An entire football team traveling to a championship match is on an airplane headed for Japan. However, the flight will never reach its destination because, during a violent storm, the airplane is damaged by lightning and crashes instantly. Crashed onto the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas, the airplane is in a thousand pieces, the dead cannot be counted, but more than one person has managed to survive the crash. At the mercy of the cold and with few heating options, the group of survivors waits hopefully for the arrival of rescue teams. But time passes and hunger looms, the only way to try to survive as long as possible is to start eating the corpses. This drastic choice will not take long to create further tensions within the group, but from the moment the survivors realize that during the dark hours someone is stealing the corpses of those who died in the crash, the situation continues to deteriorate. The cold now seems to be the least of their problems; the few survivors of the disaster have become the prey of a fierce and hungry creature that roams the snow-covered mountains.
Asian cousin of the Canadian Bigfoot, the Yeti is certainly a creature of undeniable charm that, however, has never received the proper attention from the seventh art. There are not many films, in fact, interested in bringing the monstrous snowman to the screen, and one is a bit surprised by this lack of interest given the enormous horror charge inherent in a suggestive creature like the Yeti.
To fill this gap comes "Yeti," a small production for television directed by Paul Ziller ("Creature of Terror"), a decent craftsman capable of doing his job and producing sufficiently dignified products that can differentiate themselves from the general trash to which most of these productions destined directly for television belong.
With "Yeti," we are dealing with an objectively ugly film and therefore incapable of paying the right tribute to the snow creature, but if you embark on the viewing without having too many expectations, then Ziller's film is actually watchable, has several strong points, and in many aspects is even pleasant.
The story is certainly well constructed, and the viewer is immediately thrown into a fairly credible and all-in-all interesting plot. The idea of starting it as a disaster movie, complete with an initial airplane crash and survivors who must survive the advancing cold, and then gradually progressing it towards horror with the monster's entrance into action, is certainly successful. For the entire first half, in fact, it seems like you are watching the carbon copy of the much more famous "Alive - Survivors" by Frank Marshall, and certainly—this is not exactly a good thing for a horror film—it represents the most interesting and successful part of the movie. When the Yeti actually enters into action and the language shifts from dramatic tones to undeniably horror tones, the quality of the film begins to slowly decline because the scenes featuring the white beast all seem a bit rough, and the creature does not always manage to instill the proper fear.
The look of the Yeti is well cared for, and one is quite surprised to note that the old but always effective make-up with an actor in costume was predominantly used and not just the magic of (ugly) computer graphics. When the monster is on the set in the flesh, it works very well, the makeup is effective and quite frightening, too bad then for those sequences (fortunately not too many) in which a highly substandard digital effect is used that loses points and credibility to the story told.
In terms of writing, the film is convincing to a certain extent, because on the one hand we have a good construction of the plot and characters who are not too odious, but on the other hand, there is more than one scattered naivety here and there (starting with the fact that it is not clear why there are only Americans at the rescue center on the Himalayas!) and above all an entirely improbable and ridiculous ending that descends into unintentional comedy, causing the viewer to smile rather than be frightened.
Certainly, therefore, not a good film, but it does entertain thanks to a good pace capable of avoiding dead spots and a continuously evolving narrative. If only the use of digital effects had been further limited and a few more splashes of blood had been added, the result would certainly have been more appealing.
Rounded up vote.
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