Movie Review: Yeti

After their plane crashes into uncharted territory in the snowy Himalayan Mountains, a college football team must fight to survive the harsh conditions and a hungry beast that stalks them with an insatiable bloodlust.

You know I love these cheesy Saturday night Sci-Fi network movies and always find something about them to enjoy, but this one really tried my patience. It's really 2 plots in one, with the survivors of the plane crash tying not to bicker and fight and be annoying long enough to get rescued and the other being the fact that there's a ridiculous looking monster trying to pick them off.

Part of the plot borrows heavily from the excellent movie Alive, about a group of rugby players that went down in the Andes. Those survivors resort to cannibalism after a lengthy time spent stranded whereas the characters in this movie, 1 guy in particular, seem to consider eating their friend's dead bodies pretty quickly after the crash, even though there seemed to be wildlife around as they were well below the tree line. I wouldn't be surprised if the one stupid football player that's playing the "bad guy" role didn't start eating somebody before the plane even began having trouble.

I've said this before, but these monster movies really rely on the monster to look great. That can carry a film and some of them are only as good as the monster is scary or real. In this case, I knew it was going to suck as soon as I saw the yeti. It looks like a cross between The Bumble from Rankin Bass' Rudolf The Red Nosed Reindeer, Cha-Ka from Land of the Lost and a homeless guy I see when I jog down by the river. To make things worse, towards the end of the movie they decide to make the creature be able to jump long distance, and do so with some of the worst CGI effects I've ever seen in my life. It looks like some super-kangaroo or something. Horrible.

The characters are supposed to be a college football team (from the dreaded "State College" according to their sweatshirt) but most look much older, especially our "hero", the quarterback of course, who goes by the name Peyton Elway. I'm not making this up, that's really the character's name. The guy's gotta be near 30 also. I'm not really sure what sort of schedule this college football team has but playing a team that you have to cross the Himalayans to get to isn't good routing, Coach.

They're supposed to be in the Himalayan Mountains but by the ease of which they survive the weather I'm guessing the plane actually went down somewhere in Missouri maybe or perhaps it's Summer. There's no frostbite or deadly cold as most of them run around in just sweatshirts and jeans.

A favorite scene is when a couple of mountain rangers try to get to them and at one point are looking through binoculars and spot them and the plane wreckage. He then says they're a couple of days away. What the hell kind of binoculars are these? The group gets their camp attacked by the Yeti, who kindly waited a few days before doing so, and the rangers wake-up at their camp and see this through the binoculars and arrive at the camp in minutes to help. So they hiked for days and camped out mere minutes from the wreckage apparently? Not sure really.

Anyway, Mr. Bumble kidnaps one of the girls because I think it's decided to give her the ole snowbone all the sudden instead of eating her or squashing her head like it's done to others. They make it to the cave and the yeti is actually laying on the cave floor spooning with the girl. And this just in, yetis snore.

I could go on, but you're probably spent more time on this review than you should the movie. I would say "why in the world do they keep making this awful movies?" but the answer to that is because people like me will watch them. Hell I can't wait for Yeti 2: Yetis In Da Hood.

2/10