Snowbeast (1977)

 Maybe this wasn't the best movie to start with, since it's definitely on the far better end of the spectrum. On the Wolfman/Wongo scale (We'll get there), this lands somewhere in the middle, but definitely closer to the Wolfman end of things. I've actually seen it multiple times because I actually, genuinely enjoy it. Snowbeast is basically about a, you guessed it, snowbeast, terrorizing a ski resort and the attempts by the manager, his best friend and Olympic skier, and the sheriff to kill the monster. I won't go too much farther into the plot, because I want you guys to watch it for yourselves.     

       Back to the quality of the film: When I say this is one of the better films I'll be talking about, that's not saying much, since most of them are going to be fakakta. That being said, there are parts if this movie that are genuinely very good. The acting and dialogue is actually pretty good, ya know, for a B movie, the cinematography is. . . fine, nothing special, and the snowbeast costume is okay. The big thing that drags this movie down is the awful editing. There a lot of scenes that are just cut so awkwardly and end up making no sense. One scene shows a woman skiing in the woods in the daytime, frantically looking around while the monsters roars can be heard in the distance, before cutting to an nighttime shot from the point of view of the beast traipsing around outside a lodge. At one point, they randomly cut to a funeral scene. I have no idea who the funeral is for, since no one had recently died, the leveling is so bad you can't hear the person's name, and there's only one recognizable character present. There's also a lot of long  scenes where there's no dialogue and really not much of anything happening, just characters wandering around. This kinda thing is meant to just sort of build tension, they're pretty common in 70’s and 80’s horror, but they never really have the intended effect. Luckily, though, thanks to this being a made for TV movie, we're spared of the common trope of the awkward 70's B horror sex scene.

        While it's true that most of the main fallbacks of Snowbeast are technical: The acting, dialogue, writing, and effects are all decent for a B movie, there is one other big monster that plagued Snowbeast, and it isn't the snowbeast. It's the same creature that plagues nearly all B movie creature-features: Not enough monster. For most movies, this is an easy one to explain: They didn't have a lot of money, so the monster costume doesn't look very good, or terrible, even. I've always found this to be an awful excuse, since I would much rather see a lot of a bad monster costume than barely any monster at all. But this is not the case for Snowbeast. The snowbeast looks cool! I mean, maybe aside from its static face, but over all, the costume looks sweet, especially for the time and budget, which I assume was pretty low. They had no excuse not to show us more snowbeast. I would feel cheated out of my snowbeast, but I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot more snowbeast around here in the future*.

        I would like to recommend that you watch Snowbeast, and I'd like to close with a quote from Fred Beldin, a critic for Allmovie: Fred called Snowbeast "one of the weaker entries into an already tepid horror subgenre." Fred, people like you are the reason we don't have more movies like Snowbeast today.* I hate you, stop ruining movies.

STATISTICS

First Death- 3:43

First Onscreen Death- We never really get a real onscreen death. Total bummer.

1st Monster Appearance- 22:06

1st Full Appearance- 47:50

BEST QUOTE

Tony: “It wasn't an animal. . . and it wasn't human either.”

Carrie: “Well, that narrows it down.”

*Snowbeast was remade in 2011, and the newer one is waaay better. I'll talk about it sometime.