By JOE WINTERS

Man? Monster? Missing Link? For years, much has been made of the legendary mountain-dwelling creature called the Yeti, sometimes known as the Abominable Snowman. Do they exist, or are they merely the product of human imagination passed down through generations? As with most legends, surely the Yeti must have some basis in fact.

Though unseen (at least by most of us), Yeti was an official protected species in the Kingdom of Nepal until the mid to late 1950's, according to Lama Surya Das, one of the foremost American Lamas in the Buddhist tradition and author of "Wisdom Tales From Tibet."

It was during that decade when filmmakers, eager to capitalize on the legend, took it upon themselves to get the snowball rolling with variations of their own. The results were mostly less than legendary, as a closer sampling of these films will show.

Our expedition begins in 1954 with The Snow Creature, directed by W. Lee Wilder, the low-budget brother of famed writer/director Billy.

For those who can't get enough of W. Lee's films, check out Phantom From Space (1953) and Killers From Space (1954).

Anyway, from L.A. to Bombay to Shekkar and the Himalayas in excess of ten-thousand feet, Doctor Frank Parrish (Paul Langton) and his boozy photographer Leslie Denison (Peter Wells) arrive amidst reports of a monster terrorizing the village and abducting its women. After a grueling ordeal up the mountains, the group takes refuge in a cave where a trail, including a native bracelet and a mountain goat skeleton, leads them to a Yeti which resembles a walking carpet, but is at least dimly lit so as not to appear even more ridiculous. The creature causes a cave-in, which accidentally kills his female Yeti mate and child, while he himself is only stunned. From there, the old boy is stashed in a very large refrigerator and taken to California.

While the debate rages over whether the thing is human or not, the monster escapes to resume its marauding ways while otherwise hiding out in the city's cooler storm drains. After a truly tedious search (where the shadowy shot of it stalking the same dark street appears more than once!), the monster is netted, shot and killed during a struggle.

Was this the last of old Snowy? Well, yes…and no.

Other filmmakers had other ideas, and so it fell to budding schlockmeister Jerry Warren to take some stock footage, mix some bad actors in with it, and unfold the tale of two expeditions, one in search of the other, and the first including a half-breed Yeti disguised as a human! In Man-Beast (1956), this missing link not only has murder on his mind, but romantic mating designs on the hottest looking gal around (well, the only gal around, but easy on the eyes nonetheless)! The inevitable fight between man-beast and leading man means death for one. Afterward, the leading lady gasps:

"Take me away from here, Steve! Take me away!" Here's a hint…Steve was not the man-beast (unless details of the honeymoon prove otherwise).

Not exactly a household name to many, save die-hard bad movie buffs, director Warren went on to give us such bargain basement bonanzas as Teenage Zombies (1958), The Incredible Petrified World (1958), The Wild World Of Batwoman (1966), and Frankenstein Island (1981), to name but a few.

However, with its malevolent-minded title character, Man-Beast holds the interest a bit more than Snow Creature, which may not be saying much, but both are in good/bad company with our next offering, Half Human (1957).

John Carradine, as an American scientist, sits behind a desk and lights up his cigarette (at any moment you expect him to look at the camera and say, "Alright, pay me."). The film does get a little more exciting as professor Carradine narrates to a couple colleagues the story of a party of skiers in the mountains of Japan. Among them, Carradine's two assistants were killed, and the only clue was footprints near the cabin. A mold of a footprint indicates a creature of great height and weight (guess who?).

Carradine continues the story of Professor Tanaka's search to find what was considered the Missing Link, a "Snow Man" whom the villagers worship as a god. What follows are a series of continued flashbacks and flash-forwards combining the Carradine scenes with a whole different (and I'm told, better) movie directed by Japan's famed Ishiro Honda (who gave us Godzilla and a whole slew of other big monsters).

Unlike in The Snow Creature, the upright ape-like beings in Half Human (father and son) are seen in the light of day and seem to mean no harm unless provoked, which, alas, they are. Circus owners capture Junior and incur the wrath of Daddy. Toppled trucks, landslides, and a trail of destruction lead to tragedy and death in a pit of bubbling water.

A tacked-on epilog allows Carradine to offer the hope of "new discoveries leading to clues to the evolution of man." Whatever, but it is a pity that Toho Pictures' original Ju Jin Yuki Otoko (1955) has all but disappeared, the result of a dispute with Ainu tribe lobbyists. That film may well have proved to be the best of the lot.

For now, that distinction goes to Hammer Studios' 1957 film The Abominable Snowman Of The Himalayas), where mysticism and philosophy play a part in the discovery of a race of powerful and intelligent man-like creatures. Despite the local Lhama's denial of the Yeti's existence, Doctor John Rollason (Peter Cushing, reprising his role from the 1955 BBC teleplay), along with big game hunter Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker, later of TV's F Troop) and crew set out to find the beasts and bring one back alive.

Rollason theorizes that the creatures are a parallel development of man, and benefiting from years of isolated evolution. When a Yeti is shot and killed, its fellow creatures know it, and their wails echo along the mountains. One by one, the human explorers are driven mad and killed, until Rollason himself, with understanding and reason still intact, finds himself eye to eye with the creatures. In one of those wonderful Peter Cushing moments, all is revealed to him, and through him, to us and to our own imaginations.

Director Val Guest had previously distinguished himself with Hammer's top drawer science fiction films The Quartermass Xperiment (1956) and Quatermass 2 (1957). In The Abominable Snowman, he wisely shrouds the mysterious beings in shadow, as W. Lee Wilder did in The Snow Creature, though not so as to hide a cheap-looking monster.

In the case of The Abominable Snowman the shadows also serve to help preserve the enigma of a race endowed not merely with towering physical presence, but also of advanced mental capacity (complete with mind control abilities) and wisdom beyond most human comprehension.

Over the years, an abominable snowman of one sort or another has dropped in as an escaped beast from an alien spaceship in Jerry Warren's Lapland lollapalooza Invasion Of The Animal People (1959), or as one of director George Pal's Seven Faces Of Dr. Lao (1964), or as an antagonist to Spanish werewolf Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy) in La Maladicion de la Bestia (The Curse Of The Beast), aka Night Of The Howling Beast (1975).

As for the "real" Yeti, we draw your attention to the subject of a recent British documentary set in the Kingdom of Bhutan, on the eastern side of the Himalayas, where DNA analysis of a long black hair suggests an unknown species. A former royal guard describes his encounter with the Migyur (as the Yeti are called by the Bhutanese) as something around nine feet tall with enormous hairy arms, a red face, and a nose like a chimpanzee.

Man? Monster? Missing Link? Figments of the human imagination, or something real that would be best left alone? As the ongoing mystery and deepening search would indicate, someone apparently believes in them.

The question is…do you?

Thanks, Joe.  One reason that the famed "snowman" has proven so elusive may be simply because he finds the world outside his own borders to be quite "abominable." 

Article copyright © Joe Winters

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