In a landscape of contemporary cinema filled with ‘elevated horror’ or more cerebral, boundary-pushing, and thought-provoking scary movies, The Yeti alludes to being a refreshingly throwback and rather straightforward creature feature.
There can be something quite enlivening about a simple horror film, one entirely devoid of pretension and willing to forego deeper messaging in favor of unabashed thrills. Unfortunately, the new film from writing and directing duo Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta harkens back to the less than desirable elements of old creature features, as it is hindered by poor filmmaking while, unlike films like Troll 2 and Eight Legged Freaks, it lacks the charm that defines movies so bad that they’re good.
Making its world premiere at the inaugural Beyond Chicago, The Yeti takes place in 1940s Alaskan territories and follows a band of adventurers, led by cartographer Ellie Bannister (Dexter: Original Sin’s Brittany Allen), as they search for missing oil tycoon Merriel Sunday Sr. (Corbin Bernsen) and Ellie’s father Hollis Bannister (William Sadler). As they journey through snowy wilderness, the team soon learn that they are being stalked by a prehistoric monster with ties to what brought Sunday Sr. and Hollis to Alaska in the first place.
The film’s cold open has the sensibilities of a grindhouse B-movie, concluding with a body outlandishly ripped in half and an old-school title card gracing the screen. While this prologue suggests that a schlocky, old-school horror movie is to come, The Yeti soon shifts to a more serious Indiana Jones-esque adventure story, all the way down to characters’ costumes, map following, and globe-trotting. The set-up is admittedly clunky, but it promises a film that exists at the intersection of grindhouse B-movie creature features and Indiana Jones-style adventure flicks and, therefore, hooks one in relatively quickly.
It doesn’t take long, however, for the film to collapse under the weight of inattentive filmmaking and a low budget. Taking place in the middle of the night in a freezing cold Alaskan wilderness, even the most absentminded of viewers would expect that the characters in The Yeti would struggle with the low temperatures, or at least behave in a way that reflects the cold climate.
Instead, the movie continuously takes one out of its narrative and decimates suspension of disbelief by bafflingly ignoring the conditions the characters face. Characters are poorly dressed for such low temperatures, they regularly remove jackets and walk around wearing thin shirts, and there isn’t a semblance of cold breath expelled when anyone speaks.
To make matters worse, the falling ‘snow’ could not look more artificial if it tried, with big clumps of white mush sticking to characters’ clothes and not even remotely resembling what actual snow looks like. Coupled with production design that never convinces that the movie was entirely filmed on a sound stage, these issues quickly add up and deprive the film of any manner of creepy, immersive atmosphere.
Budget constraints may underlie the film’s unintentionally comical handling of weather, but they almost certainly play a role in a jarring tendency to convey key events slightly off-screen. On numerous occasions, characters are engaging with or reacting to something that occurs just out of the sight of the viewer. Without adequate context provided for what is occurring, the audience is often left confused as to what’s going on while the characters and the story proceed forward.
A perfect example of this issue is a scene in the film in which a character ascends a radio tower to secure a signal. With the monster approaching, the character panics and tries to attract the attention of one of his team members (who is ridiculously listening to music and, in turn, blissfully unaware of the danger surrounding her). As the camera tracks the man on the radio tower, it shifts to the woman, only to then return moments later to depict the man with blood dripping from his forehead and hanging upside down from the tower.
The scene completely fails to convey what led to this character ending up in the perilous situation he is in and fosters an uncomfortable disorientation in the audience. Such an issue could be excusable if it occurred once or even twice, but it crops up throughout the film and, as a result, further takes the audience out of immersing in the viewing experience.
With poor filmmaking resulting in perplexing off-screen events and comical portrayal of cold weather, The Yeti struggles to recover as it heads toward its third act. Things admittedly become somewhat more intriguing as details of the initial Alaskan expedition are revealed and we finally catch better glimpses of the titular creature, but the film simply never shakes off its clumsy approach to moviemaking, which also includes excruciatingly slow pacing and a startling lack of decent kills.
As it converges on a simplistic and unearned message about legacy, The Yeti leaves one disappointed after a disjointed yet promising beginning suggested an old-school creature feature mixed with Indiana Jones adventure film was about to unfold. While budget constraints obviously play a role in the rather raw filmmaking on display, the effect on the audience unfortunately remains.
At a minimum, a movie should be able to pull you out of your current reality and immerse you, to some degree, in the narrative unfolding on-screen. The Yeti struggles to meet this threshold as it constantly finds ways to remind its audience that they are indeed watching a movie.
The film opens Wednesday, April 8, in select movie theaters, before releasing on various digital platforms on Friday, April 10, via Well Go USA. Visit their official site for more information.