Snowbeast is a made for TV movie from 1977 starring Bo Svenson, who's been in all sorts of movies like Walking Tall 2, Inglorious Basterds, etc etc. He's a real actor, basically. This was early in his career, and later capitalized on how lucky they got by casting him that they brandished his name in a giant font on the top of the DVD case and artwork.
The worst and weirdest part of this movie is that besides the talent there in the actor, it also had talent in the director and screenwriter. The director worked on a lot of TV including the original Star Trek TV show, and the screenwriter wrote the screenplay for Psycho and many other movies and TV shows. So why was this movie so bad? Well, I knew that I'd end up saying that...but in truth, it's just extremely dated and aged about as worst as it could've. I realized that as I was thinking about this movie today and yesterday.
I was all ready to tear this fuckin movie apart, rave on and on about how they needed to show the Snowbeast more, have more atmosphere. Et cetera. But honestly, this was 1977, and even more so this was made for TV. I mean, I've reviewed made for TV movies before, namely Killdozer, but you can't expect the exception to be the rule. I wonder what other made for TV movies from the 70's could interest me.
Snowbeast in the title is a yeti, so this is a continuation on the yeti movies I've been watching lately. Why I decided to watch a bunch of yeti movies is anyone's guess, but it's most likely cause I like to marathon similar themed movies every once in a while. That or I've finally snapped. In this movie, Snowbeast is living up near some ski resort killing people, and the resort owners recruit Bo Svenson to help them track it down and kill it.
We never truly see the Snowbeast per say, which is the flaw here. There's even a shot or two where it's actually made more awkward because of how the editing excludes the beast, and we see a lot of first person shots that are also awkwardly shot. There are a few shots of the thing's extremities and like 2 shots of the Snowbeast itself, and again this is a movie where the costume was not that bad! Show the fuckin thing more if the costume is good! Maybe it broke or they lost part of it, I don't know.
This movie is cheesy, super duper cheap, and offers no real thrills being made for TV. It doesn't make up for it in weirdness of scope or originality like Killdozer did either. In fact, if it weren't about a yeti, but instead say a manic killer, it would probably never be seen again by anyone in their right mind. I saw it for the following reason: yeti. I would definitely not have seen it sans yeti.
I'll give it a star for cheesiness.
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