Watch The Abominable Snowman For Free

Simply Perfect

Good concept, poorly executed.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Right around the time this film came out, I would have been a kid voraciously reading anything I could get my hands on regarding fabled creatures like the Loch Ness Monster, The Abominable Snowman, and it's American cousin Bigfoot/Sasquatch. Their names still pop up from time to time, and Bigfoot even had his own TV series on Animal Planet. It must be some primordial urge in Man to keep these mythical beasts going from generation to generation, and if you ever see one, let me know.Considering the subject matter, this was a pretty decent flick from the Hammer folks, showing up on one of my cable channels as "The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas". More adventure film than horror, once the thing gets going most of the fear factor is supplied by the power of suggestion. One cool element in all this had to do with the idea that the remote mountain location where the Rong-Kuk Monastery was located gave it's head Lhama (Arnold Marle) some sort of clairvoyant power to see events in the future and warn Dr. John Rollason (Peter Cushing) not to venture forth for a creature that didn't exist, lest it lead to disaster.I was surprised to see Forrest Tucker top billed over Peter Cushing here since he wasn't a Hammer mainstay, but then again, Hammer Productions was just starting out. It turns out that Tom Friend (Tucker) had a prior reputation as a huckster, passing off mental defectives as Indian Wolf Children, so it didn't seem to matter much to him that the expedition's capture of a Himalayan langur monkey would have served his purpose well enough. That was a bit of a let down for me at that point in the story because other members of the team correctly identified it, and Friend should have realized he'd be harming his reputation once again.Director Val Guest did the right thing here to tease the appearance of the yeti creatures, revealing only an arm of the one shot by Ed Shelley (Robert Brown), and later when Rollason was confronted by two of the giants in the cave, their features were hidden in shadow. This is one picture where it was convenient to let the viewer's imagination take over instead of going for cheesy monster effects. Especially after the dead Yeti was described as ten and a half feet tall and weighing six hundred fifty pounds. There's a lot of room there for the imagination.If you go for this stuff, maybe you'd like to try a 1954 film with the same subject matter going by the name of "The Snow Creature". It's a lot goofier than this one, in fact, this picture plays almost scientifically plausible by comparison. It's only the grand Lhama who brings things back to reality at the end of the story when he tells Rollason - "It is not possible to bend the destiny of Man."

Just as the Yeti in the film stood head and shoulders over the humans, so this film stands head and shoulders over most of the horror/monster films of the 1950's.You wouldn't think so from reading the reviews at the time though; one reviewer thought it too subtle, but that could be another way of describing it as intelligent and stylish, the qualities that make it so watchable 60 years later. The film also was saddled with a poor trailer (it's on YouTube). Obviously the marketing people didn't think the film monsterish enough; the trailer gives totally the wrong impression.British botanist, John Rollason (Peter Cushing), along with his wife Helen (Maureen Connell) and assistant, Peter Fox (Richard Wattis) arrive at the monastery of Long Buk as the guests of the head lama. They are searching for rare plants. A team of American adventurers led by Doctor Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker) also arrives, but this party is searching for the legendary Yeti.The Americans, Tom Friend and his associate, big game hunter Ed Shelley, are loud, brash and totally ruthless as far as preservation of the Yeti is concerned. The members of the British contingent on the other hand are masters of understatement, impeccably mannered and respectful of all life including the Yeti. This was a British film after all.Although obviously shot on a sound stage, the monastery scenes are effective replete with gongs, monks and a head lama in deep meditation. What really gives the film visual substance are the snow-covered mountain climbing sequences; they were apparently shot in the Pyrénées, but a mountain is a mountain, and these scenes open out the film.Eventually, Rollason accompanies Friend on his quest in the interests of science, and without spoiling things too much, they encounter the Yeti. However the outcome is unexpected and gives this film the edge over the mostly cheesy monster movies of the day.There is a touch of Val Lewton style about this film; it has plenty of mood and there is no rush to reveal the 'monster' with the best effects left to the imagination.

(42%) Much like a certain amount of these early Hammer flicks this has more up its sleeve than what you might at first think. Without wanting to ruin the plot at all I will only say that it's not simply about a man in a big hairy suit chasing Himalayan explorers around a wobbly set filled with fake plastic snow. Actually some of the location work is very good, certainly better than even most modern movies set in extreme conditions. This honestly is not recommended for everyone, as it is showing its age in places, but Hammer fans should certainly give it a look as it is quite well made, and better than most B-movies from this period.

John Rollason is a scientist studying the ecosystems in the frozen Himalayan mountains. He joins a team led by Tom Friend, an ambitious adventurer who wants to trap the elusive creature known as the Yeti. Will they return from this perilous expedition ?This minor black-and-white creature feature, made by the same team responsible for the two excellent Quatermass films of the fifties (director Guest, writer Nigel Kneale and production company Hammer) is an agreeable and intelligent if undistinguished genre flick. The obvious approach would be to do a simple monster movie with the standard ten-little-Indians setup; instead, Kneale's intelligent script approaches both the locating of the creature and its evolutionary position with sympathetic and scientific detachment. The movie is more a critique of the commercial exploitation of such a phenomenon, and the lengths Friend will go to in pursuing it. Cushing and Tucker exploit these ideas very well in their performances, and the support cast is good, including a nice turn by a young Brown (better known as spy boss M in four eighties James Bond movies) as the trapper. While the film has its budgetary limitations it's still good to look at, mixing second unit work shot in the French Pyrenees with some cool looking sets, and it manages to evoke the mystique and sense of mourning the script is aiming for. A thoughtful little flick, and one of a trio of agreeable horror movies American star Tucker made in Britain at the time, the other two being the oddball The Strange World Of Planet X and the not-to-be-missed cult favourite The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye).