Saturday, August 1, 2009

Yeti


It is my hope the writers of Yeti, also known as Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon were high when they came up with the script for this one. It’s really the only excuse for this.

An unidentified college football team (we are told they are in the Atlantic Coast Conference, so it would be a team on the East Coast) is traveling to a bowl game when its plane crashes in the Himalayas. Wait, what? How could that happen? The explanation is they are going to a bowl in Japan. Even so, they have gone around the world the wrong way. This is a curiously understrength team, with about 16 players and only one coach, compared to a real teams 85 players and a dozen coaches. Although there are an improbably large number of survivors, they are soon menaced by a guy in a Yeti suit worse than the ones you would expect to see on neighborhood kids at Halloween. Occasionally, the movie tries to distract from the lameness of the suit by substituting a CGI Yeti that may be the worst CGI I’ve ever seen. The survivors get eaten one by one, until the couple you would assume would survive do so.

A few of the low points:

After the crash, the first challenge faced by the survivors is getting a fire started using their limited supply of matches. They do this in a tense scene lit by the flaming pieces of wreckage that surrounds them. D’oh.

After determining the only food source available to them is the “Himalayan snow squirrel”, the quarterback rigs a trap and catches one which they eat, talking all the while about eating a rodent. Of course, the “squirrel” is very obviously a rabbit (which turns into chicken legs when it is cooked).

They fire the flare gun three times, after making a big deal of only having two flares. The first time, it acts more like a bullet anyway.

The rat bastard among the survivors (there has to be one) is shown just after the crash hiding food to horde it. You keep waiting for it to come up, but it doesn’t. Instead, RB complains about how weak he’s getting and is the first to advocate eating their dead friends (Human stomachs are filled with chicken breasts by the way). We finally see him eating his cache after they are rescued. So apparently he was saving it for the celebration.

Bodies bleed despite being frozen solid. And swear words are poorly dubbed over. I realize this was originally on the Sci Fi channel, but if they bothered to film a version with adult language, what are they saving it for other than the DVD?

The only lesson to be gleamed from this horrible film is: If your plane crashes in the Himalayas, eat the rat bastard among you first.
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2 comments:

John Hornor said...

At least Dom DeLuise's son is working.

KentAllard said...

I think he's the son who was a director & producer on the Stargate TV series.