Instant Favorite.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Visiting a Tibetan monastery, a British botanist and his assistant gathering information on the plant life of the area leaves with a friend on an expedition to capture an Abominable Snowman, but as a series of pitfalls plague the crew they all try to escape off the mountain alive.This wasn't all that bad of a film. One of the best features is the wonderful mood in this film as snow is featured often and has a powerful effect on the environment. The mountain scenes are very well done, and the high altitudes, driving thunderstorm and the blinding snow lends a really impressive aura to the feeling throughout. This also helps with it's brilliant, masterful job of building terror and suspense early on and maintaining it through to the climax. Among the key ingredients to this is the fact that it never shows the Yeti in its entirety. All we ever see of the creature are its hairy and wickedly clawed hands and large footprints, and when the whole thing is shown, it is always in shadow or obscured by driving snow. Instead of looking cheap, this technique goes a long way in making this movie scarier than it would have otherwise been as the descriptions given by the characters in their dialog, the glimpses we see, and the haunting, chilling cry of the Yeti are incredibly effective. By also keeping them off-screen for most of the film and only showing them vaguely before that, it is able to make a series of scenes that pull off it's scariness without actually showing it, from the scene where we see the creature's hand creeping under a tent to the later attack on the camp on the highest peaks of the mountain during the driving snowstorm. These here are what work for the film as there isn't a lot wrong with this one. The main issue is that creature itself is rarely even in the film as it's almost an hour into the film before we even see any hint of the famed snowman. It's fun to watch at times, but that's almost an unbearable amount of time before the creature even appears for the main factor in this is the adventure storyline rather than a horror one. Far too much of the film plays out with them trying to climb the mountain rather than deal with the creatures so it takes a while to even get going. The script here, while tightly built and well characterized, unfortunately disappoints in the ending. The whole film is built to an expected confrontation with the Yeti, but at this very point the film then enigmatically fades out with the meeting at the end, which contains only a brief glimpse of the Yeti. While not a cop-out, it's a little hard to swallow and gets some real head-scratching moments. The biggest flaw in the film, though, is the behavior in relation to their environment which is unbelievable. Every time spent in the snowy mountaintops is full of moments where someone would run around without coat or gloves in a blizzard and not seem to notice the cold. If they were really in the Himalayas, they'd be far more reluctant to take off their gloves. These are pretty minor problems, though.Today's Rating/PG: Violence.

Just as the Yeti in the film stood head and shoulders over the humans, so this film stands head and shoulders over most of the horror/monster films of the 1950's.You wouldn't think so from reading the reviews at the time though; one reviewer thought it too subtle, but that could be another way of describing it as intelligent and stylish, the qualities that make it so watchable 60 years later. The film also was saddled with a poor trailer (it's on YouTube). Obviously the marketing people didn't think the film monsterish enough; the trailer gives totally the wrong impression.British botanist, John Rollason (Peter Cushing), along with his wife Helen (Maureen Connell) and assistant, Peter Fox (Richard Wattis) arrive at the monastery of Long Buk as the guests of the head lama. They are searching for rare plants. A team of American adventurers led by Doctor Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker) also arrives, but this party is searching for the legendary Yeti.The Americans, Tom Friend and his associate, big game hunter Ed Shelley, are loud, brash and totally ruthless as far as preservation of the Yeti is concerned. The members of the British contingent on the other hand are masters of understatement, impeccably mannered and respectful of all life including the Yeti. This was a British film after all.Although obviously shot on a sound stage, the monastery scenes are effective replete with gongs, monks and a head lama in deep meditation. What really gives the film visual substance are the snow-covered mountain climbing sequences; they were apparently shot in the Pyrénées, but a mountain is a mountain, and these scenes open out the film.Eventually, Rollason accompanies Friend on his quest in the interests of science, and without spoiling things too much, they encounter the Yeti. However the outcome is unexpected and gives this film the edge over the mostly cheesy monster movies of the day.There is a touch of Val Lewton style about this film; it has plenty of mood and there is no rush to reveal the 'monster' with the best effects left to the imagination.

John Rollason is a scientist studying the ecosystems in the frozen Himalayan mountains. He joins a team led by Tom Friend, an ambitious adventurer who wants to trap the elusive creature known as the Yeti. Will they return from this perilous expedition ?This minor black-and-white creature feature, made by the same team responsible for the two excellent Quatermass films of the fifties (director Guest, writer Nigel Kneale and production company Hammer) is an agreeable and intelligent if undistinguished genre flick. The obvious approach would be to do a simple monster movie with the standard ten-little-Indians setup; instead, Kneale's intelligent script approaches both the locating of the creature and its evolutionary position with sympathetic and scientific detachment. The movie is more a critique of the commercial exploitation of such a phenomenon, and the lengths Friend will go to in pursuing it. Cushing and Tucker exploit these ideas very well in their performances, and the support cast is good, including a nice turn by a young Brown (better known as spy boss M in four eighties James Bond movies) as the trapper. While the film has its budgetary limitations it's still good to look at, mixing second unit work shot in the French Pyrenees with some cool looking sets, and it manages to evoke the mystique and sense of mourning the script is aiming for. A thoughtful little flick, and one of a trio of agreeable horror movies American star Tucker made in Britain at the time, the other two being the oddball The Strange World Of Planet X and the not-to-be-missed cult favourite The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye).

I've never seen a movie done well about the abominable snowman. But this one is one of the better one out of all the bad ones that are out there.The movie is mostly about nothing as is with movies of this type. It's about people in one sort of distress or another but very little exposure of the snowman. The total appearance time of the snowman is less than a minute in the movie.The movie does score high in one department, and that it didn't just portray the snowman as a mindless savage, and the final appearance of them made the movie dignifying.But by no means is this movie a masterpiece of any sorts, and is weak in terms of entertainment value.