Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Thanks to the movie ‘Funny People’ I have a new term to add to my limited lexicon of words I have at my disposal and this word would be ‘organically’. Of course I know what the word means but it’s this new application of the word that I have added in, so instead of one forcing things one should allow it flow ‘organically’. Now where is the relevance to that and this movie ‘Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon’? Well, a lot filmmakers attempt to make movies that are parodies in that they try to make a movie that is bad with the theory being that their attempt will elicit comedy. More times than not they’re forcing the issue and more times than not they fail miserably. It’s not organic. See the ‘Date Movie’, ‘Disaster Movie’ series of flicks for examples of this. Then you have a movie like ‘Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon’ which I think the filmmakers where attempting to make legitimate creature feature but instead they’ve created one of the wackiest, silliest, and funniest movies that the genre has ever produced, and it all occurred within the organic flow of the filmmaking process. This genre we speak of would be the abominable snowman comedy, a genre which I believe consists of one film… this one… but the fact remains that ‘Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon’ is the funniest abominable snowman movie of ALL-TIME.

One the reasons that this movie has us a bit off balance on whether or not it was designed to funny is that our heroes name is Peyton Elway (Mark Menard) and he’s a quarterback. So Mark and his Virginia football team are off to Japan to play in the first ever bowl game in Japan when their plane experiences some ‘turbulence’. Believe me when I tell you that you haven’t see an airplane experience turbulence until you see the fake CGI puppet plane in this movie experience turbulence. It’s really too awesome to describe but the plane was bouncing off of clouds like a pinball.

Anyway the plane crashes in the Himalayas and now we have a crew of young adults who have unfortunately landed in the land of the Yeti. In addition to Peyton we have

super cute team manager Sarah (Carly Pope), a Black dude with extensive knowledge of ancient allegedly extinct snow creatures named Rice (Brandon Jay McClaren), team trainer and Asian chick with dreadlocks Kyra (Elfina Luk) and of course the prerequisite scurrilous back stabbing asshole Ravin (Adam O’Byrne). Everybody else is dead or soon will be. Our kids lay the dead bodies out in the snow which actually works for them because where we see a horrible tragedy the Yeti sees a Piggly Wiggly and he comes by at night and grabs him a body and goes on about his business which keeps him away from our survivors who aren’t yet aware of his existence. Unfortunately food is running low for our crash survivors and it’s ‘Alive’ time as the dead former teammates are starting to look quite tasty. But what I don’t get is that our survivors have full access to the front of the plane and considering this was a transpacific flight, the cabin should be loaded up with roasted nuts and prepackaged meals, not to mention little bitty bottles of liquor. So the irritating Asian chick with the dreadlocks apparently has a problem with eating people and sets the bodies on fire, or in essence burnt down the Yeti’s Piggly Wiggly. Now what’s the Yeti gonna eat? This does raise the larger question as to what was the Yeti eating before the plane crashed? After watching my man eat he’s certainly not down with moderation so unless a plane crashes on a weekly basis he should’ve starved to death decades ago.

Now our kids are on the run with the only thing standing between them and instantaneous death is a couple of park rangers, a couple of really stupid park rangers that is, and a First Down Marker. It’s complicated.

There are a number of things which keep the comedy flowing organically in this film, with a major contributor being possibly the worst CGI in the history of Computer Generate Images. From the airplane turbulence to the airplane crash to the herky jerky yeti movements and the fact that the cat in the Yeti suit and CGI Yeti didn’t come close to matching each other, made for some seriously high brow comedy. In addition to the horrible looking Yeti the actors in this flick kept the comedy flowing with some inspired comedic actions. Ravin the asshole snatched a bunch of chocolates off dead Black guy Chubbs to hoard. I get that. What I don’t get is when faced with opportunity of eating humans or eating his stolen chocolates Ravin opted to eat people. What’s up with that? He didn’t actually start eating his chocolate until AFTER they were rescued. More or less rescued. Because that would indicate that the asshole survived. So we’ve established that Ravin is an asshole which is punctuated by him shooting a returning teammate in the eye thinking it was the Yeti. I’m sorry but we gotta give the asshole a pass on this one. If the teammate had simply piped up with ‘Hey guys, it’s me’, he wouldn’t have an exploded flare in his eye socket. Observe how a wild rabbit magically transforms into the Colonel’s grilled chicken once they cook it. Our characters also seemed to enjoy charging the twelve foot two ton Yeti with razor sharp yellow teeth, only to seemed surprised when it ate them spine first.

At this point in my life my friends the only thing I require from a movie is that it entertain me in someway. True, ‘Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon’ is probably about as bad as a movie gets but I sure did have a good time talking to the television and laughing at it while it was on. But then that’s just me.