How lucky are we to be alive at this day and time people? This day and time being late in the year 2011. Yes, the economy might be in the tubes, gas costs close to four dollars a gallon, air carriers charge us more to fly our bags than to fly people, kids are disrespectful, and observing Black Friday mayhem indicates that society is crumbling at the seams. But all of that doesn’t matter because in two weeks I’ve seen TWO… count ‘em… two Yeti movies. The Sci-Fi channel hit us with ‘Rage of the Yeti’ followed closely by some operation calling themselves SunWorld Pictures who have brought us ‘Snow Beast’ and both movies are equally terrible but for completely different reasons… and all is right in the world once again.

Bo Duke assumes the character of Jim Harwood who is some kind of doctor that studies the migration patterns of the Canadian lynx. I almost fell asleep just typing that. Jim has as EXTREMELY bratty and disrespectful daughter in Emmy (Danielle Chuchran) who he is forced to take along on his study sabbatical since she got herself suspended from school. At first I thought Emmy was going a little overboard in her vehement opposition to going on this trip with her old man, until we actually saw what the doc and his crew were doing. I don’t know if there’s anything more boring than that studying the migration patterns of the Canadian lynx, but now imagine there are no lynx to study which means you’re just studying the migration patterns of stagnant snow.

Where are these lynx? Uh, the Yeti ate them, thank you? And now that’s it run out of Canadian lynx to eat, it’s just eating Canadians. The doc and his team, which consists of his grad assistants Rob (Paul D. Hunt) and Marci (Kari Hawker), have eventually figured out that there is some kind of weird, upright beast running around the cold snow hillsides killing snowboarders and law enforcement officials that don’t carry guns, and they know they have to get the hell out of there, but there are a couple of things holding them back. For starters, Mr. Yeti has crushed one of their snowmobiles. I don’t know why he did this, considering snowmobiles aren’t very tasty, but I guess Mr. Yeti is just an asshole. Then Marci has decided that this discovery is the find of the millennia and has decided to investigate further, by taking the working pickup truck, despite the fact that her boss told her not to do this. She was cute too. But where we saw a cute girl, Mr. Yeti just saw a tasty treat.

So now our heroes are in all kinds of trouble.  Mr. Yeti is still hungry even though he’s eaten almost everybody in this movie, the doc is trapped in his icy lair, and the bratty daughter won’t leave until she and Rob can rescue her old man which will require them to go head up against Mr. Yeti.  Now Rob thought they should just try to get to safety and forget about the old man, but the daughter whined and whined about saving her father so Rob laid it all on the line to make this happen.  There’s going to come a time in this movie where Rob will need this same kind of commitment shown towards his survival that he showed for these clowns. Think that’s gonna happen for Rob?

‘Rage of the Yeti’ vs. ‘Snow Beast’.  Let’s examine the tale of the tape.  Rage of the Yeti features bad CGI monsters where Snow Beast has some nutjob running around the snow in a rubber suit.  Eight Points for ‘Snow Beast’.  Yeti features middle aged actors who were in Stargate and Witchblade, where Snow Beast features middle aged actors who were in Smallville and 7th Heaven (Jason London).  Or was that Jeremy London?  Regardless, a point for Yeti.  In Yeti, almost everybody dies, and in Snow Beast, almost everybody dies.  Obviously that’s a push.  Snow Beast has family melodrama where Yeti has none of that superfluous nonsense.  Three points for Yeti.  Yeti’s heroes are swashbuckling treasure hunters where Snow Beast’s heroes observe the migration patterns of the Canadian lynx.  Dang, I fell asleep again.  Six points for Yeti.

Thus after sending the ballot to our St. Louis office and tabulating the complex equations that have gone into our empirical data, we’ve come to the conclusion that ‘Snow Beast’ gets the nod as the better movie. I know you’re thinking that the math adds up on the side of ‘Revenge of the Yeti’, but as president I’ve vetoed that original summation for a few reasons. First there’s the Bo Duke factor which wasn’t taken into consideration, then there was the fact that ‘Snow Beast’ had way more unintentional humor than that other ‘Yeti’ movie, and a guy in a rubber suit trumps bad CGI every single time.

The bottom line is that neither of these movies are all that good and you might want to opt for Sci-Fi’s own ‘Abominable’ if you absolutely, positively have to watch a Yeti movie, … or Sci-Fi’s ‘Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon’ if you’re really desperate for some Yeti action, and you will be trapped watching folks looking at their computer monitors tracking the migration patterns of snow drifts since the Yeti ate all of the lynx and stuff. But given a choice between the two, always opt for the guy in the rubber suit.