The Werewolf and the Yeti

Here's a wacky adventure-horror film with splats of gore, a few sexy ladies and two famous monsters. Made in the 70's, The Werewolf And The Yeti was banned in Britain during the Video Nasty madness of the 80's for reasons even harder to fathom than usual, and stayed banned.

The yeti attacks some folks in Tibet before the credits have rolled, immediately establishing the pace for the film: fast! Within minutes the good guys have thrown together a major expedition and are trekking through the Tibetan mountains in an attempt to find out what weird stuff is going on up there. The answer is complicated. The superstitious sherpas won't stop raving about demons in this land, but the real problem is the shrine-guarding vampire women who like a bit of male-straddling on the one hand and snarling like hyenas as they fight over bloody entrails on the other. The hero does manage to escape from this delicate web of sex and violence, but not before he's been afflicted with the curse of werewolfism! As if life isn't complicated enough, the yeti's still at large and evil raiders are starting to attack folks indiscriminately all over the mountains. This all makes for the sensation of as much action as it sounds like it would. Somehow the film achieves a consistently tense feel, more by the portentous way that everyone talks about the situations they're in than by the actual portrayal of those situations. This isn't to downplay the considerable amount of action that there is, including gunfights, swashbuckling, dungeon torture and monster combat. But I do regard this likable film as a triumph of what's good about exploitation - getting maximum cinematic effect out of modest resources. Technically it's good too. I don't know if some mountain stuff was shot day for night, but the intense blue scenes in the snow are atmospheric, as is the oft-scary score. Note however that the use of 'Scotland The Brave' on the soundtrack over establishing shots of England is of a different kind of scary, as is a lot of the dubbed dialogue.

Macroscopic logic isn't The Werewolf And The Yeti's strong point, but few films throw together as many elements as this one does and still achieve something basically coherent, fun and with good exploitation bang for your buck. Seeing this film made me wish they still made stuff like this today.