-Celluloid Dimension’s most unapologetic section, where we share the best of the worst. Bringing bad movies the love they deserve.
Directed by Michael Findlay
Written by Ed Adlum and Ed Kelleher
Starring:
- Alan Brock as Dr. Ernst Prell
- Jennifer Stock as Karen Hunter
- Tawm Ellis as Dr. Karl Werner
- Michael Harris as Keith Henshaw
- Darcy Brown as Lynn Kelly
Rating: 
Forget the usual hairy-man-in-the-woods routine. Of all the Bigfoot and snowman exploitationers that haunted ’70s and ’80s grindhouses, only Michael Findlay’s serves up a booze-fueled academic shindig, doom-laden monologuing, deadly domestic violence, hysterical women, and a plot twist completely out of its fucking mind. This isn’t exactly cryptozoological folklore as usual. It’s more like a slasher movie populated by university grads, with a professor taking them to upstate New York to investigate sightings of some mysterious creature. The movie spends most of its time on chatter and psychotronic nonsense before periodically unleashing its goofy white, hairy monster for a welcome splash of dirt-cheap gore.
By this time, the Findlays—the roughies’ reigning gurus—had already split up, with Roberta sticking to cinematography and Michael directing while wrestling with a host of personal demons. Maybe that explains why the movie’s limp storytelling feels like it was beamed in from another dimension, completely at odds with its bizarre, chilly aesthetics. With Michael barely seeming to be on the same planet and Roberta dutifully shooting the proceedings, this disastrous little enterprise somehow turns into a thoroughly enjoyable, ultra-cheap exploitation train wreck, held together with spit and duct tape by producer Ed Adlum—the trashmeister behind Invasion of the Blood Farmers—who did his best to keep the whole thing from going completely off the rails. But it’s the sheer offbeat nature of all these flaws that ultimately gives rise to one of the wildest Yetisploitation films ever made—the only one that goes out of its way to pretend to be something it isn’t, just to unleash its greatest shock potential in the form of cult-like cannibalism that’s as outrageous as it sounds. It does for sasquatch exploitation what Rosemary’s Baby does for Satanism.
