The yeti is a proper practical creature and Brittany Allen gives it someone worth chasing. Around them, Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta have made a film that cannot decide whether it is frightened, sad or joking, and settles for slow.
Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta write and direct a 93-minute creature feature set in deep snow, and the title tells you the creature. Ellie (Brittany Allen) is the lead. Around her are a father and son both called Merriell Sunday (Corbin Bernsen and Eric Nelsen), an old hand named Hollis Bannister (William Sadler), and Lamb (Christina Bennett Lind). The bet is the old one, and a sound one: put a real thing on set, surround it with snow and a handful of people, and let fear do the rest. The creature holds up. The film around it does not.
Start with what works, because it is the reason the film exists. The yeti is a practical creature, tall and heavy and plainly present with the actors, and when it tears into someone the 15 certificate is earned in a way that no computer file manages. We sat up the first time it came out of the white, because it had weight and the actors were reacting to something that was there. A monster that occupies space is worth a good deal in this genre, and the film has one.
Allen is the other thing worth the ticket. She plays Ellie as someone who has already had the worst day of her life before the creature turns up, and she does not raise her voice to prove it. Bernsen and Sadler have the ease of men who have done a hundred of these and know how to stand in a doorway. Nelsen has the harder job as the younger Sunday, and the script gives him lines that do not sit in the mouth.
The trouble is tone, and it is trouble from early on. Gallerano and Pisciotta want a horror film, a comedy and a family drama, and they have written all three without deciding which one the others serve. Gallerano has cast himself as a character called Dynamite Dan, and his producer Johnathan Brownlee plays Harold Pullen, and the film keeps stopping to let its comic figures talk. Between the creature’s appearances, we were bored, and then we were annoyed at being bored, because we could feel a lean seventy-minute film underneath this one, and nobody had been ruthless enough to cut down to it.
Joel Froome shoots the snow wide and flat and lets the figures go small in it, which is the right instinct for a film about being hunted across open ground. The interiors are dimmer and less certain, and the camera often sits where a line is being delivered rather than where the fear is. John Hunter’s score leans on low sustained notes and is at its most useful when it goes quiet before an attack. Frank Coppola’s production design is modest and honest, weathered wood and cold light, and it never once looks like more money than there was.
The standard here is The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1982 film, which understood that a snowbound creature picture is about the people indoors before it is about the thing at the door. The Yeti has the thing at the door, and it has one person indoors worth watching. It does not have the ensemble work. Scenes end because a scene has to end, not because anything has changed, and the suspense the genre lives on never gets a chance to build.
Only two reviews have reached us so far, one mixed and one cold, and we sit between them, closer to the cold. See it at home, late, with the lights off, and go in wanting exactly what the title promises. You will get a good monster, and you will wait a long time between visits.
