony Rill sees a white shadowy beastly shape disappearing into the woods. Although Tony's grandmother Mrs. Carrie Rill, who owns the Ski Resort and the town sheriff, Sheriff Paraday disagree, it soon becomes clear when the creature finally attacks the town.
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Review:
The film is basically Jaws relocated to a ski resort with a murderous yeti subbing for a prowling great white, and the filmmakers follow Spielberg's template so closely the homage isn't even subtle. Our thankless protagonists are made aware something is amiss when a teenage girl goes missing, local higher-ups urge them not to divulge what they know because the chalet's major tourist season will be placed in dire financial jeopardy if they do, a cursory hunt leads to the killing of a lesser creature that our heroes know can't possibly be the monster menacing their mountaintop, and no decisive action is taken until a savage attack right at the town's doorstep forces everyone to acknowledge that they are being threatened by something far more heinous than the potential loss of leisure industry dollars. None of the characters are named Brody, but other than that, every aspect of the plot here will resonate as strikingly familiar to anyone who's ever visited Amity Island.
Regrettably, Snowbeast's primary weakness isn't its blatant plagiarism. What really undermines the film's aptitude is a vexing shortage of its most promising horror elements and an even more vexing abundance of rote melodrama. While it's reasonable for anyone sitting down to investigate a flick called Snowbeast to anticipate that most of what they're about to see unfold is centered around a beast in the snow, far too much of the runtime here is squandered on ancillary story threads like a tepid love triangle and the midlife crisis of a former champion skier (named Gar Seberg, no less). Certainly, solid character development can add immeasurably to the tension in a scenario like this, yet the momentum generated by the film's more exciting moments is quashed by an abundance of needless vignettes, such as an extended monologue revealing why our reluctant hero Gar decided to hang up his poles at the height of his success. The disjointed tone these interludes foster, along with the inclusion of some truly cheesy '70s library music, often makes Snowbeast feel more like a Halloween episode of Quincy M.E. than a proper horror film.
When the movie stays on topic, the results are much stronger. The monster design is certainly more impressive than the shaggy bipedal Ewok featured in the far stupider (but far more fun) Shriek Of The Mutilated, and there are numerous effective shots of the titular creature lurking among the trees and lumbering through the arctic terrain as it stalks its prey. The gore quotient here is sadly as paltry as the era's made-for-TV rubrics mandated, though some of the implied violence is executed to chilling effect--particularly the discovery of the first victim, which lends the film its best lines: "Maybe I'll recognize her when I see her face"; "She doesn't have one." The way the kill scenes dissolve to a stark red screen to suggest the terrible things left unseen is likewise a novel device, even if these inserts were probably mostly utilized to provide easy spots for the network to cut away to commercial breaks.
Still, with only a few deaths sprinkled throughout and not a lot of payoff when these moments arrive, Snowbeast's gruesome lead never really coalesces into something especially menacing. The most ambitious sequence, an extended attack at a pageant, offers up an entire building of trapped and ready victims yet only yields a body count of one, and elsewhere in the narrative several random characters are tracked through interminable protracted prowl and growl scenes that eventually conclude with them simply skiing anticlimactically away to safety. Snowbeast's moderate milieu didn't allow the filmmakers to bombard the screen with shorn limbs and splatter the hillsides with crimson snow, but since they offer repeated glimpses of the creature's imposing claws, most genre fans will inevitably be disappointed by how little we get to see of the damage those talons are capable of inflicting.
The biggest letdown in the film arrives during the stilted climax, during the final battle between our intrepid protagonists and their wooly nemesis. The creature's comeuppance is staged in far too clumsy a manner to lend the culmination of this saga any impact, and the picture comes to such a dull and unspectacular finish I can only assume someone in the wardrobe department lost the bigfoot costume before the last scenes could be filmed. As the credits cue, it isn't quite clear whether the monster rolled down the mountain or simply vanished into thin air after it was vanquished, but what becomes abundantly clear is that ending a movie about a bloodthirsty yeti with a seven-minute fight scene during which said yeti never once appears on the screen is an utterly dissatisfying tactic.
Snowbeast has its charms, but as far as the lethal abominable snowman subgenre goes, it is neither the best nor the worst entry in that canon. Sasquatch devotees who don't mind spending 90 minutes in the middle of that particular road will find a suitably entertaining romp here; for the rest of you, I'm much more inclined to recommend you just watch Jaws again instead.
Review by happyendingrocks from the Internet Movie Database.
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