Review: The Yeti Is Better Than a Movie Called The Yeti Has Any Right to Be
- More Horror
- 7 hours ago
- 7 min read
By Devin Smock, MoreHorror.com -
SPOILERS THROUGHOUT
There is something almost reassuring about a movie simply calling itself The Yeti.
No subtitle. No colon. No clever mythology bullshit.
There is a Yeti.
Here is the movie.
Expectations appropriately adjusted.
Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta’s creature feature opens in Alaska in 1947, and almost immediately I liked what it was doing. There’s a commitment to the period that goes beyond throwing everyone into old coats and hoping nobody notices the zippers. The movie wants to feel like something that might have crawled out of an older Hollywood monster picture, with pulp-adventure dialogue, studio-built wilderness, exaggerated characters and just enough artificiality to make the whole thing feel handmade.
The opening is especially clever. A group stranded in a snowy cabin encounters something we’re not really allowed to see yet. The attack gives us enough to understand that whatever is outside is large, angry and capable of making a tremendous mess of a human being without immediately sticking a rubber monster directly into the lens.
That's smart.
Creature movies tend to get themselves into trouble the second they decide we need a good long look at the creature.
More on that later.
The film then gives us an old-fashioned newsreel-style introduction to the rescue party being assembled after oil tycoon Merriell Sunday Sr., played by Corbin Bernsen, and famous explorer Hollis Bannister, played by William Sadler, disappear along with their expedition in the Alaskan Territory. Merriell's son puts together a collection of specialists to go looking for them, including Hollis' estranged daughter Ellie, played by Brittany Allen.
The rescue-team presentation is funny and knowingly theatrical without immediately becoming parody. It reminded me of a dozen old adventure movies at once, but never so specifically that it felt like somebody was recreating another movie's homework.
Then they get to Alaska.
And apparently the boat has left them there.
Wait.
They got left there?
Okay.
The explanation is that the weather forced the boat away and the team is now stuck waiting for it to return. Fair enough. At least we're rid of the boat. Now we can get to the important business of people disappearing into the woods.
The period dialogue is an interesting problem.
You can tell somebody did the work. The vocabulary, expressions and rhythms are deliberately old-fashioned. Nobody sounds like they walked out of a Starbucks in 2026 wearing a wool coat.
But sometimes you can hear the acting.
There's a difference between speaking in the language of another era and performing the idea of speaking in another era. A few of the actors settle into it naturally. Others give every syllable a little extra polish, like they're afraid we'll forget it's 1947 unless the dialogue arrives wearing a fedora.
Linc Hand's Coates is probably the most extreme example.
Coates is ridiculous.
I also kind of love him.
He's a scarred World War II veteran operating at roughly 115 percent intensity at all times.
Someone suggests going with him and his response is:
“The hell you will.”
Of course it is.
That's Coates.
And eventually the movie starts building some actual tension. Something is moving around out there. People are hearing noises. Nobody knows exactly what they're dealing with yet.
Then:
Where's Dan?
Half-eaten in a pile.
Dan's dead?
Yeah.
Dan's dead.
It shouldn't be as funny as it is.
The movie has a strange tonal quality where I'm not always sure whether I'm laughing exactly where the filmmakers intended me to, but more often than not I was still having a decent time.
There's even a split-diopter shot that made the film nerd in me perk up for a second.
Nice.
The cinematography from Joel Froome isn't consistently remarkable, but the movie has much more visual personality when it fully embraces the artifice of what it's doing. The filmmakers built the Alaskan wilderness, including its forest, cabin and cave environments, largely on a soundstage in Buffalo specifically because they wanted the artificial quality of old studio monster movies.
Knowing that actually made me appreciate some of the snowy exteriors more.
They're fake.
They're supposed to feel a little fake.
That's part of the charm.
Unfortunately, the middle of The Yeti has a tendency to confuse character development with people standing around arguing about what they're going to do next.
What are we doing?
We're going this way.
No, we're not.
To hell you are.
We should stay together.
I'm going alone.
You're not going alone.
Repeat.
Some of that is necessary. You're making a survival movie with a group trapped in the wilderness, so obviously people are going to disagree about survival. But eventually the movie starts circling conversations whose dramatic purpose was clear several minutes earlier.
That's where the 93-minute runtime occasionally feels longer than it is. Other critics have pointed to similar pacing problems, particularly the amount of dialogue occupying the middle section, and I think that's where the movie loses some of the energy its opening earns.
Margaret Lamb, played by Christina Bennett Lind, eventually gets the thankless creature-feature job of being the person who understands animals well enough to start explaining what the hell might be stalking everyone.
Every monster movie needs somebody like this.
At some point somebody has to look at a footprint and say, essentially:
That's not a bear.
Thanks, science.
The movie is smart about withholding the Yeti for a while. We get noises, movement, aftermath and pieces of the thing rather than immediately meeting our giant furry friend in broad daylight.
And I appreciated that because creature effects people have one of the most thankless jobs in horror.
No offense to the practical-effects and animatronic people of the world. They're unsung heroes. But sometimes the assignment is basically:
Build a nine-foot snow monster that can survive a close-up on a movie screen and please don't make anyone laugh.
Good luck.
Apparently the creature team spent months constructing a handmade nine-foot suit specifically for this production. It was practical, custom-built and designed for one performer.
And you know what?
They pulled it off.
The Yeti looks pretty damn good.
Not Alien good. Let's remain adults.
But good enough that the movie can actually show the thing.
That's important.
Even when we eventually get close-ups, I never had the catastrophic moment creature features sometimes produce where the monster steps into proper lighting and you immediately wish he would go back behind the tree.
The filmmakers know what they've got and mostly photograph it intelligently.
The practical gore is even better.
This movie brings the meat.
People get ripped apart. Organs leave bodies. The Yeti does not appear particularly concerned with maintaining the structural integrity of the human abdomen.
And then Margaret is literally holding onto Coates' intestines.
It's ridiculous.
It's disgusting.
It's awesome.
That's the movie I showed up for.
I was sorry to see Coates go because he'd become one of the more entertaining personalities in the group, but if you're going to introduce a giant murderous Yeti, eventually somebody we actually like needs to become lunch.
Otherwise what are we doing here?
Later we get the obligatory little quiet moments between impending deaths, including one scene involving Booker, his radio and the vague possibility that two people may or may not make out before the movie remembers that it has a monster to deal with.
There's also a gramophone spinning old records in the shelter, another tiny period detail I enjoyed. It's the kind of prop you don't technically need, but without those details a period movie starts feeling like actors playing dress-up.
Eventually Booker is gone and Ellie, our increasingly Amelia Earhart-ish adventure heroine, is alone again.
Brittany Allen is probably the performance that holds the whole thing together best. She manages to fit the heightened period style without constantly announcing it, and Ellie has enough actual emotional grounding through her relationship with her missing father that she doesn't feel like nothing more than the Final Girl With a Map.
And then the movie reveals that Dad is William Sadler.
Of course he is.
Along with Bernsen and Jim Cummings, Sadler gives The Yeti one of those casts where every twenty minutes you find yourself going:
Oh, hey. That guy.
Corbin Bernsen doesn't dominate the movie, but his presence gives Merriell Sunday Sr. an immediate recognizable authority. William Sadler is exactly the sort of actor you want wandering around a 1947 monster movie. And Jim Cummings, playing Booker, brings his naturally odd rhythm to a movie already full of people who talk like they were raised on pulp magazines.
The movie also finally lets the Yeti get properly ugly.
That's where it earns a lot of its goodwill with me.
From a strictly critical perspective, The Yeti isn't particularly sophisticated. The screenplay is uneven. Some performances are too broad. The pacing drags. Several conversations overstay their welcome. The family drama isn't always convincing enough to support the amount of emotional weight placed on it, and the movie occasionally gets caught somewhere between sincere period adventure and knowingly goofy B-movie.
If I'm looking at it solely as cinema, there are a lot of better movies.
But that's not the entire equation.
I'm also a horror fan.
And horror has always had a strange second scale running alongside conventional critical judgment.
Sometimes I want to watch an elegantly constructed film about grief and mortality.
Sometimes I want a giant furry bastard to tear somebody's guts out in the snow.
There should be room for both.
The Yeti has gore. It has creature effects. It has lore. It has a snowy fake-Alaska soundstage. It has Corbin Bernsen and William Sadler wandering around in an old-fashioned monster picture. It has Coates behaving like a lunatic. It has intestines.
You know what you're buying.
And unlike a lot of low-budget creature features, it doesn't spend 85 minutes desperately hiding the fact that it can't deliver the creature promised by the title.
When the Yeti finally has to stand there in close-up and be the Yeti, the movie doesn't collapse.
Kudos.
Would I recommend it to somebody looking for great cinema?
Probably not.
Would I recommend it to a group of horror fans looking for something bloody and slightly ridiculous to put on at night?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Sometimes genre competence is enough.
Sometimes a movie called The Yeti just needs to give me a decent goddamn Yeti.
This one does.
5.8/10
The Yeti is currently streaming on Shudder.
