Sick Product of a Sick System

Load of rubbish!!

Absolutely the worst movie.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Every once in a while, a movie comes along like this. If you haven't seen it, you are in for a treat. For you see, what we have here is basically a live-action Scooby Doo mystery, with characters I will refer to by that TV show's names. Fred, Shaggy, Velma, and Daphne head off to Boot Island with their professor, Doctor Prell, to attempt to photograph or, dare to dream, capture a yeti. Mind you, the yeti is basically the abominable snow man of Tibet and surrounding regions. What he's doing in America, in an area where there is no snow, well, that's not really important unless you try to take this film at face value, and hopefully you won't.I smiled throughout most of this movie because it's just one of those flicks that is so bad you think it's good, or good enough to watch for laughs. Some movies are too inept even to be granted that, but this one succeeds on enough levels of absurdity, bad acting, horrid dialogue, and moronic premise that you just sort of find yourself enjoying it in spite of yourself.Now, back to the island. The elusive yeti stalks the landscape with a super loud heartbeat, occasionally roars, and when you see him, he has a lovely white fur coat. While rambling about in the woods near a country home not too far off the beaten path, our intrepid mystery hunters, who in fact arrive at their destination in a van not unlike the Mystery Machine--a white Econoline van with blue hippie flowers all over the front, find themselves being picked off in the woods by Bigfoot's white cousin. First, Shaggy gets his leg ripped off. And while parts of Shaggy are laid out to lure the yeti back to being captured, Velma meets her fate. By this time, Daphne is hysterical and Fred is, well, Fred. Practically everyone will have this mystery pretty much solved in the first 15 minutes of viewing, which leaves the rest of the time for you to wonder how they could stretch a Scooby Doo mystery into 86 minutes.This is a very amateur film, to say the least. I've seen much worse, and at least this has some unintentionally humorous bits. It would have been nice if Velma got naked, but I digress. See, it turns out there is also a blood cult thing going on in these here woods and Daphne is on the menu, along with Shaggy and Velma. Fred is left to tell his tale just as some goof did on a previous failed expedition. And wait til you see how things go for that guy! Unbelievable nonsense that you can't help but find amusing. This is the sort of film you need to watch on a Saturday night with your buddies. Buddies that get your sensibilities when it comes to films, that is. You may wonder if this is a Scooby Doo Mystery, where is the dog? The whole movie is a dog!

After following the supposedly REAL case of the Yeti corpse found in the U.S.A. I decided to watch some Bigfoot related movies like "Night of the Demon" and this one, "Shriek of the Mutilated". After watching both, I could only ask myself: Why all the killer Yeti movies are CRAP?!.Even "Night of the Demon" is a fun exploitation trash but "Shriek..." is plain bad, terrible and a demonstration of incompetent film making.I regularly recommend bad movies in the style of this one, but in this case, my advice will only be: stay away from it! It's not bloody, gory, or even unintentionally funny. It's just a horrible movie with zero budget and none production values.

This movie blows like a gale force wind coming in off of a dump heap. It's terrible! It's not even a "it's-so-bad-it's-almost-good" movie. It's just really really stupid. A bunch of stupid college students go off with their stupid college professor to a stupid island to search for a stupid creature that may or may not exist, and they all act very stupidly the entire time. How this managed to avoid a good blasting on MST3K is beyond me.First off are the actors, if you can call them that. They read their lines with perfect woodeness - were they hired straight out of a department store window? They might as well have had numbers painted on their foreheads: 1st victim;, the arrogant party boy, 2nd victim; frumpy girl who wants party boy to like her, 3rd victim; incredibly irritating whiny girl whom I wish had been slapped to death, and so on. The monster is the silliest thing I've ever seen, although as the amazingly stupid plot twist reveals, it isn't really a monster anyway. Still, it's so obviously a guy of average height in a white gorilla suit that I cannot believe that the victims didn't think to check for a zipper before they started screaming. Even the music was stupid. If you can get past the "Popcorn" scene without gagging, the rest of the film is filled with stolen pieces of classical music (including that horror movie favorite tension-setter "Dies Irae") that don't fit the action or situations at all.Too bad, because the first murder scene was kind of promising, if unintentionally funny; double homicide with electric knife and toaster in the bath tub! But the film just circles the drain after that point and descends into depths of stupidity that I hadn't known existed. You may want to watch this film just to say you did, or if you really enjoy low-low-low-low budget crap. Otherwise, you're not missing a thing if you should choose to skip this one.

Just a note of warning: The Retromedia DVD of "Shriek of the Mutilated" is missing one of the highlights of the movie...the use of the '70s syntho-pop instrumental hit "Popcorn" during the party scene early in the movie. I assume Retromedia couldn't get the music rights, so they dubbed in some unremarkable new background music. There also appear to be some cuts in the dialogue (for instance, when the St. Claires arrive at the party, Retromedia has removed a student's sarcastic remark about their presence). In its original form, this movie is a hysterical classic of bizarre filmmaking...so track down the out-of-print Lightning Video VHS release if you can.