Seen at a screening of The Yeti.
I was surprised to learn that The Yeti made its debut only on 3 April at a festival in Chicago yet was playing here in Madison just a few days later. To the programmer at AMC Fitchburg, I salute you.
It was a really fun monster movie about a rescue mission seeking to find out what happened to a previous expedition into deepest, darkest Alaska in 1947. The look and style was old school and it appears there was no CGI which makes it all the more retro. The title font looks like it was from a 1950s b-movie and one scene even had a newsreel look and feel to it. We had the overreach/hubris of scientists, a horror shown largely only in shadow or as a hazy figure shrouded in fog. We'd get an arm here or a tuft of fur there but the movie smartly let the creature exist as sound for quite a bit until the end. A growl or some strange noise or the cries of terror of its victims.
A genuine creepfest full of horror as the crew of the rescue mission are picked off one by one. But the movie also mines a vein of rich thematic material as the Yeti is shown to be less evil, perhaps, than just another facet of Nature doing what creatures do. Plus 2 members of the rescue mission are the children of 2 of the missing explorers. At 90 or so minutes the movie does not mine this vein deeply, I grant you, but it did so just enough to add color and turn the story in another direction which I found to be interesting and in keeping with the movies of yore that The Yeti seeks to invoke.
I arrived to the showing late and missed a trailer or 2 or 3.
This one flummoxed me. It was very confusing and weird but I am unsure if that is actually representative of the movie or if it was a ploy. Weird is good! I just found this trailer odd and it deviated from the norm. Could be good, though.
This was, unsurprisingly, a red-band trailer. On Monday I ran into Lewis Peterson, co-owner of Four Star Video, who was attending one of the mystery movie screenings at AMC and he was eagerly anticipating it being this one.
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