Crew
Directors/Screenplay – Gene Gallerano & William Pisciotta, Producers – Ross Meyerson & William Pisciotta, Photography – Joel Froome, Music – John Hunter, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jim Bowhall, Special Effects Supervisor – Randy Krautsack, Creature Design – Wayne Anderson, Makeup Effects – Amanda Schaefer, Production Design – Frank Coppola. Production Company – Torfoot Entertainment Group/Cool and Happy Limited/Hardscrabble Film Company.
Cast
Brittany Allen (Ellie Bannister), Corbin Bernsen (Merriell Sunday Sr.), Eric Nelsen (Merriell Sunday Jr.), Jim Cummings (Booker Marchmont), Christina Bennett Lind (Dr Margaret Lamb), Linc Hand (Leander Coates), Gene Gallerano (Daniel “Dynamite” Hewitt), William Sadler (Hollis Bannister), Elizabeth Cappucino (Belle Parker)
Plot
In 1947, Merriell Sunday Sr. and Hollis Bannister are among a party who disappear while on an expedition to Alaska to search for oil. Several years later, Bannister’s daughter Ellie, a cartographer, is invited to join an expedition to find their parents being mounted by Sunday’s son Merriell Jr. Soon after arriving in the area, they become lost. They seek refuge at the first expedition’s hut, as a Yeti appears and starts to eliminate their numbers.
Yeti films have been with us ever since the 1950s with Half Human (1955), Man-Beast (1956) and Hammer’s The Abominable Snowman (1957). There have been sporadic entries through the years with the likes of The Werewolf and the Yeti (1975), Yeti: The Giant of the 20th Century (1977), The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008), Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon (2008), Rage of the Yeti (2011) and The Primevals (2023), even a Troma comedy Yeti: A Love Story (2006). And that’s not counting the number of animated and family films featuring Yeti such as Monsters, Inc. (2001) and Abominable (2019). (For a more detailed list see The Yeti).
The Yeti comes from Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta who have both made a number of short films together since the mid-2010s. The interesting name on the credits is that of Jim Cummings, an actor and indie director behind films such as The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020) and The Beta Test (2021), among others, who plays one of the explorers and also acts as an executive producer.
There are no reported sightings of the Yeti in the continental Americas. It has always been located in the mountainous Himalayas and Nepal-India region. So it is a surprise that The Yeti locates the creature in Alaska. The film also gives us a 1947 setting for the missing expedition, placing the search party in the late 1940s/early 1950s – close enough for one character to have flown on the atomic bomb missions to Japan. This places the film squarely into Indiana Jones territory, which it starts to play out as being for a time, especially when the party is gathered.
Thereafter though, The Yeti drops any interest in the Adventure Movie aspect. At this point, it promptly reveals itself as the B-budget film it is. Any adventure aspect telescopes down to being the characters trapped on what we are told is a mountainside (but looks like a studio set) and the cabin. About an hour’s worth of drama takes place there. Various supporting characters are killed. Though this is a monster movie, there is not much tension or blood to any of these scenes. It is an hour of the characters waiting around in the wilderness debating about what to do where crucially nothing happens dramatically.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that it is not until the one hour and ten-minute mark that we get to see the Yeti. Certainly, the production turns out an impressively large and ferociously looking beastie. However, this does not excuse the lack of anything up to that point where the Yeti is kept to brief glimpse of a furry shape or a claw coming from the edge of the frame. Certainly, the one-hour point is where the film gains some life with the appearance of Corbin Bernsen as a crazed survivor of the original expedition and his deranged plans to trap the Yeti, but it is not enough to compensate for an hour of hardly anything happening.
Trailer here