The year is 1947, as a ragtag bunch of explorers set out in the frozen Alaskan wilderness to find the survivors of an ill-fated expedition. For cartographer Ellie Bannister (Brittany Allen), the stakes are personal as she aims to find her missing adventurer father until she and her party cross paths with the titular yeti, a supposedly abominable snow creature.
A campy but thrilling creature feature with some impressive practical effects. Creature features have dominated cinema since the dawn of the medium. From King Kong climbing atop the Empire State Building to the foot-thumping T. rexes of Jurassic Park, every creature has been supersized for Hollywood at one point or another. The more fictional ones, however, tend to remain shadowy blurs in the genre with names such as the Loch Ness Monster or the Yeti, a snow giant believed to have been sighted in Tibet and the Himalayan mountains. The latter is a compelling land beast, capable of chasing you down or scratching off your existence with a single paw. Interestingly enough, there’s a major dearth of yeti films, with the most mainstream example probably being animated offerings like Abominable and Smallfoot. This is perhaps the void that writers-directors Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta attempt to fill with a period adventure that plays like a mix between a Tintin comic and John Carpenter’s The Thing. Replacing the Himalayas with Alaska, the film rewrites yeti myths as a slow-burning mystery in which personal motivations are challenged, and a gargantuan prehistoric threat lurks in the shadows. The film’s modest budget is evident in its limited setting, and the scant screentime accorded its big creature. But instead of making the production look cheap, The Yeti works as a well-paced exploration of nocturnal paranoia and primal terror, rather than in-your-face, popcorn-munching creature-horror thrills. By the time the Yeti walks out in full scale, the aura of an ice giant can be felt with both awe and dread. Achieved with a practically assembled suit, the intricate character detail in the greyish, freezing Alaskan nights gives The Yeti a slight edge over any other campy direct-to-DVD attempts at cashing in on the Abominable Snowman.
A retro team of Indiana Jones-style adventurers shines more than the monster. Much like the aforementioned John Carpenter cult classic The Thing or the surprisingly effective Vietnam War monster flick Kong: Skull Island, The Yeti’s beating heart is its band of survivors. The ensemble cast is led by Brittany Allen as a gifted map-maker with the rest of her worn-out colleagues, including an oil tycoon’s bratty son, a radio communications specialist with experience from Hiroshima, and a shellshocked World War veteran who covers one half of his burnt face with an appallingly oversized half-mask. Owning that Phantom of the Opera look, as the latter, Linc Hand delivers a standout performance as Leander Coates, a character equal parts outrageous in his chest-thumping machoism and tragic in the war-era trauma he survives. Their frosty exploits, ideological clashes, and predictably ill-fated trails might come across as not that extraordinary, but Gallerano and Pisciotta’s characters are colorful and well-acted enough to leave an impact (with or without the behemoth stalking them).
The Yeti is riddled with predictable twists, but it boasts some impressive practical effects and an over-the-top team of explorers to turn it into a decent midnight horror flick.
