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The Abominable Snowman
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Manufacturer: Starz / Anchor Bay
Find all by Starz / Anchor Bay
Directed By: Val Guest
Audience Rating: Unrated
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Theatrical Release: December 31, 1969
Average Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars
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Starring: Forrest Tucker, Peter Cushing, Maureen Connell, Richard Wattis, Robert Brown
Made the same year as the gory gothic hit The Curse of Frankenstein, this smartly written, philosophically grounded Hammer studios adventure written by Nigel Kneale (who also wrote the excellent science fiction thriller Quatermass and its two sequels) was lost in the flesh and blood of Hammer's new vein of horror. Peter Cushing, best known for his ruthless portrayals of Dr. Frankenstein and his more tempered rationalist skew on vampire hunter Van Helsing, plays another scientist driven to prove his unpopular theories. Against the advice of his wife and a kindly but firm Tibetan monk, he leads blustery American showman Forrest Tucker and his party of explorers up the frozen peaks (the Pyrenees standing in quite spectacularly for the Himalayas) to track the fabled Yeti. When he discovers that this is no scientific expedition but a hunting party he starts to have second thoughts, which are only reinforced by Tucker's mercenary behavior when he kills one of the creatures. Director Val Guest keeps the "monsters" hidden until the final showdown, where their hulking silhouettes loom over the cave entrance, but their mournful cries haunt the camp like wailing ghosts, slowly driving the party members mad. While it lacks the edgy desperation and inventiveness of Kneale's Quatermass features, The Abominable Snowman is a taut thriller that contrasts the gorgeous aerial mountain photography with the claustrophobic atmosphere of the tents and caves of the base camp. --Sean Axmaker
User Submitted The Abominable Snowman Reviews
September 9, 2008
You Must Forget That The Yeti Exist Or They Will Kill You
An expedition searches for the Yeti of Tibet. These creatures, they learn, are far more superior to men. Using their powers of telepathy, the Yeti begin killing the members of the expedition in order to keep their existence a secret.
"The Abominable Snowman" is a perfect blend of science fiction and horror and was created by those who brought us the highly successful Quatermass films. It stars Hammer horror icon Peter Cushing as a botanist and Forrest Tucker (Sergeant O'Rourke from the TV series "F Troop") as a trapper.
Released in 1957, "The Abominable Snowman" was filmed in black and white. Pity it couldn't have been shot in color as were the Hammer horror classics, "Horror of Dracula, "The Mummy," and "The Curse of Frankenstein." However, since the beautiful, snow covered Himalayans serve as the backdrop for most all of the film, I doubt if color would have helped. Black and white gave it more of a gothic feel.
Only one gruesome death occurred. A man falls from a steep cliff and strikes a large rock before being slung aside. A few more gruesome deaths would have been necessary to keep the attention span of a younger generation. However, the Yeti are not bent on mayhem and destruction. They merely wish to live in peace while keeping their existence a secret.
"The Abominable Snowman" is a unique creature feature from Hammer Film Productions. Some of the scientific theories that are offered seem very plausible. Perhaps the Yeti are waiting for mankind to become extinct in order to reclaim their rightful place on the earth. We are the savages, not the Yeti. We are the ones who declare war on each other simply because our beliefs are different. The Yeti may not have to wait much longer.
"The Abominable Snowman" is a must see for fans of classic science fiction horror. It is also highly recommended for fans of Hammer Film Productions and horror legend Peter Cushing.
August 11, 2008
CAUTION: no subtitles , no closed captions , NO dice
i'd honestly waited and read about this film for years . i know it's a very good picture , however , i'm so glad i rented this disc rather than spent the rediculus sums asked for it here and elsewhere . if you are deaf , if you have hearing loss (like myself) , if you're not british (like me) , if you must sometimes play the volume rather low in consideration of other people in your home , if you simply enjoy reading the screenplay as you watch a film (like me) , be WARNED . this film is not only not encoded with closed captions , nor does it have subtitles for the hearing impaired or deaf . know this when you buy this product , and you can make an informed decision . i tried to follow the first fifteen to twenty minutes of this beautifully shot and acted film . what on earth are they saying ? it actually matters !
December 4, 2007
Subtle and well crafted vintage horror
Nigel Kneale was arguably the most influential figure in UK science fiction during the 1950's and 1960's mostly because he was quick to see the potential in the relatively new medium of TV .The Quatermass serials became must see TV and arguably the first series to provoks animated playground discussion among schoolkids of that era.
This movie has its genesis in a TV series of the same name broadcast on the ITV network on a Saturday night and the movie companies as they did with Quatermass and another serial The Trollenberg Terror leaped on the bandwaggon by making it into a movie -and a decent job they made of it too.
Its core is the conflict between two men who represent opposing points of view.Tom Friend-well played by Forrest Tucker -is an entrepreneurial American who ,on capturing a Yeti in the Himalayas ,sees it as a commercial opportunity ,His opposite numaber ,a botanist Dr Rollason -the always admirable Peter Cushing -wants to learn more about the creature ,and subject it to scientific study .As it turns out the creature has a suprise in store for them both ,revealing unexpected gifts that throws a curve into both their plans.
The movie is studio bound with no attempt to utilise genuine locations and the movie thus looks artificial and the creature is glimpsed only sparingly .It is a talky piece of work and while the script is literate and intelligent this may limit the appeal of the movie to gorehounds out there
It is a gripping and intelligent little movie that has more subtlety than usual in horror pictures of the era and I recommend it to those who like a little cerebral exercise with their creature movies
October 25, 2007
Pricey or a rip-off
$57.00 for a dvd? I would have to see this one(rental,TV) before buying this flick.The Blob didn't even cost this much!
June 27, 2007
Great Movie, bad price
I kick myself I didn't buy this while it was in stock for probably as cheap as ten dollars. Now the scalpers want way to much for me to pay. I will rent it in the mean time from Netflix and wait till it is re-released. The movie itself is great. Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker play great roles as botanist and entrepreneur. Cushing gets to see the human side of the snowmen, Tucker gets to see it isn't wise to tick off the family. The last scene when you look on the face of the Abominable is unforgettable. One of the best low budget monster movies of the period.
December 18, 2006
See It With Someone Brave!
Alright movie about principled botanist Peter Cushing and unscrupulous adventurer Forrest Tucker tracking down an elusive herd of yetis in the frozen wastelands of the high Himalayas. Tucker, naturally, wants to "bring `em back" and convert the abominable snowmen into heaps of shining gold, while the kindly Cushing wants to study and learn from them.
And so it's off to the peaks of the Himalayas, with a handful of native guides, a gun slinger (Tucker's pal) and a photographer (Cushing's chum,) and wildly diverging agendas. I'm not overly familiar with Hammer films, but I have the impression they were a pretty bare bones studio. You can't tell that from what's on screen, though - the movie starts and ends in a Buddhist monastery, and it's a convincingly ancient retreat. The movie well integrates some second unit shots taken in the French Pyrenees and larger set large-stage scenes shot at Pinewood Studios.
Unfortunately, there's a LOT of talking going on as Tucker and Cushing - both good, by the way - endlessly and monotonously yak about the nature of the yeti. And director Val Guest had decided to give nothing but a couple of unsatisfying teaser shots of the abominable snowmen. Guest explains in on the commentary track, something about what the viewer could imagine is much more powerful than anything our makeup department could come up with - but he could have dressed a couple three tall stuntmen in monkey suits and take long distance shots of them roaming about the Pyrenees/Himalayas. We do finally see a bit of the `creatures,' but not enough, really.
And so we're left with a talky, philosophical horror flick that's short on horror but looks good and has a thought provoking point of view. Despite its severe shortcomings in the terror and horror department, THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN does manage to maintain a low level of suspense - it we don't see the susquashes, we hear them often enough. If I wouldn't recommend this to the "make me scared" horror fans, it is a good one for the family.
June 22, 2006
"Listen Doc, this expedition cost a lot of money...I'm not going back empty handed!"
Not too long ago I sat through schlockmeister Jerry Warren's Man Beast (1956)...last night I watched The Abominable Snowman (1957), written by Nigel Kneale (The Quatermass Xperiment) and directed by Val Guest (The Quatermass Xperiment, The Day the Earth Caught Fire)...the stories in the two films were so similar (although where Kneale and Guest utilized intricate subtleties to pass the crux of their tale along Warren's method involved something akin to beating the audience about the head with a sledgehammer) one might think Warren was the one who got ripped off, but in actuality Kneale and Guest's feature was based off a television feature, written by Kneale, originally aired in 1955, entitled The Creature, one Warren (or his writer) most likely caught prior to cranking out his own abominable snowman movie. Starring in The Abominable Snowman is Peter Cushing (The Curse of Frankenstein, The Hound of the Baskervilles) and Forrest Tucker (The Trollenberg Terror, Auntie Mame). Also appearing is Maureen Connell (Kill Her Gently), Richard Wattis (Operation Crossbow), Robert `M' Brown (A View to a Kill, The Living Daylights), Michael Brill (The Camp on Blood Island), Arnold Marlé (The Man Who Could Cheat Death), and Wolfe Morris (The House That Dripped Blood), who, along with Cushing and Marlé, reprise their roles from the television feature I mentioned previously.
Cushing plays Dr. John Rollason, a botanist currently in the Himalayas with his wife Helen (Connell) and priggish colleague Peter Fox (Wattis) collecting samples of medicinal plants. In actuality Rollason has an ulterior motive being to hook up with a brash American named Tom Friend who's mounting an expedition to search out the legendary man beast of Tibet, much to Helen's dismay (seems Rollason told his wife he gave up mountain climbing after a previous unfortunate accident). Friend makes the scene along with an expert tracker and trapper named Ed Shelley (Brown), a photographer named Andrew McNee (Brill), and their guide Kusang (Morris). After an abstruse warning from the local Llama (Marlé), the quintet, traveling lean and mean, make their way up the mountain in search of their quarry. Along the way they face numerous natural perils (fatigue, treacherous mountain passes, etc.) and Rollason discovers Friend's motives aren't all that pure, as his interest is purely of a commercial nature, which goes against Rollason's academic instincts (Rollason wants to prove the existence of the creatures, while Friend wants to exploit them for monetary gain). As the group gets close to the area where the creatures might be, McNee begins to hear things (apparently he's the sensitive type) and Rollason postulates perhaps the creatures aren't a missing link, but an offshoot of human development, who may have an intelligence equal to or even superior to our own, and have chosen to exist how and where they do for a specific reason. After plenty of trudging about in the snow, McNee hurts his foot, Friend and Shelley bag themselves a mountain monkey (Friend's willing to pass it off as a baby Yeti if'n they don't catch the real thing), and their native guide flips his lid and hauls ash down the mountain after a particularly harrowing incident. Eventually those remaining do locate what they're looking for, but while finding an abominable snowman is one thing, returning with (or without) one a different story...
Whenever I think of the abominable snowman, that Bugs Bunny cartoon featuring the abominable snowman comes to mind (I think it's titled "The Abominable Snow Rabbit")...in it the creature is portrayed as a big, doofy moron type whose main interest in Bugs is to keep him as a pet and call him George...suffice to say, the abominable snowman doesn't rank high on my list of frightening horror film characters. That said I thought this Hammer Studios produced film a most excellent feature as it had a number of things going for it including the following; intelligent writing, solid and flowing direction, healthy production values, strong, well developed characters (especially in the case of Cushing and Tucker), and two extremely capable and experienced leads. I thought Cushing and Tucker played really well off each other, both playing characters with the same goal, to find a Yeti, but for very different motives...when you think about, despite the differences in motives, both involved exploitation of creatures, which Cushing's character ultimately realizes (who's the real monster on the mountain?), and acts accordingly. The story does tend to drag a bit for the first forty-five minutes or so, but then things really pick up after once the party reaches their final destination. One of the more interesting aspects for the feature to me was rarely are the creatures shown, other than perhaps a curious hairy hand or two reaching from underneath a tent flap. I think it was a good choice not to parade the creatures around as it maintained a mystique, allowing for the audience to develop their own mental picture given the framework provided by the characters on the screen. Near the end we do get a slightly more detailed visual, but the ephemeral quality is preserved. I did have two minor gripes about the film the first being I thought it interesting how the only two American characters portrayed in this British feature lacked any seemingly redeemable qualities...I mean here you have Ed Shelley, a tracker and a trapper, with his shoot first, shoot again, and then ask questions mentality along with Tom Friend, the financier of the expedition whose only real goal was that of fame and fortune, even if it meant leaving someone else's cheese out in the wind...despite appearances we're (we referring to Americans) aren't all money grubbing, bloodthirsty, trigger happy a-holes looking out only for our own interests (the current administration certainly isn't helping my claim here)...ah well...the other beef I had was what was up with that photographer character? What a completely useless individual...I don't remember seeing him take one picture. Given how his character is portrayed (sniveling and useless sums it up) it's pretty easy to foretell his role in the story. All in all if you see only one abominable snowman movie in your lifetime, I'd go with this one, as it's the best I've seen so far...
The picture quality, presented in widescreen (2.35:1), enhanced for 16X9 TVs, on this Anchor Bay Entertainment DVD release, looks very sharp and clean, and the Dolby Digital mono audio comes through clearly. As far as extras included there's an audio commentary track with director Val Guest and writer Nigel Kneale, an original theatrical trailer, a World of Hammer episode entitled `Peter Cushing' (24:51), and a 5X7 original poster artwork reproduction insert, the flipside listing the chapter stops.
Cookieman108
June 1, 2006
Effective Script, Performances and Production
This is a whimsical and very well done movie. In fact, it is extremely well done all around. The performances by Forrest Tucker and Peter Cushing were very effective and convincing. I particularly liked the mood setting camera work by Arthur Grant and wonderfully logical script by Nigel Kneale. The intelligent and plausible script succeeded on many levels making it engaging to a wide audience. I found this film to be both entertaining and thought provoking. Another excellent and unsung Hammer Production.
November 24, 2004
Burrrr!! It gave me the chills!
This is a very atmospheric and enthralling movie. It's a big departure from most of the Hammer Films in the sense that its basis is on folklore and speculation rather than "Classic Monster" genre. Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker give great performances and the film sets itself up well.
It also contains great shots of the Nepal mountain range and also pays a respect to Himalayan culture and religion.
This is a wise decision for any old monster movie buff or fan of the Hammer Films.
Bigfoot enthusiasts will enjoy this especially.
It's a good old fashion creature feature that delivers the goods and is suitable for everyone.
November 4, 2004
Watered Down Hammer
The Abominable Snowman is in a somewhat different vein from much of the Hammer films of this period. It aims to be more philosophical rather than horrific and comes across more as a long (too long) Twilight Zone or original Star Trek episode (particularly as the Himalayas looked much like a snowish covered version of the planets in which the crew always seemed to find themselves) which is not what one is necessarily looking for in what was once a feature film. The actors, particularly, of course, Peter Cushing, do good work and the film has nice intentions in its message but the slow build-up to the story is unnecessary when the time could have been used more effectively to develop the secondary characters and give a litte more back story to the leads, if not actually creating suspense. Not the best work from a great studio.
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