MAN BEAST (1956)

MAN BEAST (1956)

Tagline: Hair-raising excitement in the icy lair of man-like creatures roaming the roof of the world!

(Sci-Fi, Horror, Creature Feature) [G]

Note – This movie did not originally have an MPAA rating, but I am pretty sure it would have been a G.

I can't believe such men as Du Bois, Wagner, Hale, and Bishop could be completely wrong. One of them, yes. But four distinguished scientists, each at a different time, different place, have seen the same evidence.

In this one Connie Hayward, a friend and Steve Cameron decide to go on an expedition to the Himalayas looking for her brother who has gone missing. When they get to where her brother should have been but only a mysterious guy named Varga remains. He seems to want to help, but Steve and Connie become suspicious after some of their party go missing. Meanwhile, the entire group is facing attacks from “abominable snowmen” which the locals all warned them about.  

First off, this freakin movie has one of the weirdest plots of any of the movies about Yeti, or abominable snowmen. I won’t go into the character of Varga (played by George Skaff who is one of three actors in this whole movie who actually had a long career in Hollywood), but this dude is creepy from the onset. Lloyd Nelson who plays Trevor Hudson also had a pretty solid career in acting as does Asa Maynor who plays Connie Hayward. She is probably most famous for her role as Mrs. Riley in THE CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Outside of that pretty much everyone else was either in just this movie or very few other films. That even applies to the lead actor Tom Maruzzi who plays Steve Cameron who was only in this movie and that was it. We also have an odd situation where the director created a fake credit for Rock Madison who wasn’t even in the movie. He wasn’t in the movie because he doesn’t exist. 

Okay – so in spite of all that, this movie is actually pretty interesting. Yes, there is a lot of climbing mountains and all that and basically, no one can act to save their lives (no not even Asa Maynor is good in this) but I actually enjoyed it. It is not as slow-moving as THE SNOW CREATURE and at the very least the Yeti suit has an actual Yeti face, unlike what we get in THE SNOW CREATURE. I will say that some of the direction is just really weird. Several repeated sequences and annoying slow-motion oddities. Because the direction is so odd and because the director literally made up a credit for the movie, I decided to look a little more into Jerry Warren and he’s not even Roger Corman level bargain-basement budget-wise. His stuff was below that, but I am not going to knock a guy who just wanted to make movies so bad he pretty much just threw films like THE INCREDIBLE PETRIFIED WORLD, TEENAGE ZOMBIES and FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND together. 

Overall the 50s had far better to offer than this thing, but it’s actually a weird enough story to keep you interested, and like I stated before, the Yeti has a Yeti face, so man, that has to count for something in this topsy-turvy world we live in. 

For me, this is a 3 out of 7, but it’s definitely watchable.

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF JERRY WARREN PRODUCTIONS INC. AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY. 

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