Jerry Warren's second contribution to the 50's yeti creature feature cycle after the shockingly good "Man Beast" was this simply abysmal atrocity. This time Jerry took a '59 Swedish sci-fi/horror flick and shot crummy new footage with frequent co-star John Carradine in standard drippy uptight professorial mode for a shoddily slapped together mess which Warren callously released upon an unsuspecting world in '62. The only odd thing about this devious practice is that for once Jerry didn't butcher a south-of-the-border Mexican cheapie as was par for the course for Mr. Warren ("Attack of the Mayan Mummy" and "The Face of the Screaming Werewolf" are among the other cinematic crimes against humanity Jerry committed during his dubious career). The movie relates the insufferably talky'n'tedious tale of an attempted alien invasion force which sets loose a large, lumbering, murderous yeti-like beast who runs amok and wreaks the expected destructive havoc all over the desolate snow-covered Lapland countryside. An international team of scientists, complete with an annoyingly bitchy token female in tow, investigate the spaceship landing site and eventually thwart the nefarious extraterrestrials. The technical credits are strictly from hunger: the dark cinematography unleashes a hideous torrent of unsightly horrible fade-outs, the blaring score sporadically drowns out the banal dialogue (a minor blessing in disguise), screaming newspaper headlines are clumsily used to fill in gaping holes in the saggy story, the poky pace plods along with all the thrilling momentum of a snail on Quaaludes, the characters are all paper-thin cardboard cut-outs with all the appeal and charisma of a smelly dead skunk, most of the big scary moments take place off-screen, and the actors seem comatose throughout. Taking amphetamines prior to watching this clunker is optional, but nonetheless still strongly advised if you ever decide to give this stinker a stare.

Although this movie received lukewarm reviews (when it was reviewed at all) by the London critics, I liked it. I still do, even though I now have sufficient clues to realize that a good proportion of the film was actually played by doubles. The heroine has no less than three: a girl to perform her figure skating routines, another to do all her skiing, and another to partly show off her figure in a chaste shower sequence. The hero has only a skiing stand-in to upstage his footage—but the amount of skiing material in this movie is actually quite considerable. With the addition of a song or two, plus the usual pseudo-scientific back-chat, this doesn't leave much time for the monster, an impressively cumbersome, furry giant who manages to shuffle through the snow leaving sharply delineated footprints. In true King Kong style, the heroine has plenty of screams up her sleeve, before the monster is finally pursued and disposed of in an ending rather reminiscent of Frankenstein.Nonetheless, the snowy, ice-bound Swedish locations lend the movie more than routine interest and it must be admitted that director/editor Vogel puts this hokum across with considerable competence, cleverly using both low and high angles to re-enforce the supposed height of the killer creature, and smoothly cutting between 2nd and main unit sequences to generate a fair degree of excitement.Stan Gester played the hero with a great deal of charm. He made over twenty movies (mostly in Sweden) from 1944 through 1962, but this seems to be his only starring role.

A rating of 3 out of 10 is almost too good for this collection of dull and lacklustre clichés. It has everything that this kind of movies from this era *always* has - silly romantic music, a silly girl that gets into trouble for acting like a teenager and then hooks up with the dashing, handsome hero, only to become the object of the aliens' infatuation (complete with screaming and fainting)... And almost the entire first half of the movie is devoted to the cast frolicking (and making romantic innuendo) at a ski resort right next to the "meteor" that they've come there to investigate! There is nothing in this movie that hadn't, even in 1959, already been done a dozen times.An annoying movie.

One thing to know about this movie is that it was made in two different versions. One Swedish and one American. Most of the ones who have commented this film has obviously seen the American edition that was edited and added with extra scenes.From what I've read here and heard from others, the Swedish version is much better, still a really bad movie though, and it's a shame that only the American version has made it to the video market.From what I know the Swedish version only exists in one, maybe two, 35mm copies in Sweden and they are frozen for conservation.I've seen it a couple of times and I cant help laughing. We used to show it here in Kiruna every year at our film festival, Arctic Light Film Festival, but had to stop because it was to expensive to thaw the film.