Beast-Human Snowman (Half Human)

Yeti’s Berg Addressed

Beast-Human Snowman
aka Jû jin yuki otoko
aka Half Human
Japan 1955
Directed by Ishirô Honda

Warning: Some very slight spoilers but probably not enough to warrant stopping interested readers from pursuing this review, I suspect.

Although not his next film after his original Godzilla, Beast-Human Snowman was the second of a steady stream of sci-fi, horror and /fantasy films made just one year after Ishirô Honda’s most famous behemoth, The Big G, was released onto Japanese screens.

It’s also a lost film.

Yeah... so this film was released to cinemas for a short while by Toho in Japan before being 'unofficially banned’ by them, due to various misconceptions (and possibly the nation’s collective guilt), about the depiction of the mountain tribe in parts of the film who, like the title character,  live on and around Mount Fuji...  many of whom appear deformed due to in-breeding. As such it’s never been released onto any home video format (it was almost released once on VHS tape but got pulled at the last minute) and has remained largely unseen apart from a print which, very occasionally, gets screened at Ishirô Honda film festivals in Japan. I can only assume that’s the source for this blurry transfer of, what looks like a pretty good print, which I purchased from one of the ‘usual kind of places online’, because I didn’t want to end up dying at some point before ever being given the opportunity to watch this film.

It’s true, the usual truncated recut for American audiences, called ‘Half Human’ in this case, was released into cinemas in 1958 but, from what I can understand, this is probably the most compromised version of a Japanese film recut for American release that I’ve ever heard of. Reportedly, between various scenes utilising footage of John Carradine in a new, grafted on and tonally changed story, only half an hour of footage from this original Japanese version found it’s way into that re-cut, by all accounts. So, frankly, I was willing to take a punt on the possibility that the print here might be totally unwatchable in the hopes of being able to see this at last. As it happens, the print is pretty much like one of those bad transfers of old movies at the dawn of DVD so... yeah, quite watchable depending on your expectations, I suspect.

It’s also, as it turns out, another early masterpiece from Honda and, frankly, it’s a crime against filmanity that a film this good has been left to wallow unseen for, so far, 66 years. This needs a decent Blu Ray print released on the double but I suspect the chances of that happening in my lifetime are slim to nothing.

The film starts off in a grim setting... a kind of station waiting room in the rain where a reporter finds a small group of Alpine Club members deep in gloom. They have been to find out what happened to another party lead by a professor who is a brother to one of them. A woman in part of this second expedition, played by Momoko Kôchi, also has... well, had... a brother on the first team but they find his remains a little while into the movie. Apart from one brief cut back to this scene a third of the way through... and then back to it at the end of the movie, the entire film appears as a flashback as told to the reporter. And what a film it is.

After finding the remains of one person, they wait and go back after the ‘spring thaw’ to resume their explorations. Meanwhile, another outfit trying to discover the ‘big foot’ creature that lives there for exploitation purposes, in the tradition of King Kong but more ruthless and unrelenting, are keeping an eye on them without them being aware of their presence. And also, the mountain tribe I mentioned earlier, with the beautiful village daughter played by Akemi Negishi (who was discovered by Von Sternberg and who you might remember from roles in such films as Lady Snowblood and the Female Prisoner Scorpion movies), is a third ‘interested party’ in that they help feed the bigfoot and his son, worshipped as deities in the village.

And there are a lot of shenanigans and twists to the story which I won’t relate or spoil here but, I will say that, at no time, is the title creature presented as anything other than a pacifistic, non-threatening and tranquil creature, completely worthy of our sympathies. Indeed, when one of the characters is being held prisoner and left dangling over a mountain for vultures to finish off, the creature pulls him up and then frees him from his bonds before going peacefully back to what he was doing. Indeed, the only time the creature becomes aggressive and wilfully violent is when, upon regaining consciousness after his son attempts to rescue him, he sees his young ‘un shot to death. So he first kills the people involved with the murder before going to the village of the local tribe and tearing through it in a frenzy of revenge (the tribe actually had nothing to do with the death of his offspring but, he has no way of knowing that as he now obviously sees humans as treacherous and dangerous).

It’s a beautiful looking film shot with a group of actors who are all highly convincing (even the larger than life, evil stereotype of the fortune seeking entrepreneur serves the film well) and also, it has to be said, very familiar. I think I recognised a few members of Akira Kurosawa’s stock company of actors here including the ‘morale booster’ character from Seven Samurai.

There are some great compositions in the 4:3 aspect ratio and Honda uses the frames well, especially in the group shots where everyone seems to be on the screen without the shots seeming over crowded. Also, there are some great skiing shots where big, diagonal swathes of snow take up a lot of the composition as the team of the Alpine Club glide across the frame. There’s even one shot which reminded me a little of a moment in a Kurosawa film called Stray Dog, where he goes to an extreme amount of non-action space on a frame. In this case, we see a big mountain valley and, at the very bottom of the shot, like ants and taking up less than a 20th of the vertical space, the small group of the expedition are walking from one side of the frame to another, almost hidden before the eye is attracted to the movement.

Added to all this, there’s some interesting stuff where the camera shoots through undergrowth and we can just make out the movement of a figure behind it all. Are we watching one of the party or a bigfoot, seems to be the challenge of shots like this and, I have to say, they fit in really well.

The film is genuinely intriguing and atmospheric too, primarily in the way the tension is ratcheted up before the audience is let in on the true, peaceable nature of the title creature.

One such scene is when the expedition first go to find out what’s going on and are staying at a log cabin (where they meet Akemi Negishi’s character the first time). In one sequence where the gloomy tension and mood of the expedition is dominant, the silence of the room is first shattered by the hourly warblings of a cuckoo clock before immediately being followed by the sound of a phone ringing. When one of the party answers it, we hear yelling, the wailing of a beast and a shot, heralding an ominous atmosphere of a potentially hostile creature (later we find that the creature was trying to rescue and care for an injured party but, by then, things have escalated).

Another great sequence full of creepiness is when we first meet the bigfoot. Momoko Kôchi’s character is sleeping in her tent when, in the window of the canvass just above her sleeping form, appears the face of the creature. It then reaches inside an opening in the tent with its hand and, out of curiosity, starts feeling around her face before she wakes up and screams in terror. It’s a nice moment and also our first inkling that the ‘Beast-Human Snowman’ is not the aggressive creature one might expect in this kind of genre movie.

And that’s me more or less done on this one. Masaru Satô’s score is perhaps less striking than I would have expected from him but perfectly suits the mood and tone of the picture. There’s a bit of an error when you may realise that many of the events being told by the returned party and conveyed to the reporter are not anything the Alpine Club members could have possibly had any knowledge about but, I think I’ll kindly put that down to framing the whole story for the audience as opposed to the first hand knowledge the reporter is getting. Artistic license and all that.

Whatever its very minor faults though, make no mistake, Beast-Human Snowman is one of Honda’s best films and, like I said earlier, it’s a real crime that this one has not had a release and that, at time of writing this article, most people haven’t seen the film and a lot of people are probably even unaware that this film exists. So, in the end, yeah, I was glad I paid the money on this one and am really happy to have been given the opportunity to see it. If you are a fan of Japanese fantasy films of this type, you may well want to try and track down a source for this one. Great movie. Deserves a proper release.

Doctor Who - The Enemy Of The World

Two By Two

Doctor Who - The Enemy Of The World
BBC DVD Region 2
Airdate: 23 December 1967 - 27 January 1968

2013 was a relatively good year for Doctor Who fans. After the initial disappointment that an alleged cache of “missing presumed wiped” episodes of the show had possibly been mostly ransacked and sold off to private collectors, the good news was that, as part of that cache, all but one episode of the missing 1967 story The Web of Fear and all of the serial that preceded it, The Enemy Of The World, were now once more amongst us. The BBC more or less rush released the two stories onto DVD with pretty much no extras at all at the end of the year and, from what I can remember, both stories languished at the very top of the DVD charts for a week or two. Not a bad chart performance for a couple of black and white Patrick Troughton stories almost 50 years old.

This marks my first screening of this story, although I had the novelisation of this one, adapted by Fourth Doctor companion Ian Marter. I remember when reading that novel as a kid, wondering how they'd managed to be able to use a word like “bastard” on a family viewing, British TV show in the 1960s and, as the existence of this recording confirms... they didn’t. Marter was adding his own dialogue to the mix and gave it a far more adult tone than it had originally, methinks.

This is a good story to have back with us, though. There are, sadly, very few Second Doctor stories surviving and this one is a particularly interesting one to have because it features my favourite Doctor, Patrick Troughton, in a dual role. Yes, I know it’s the old ‘jump the shark’ doubles plot but, already in the, then, short history of the show, this wasn’t the first time that a doppelganger of The Doctor had cropped up and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Here it’s done pretty tastefully and, believe it or not, there’s only one scene right near the end of the last episode where the two characters actually come face to face. So you don’t have to sit through too much of that split screen stuff here.

Why this is a good story to have had recovered though, is because of the versatility of Troughton’s standout performance. Yes, we’re all aware he was good as The Doctor and even non-Doctor Who fans will remember him, I’m sure, as being an outstanding character actor in films such as, for example, the original version of The Omen (reviewed by me here), where the priest he is playing gets impaled by a church spire. However, although he is a double for the title character, Salamander (the titular 'Enemy of the world'), he is only his double in appearance. The evil Salamander speaks with a kind of Mexican accent and this gives Troughton a chance to show off how he handles dialects. He also does some much more subtle stuff than this with the dual role, though. For instance, as The Doctor is working on perfecting his impersonation of Salamander so that he can find out if the tyrant of a future time in the Earth’s history, the far off year of 2018, is actually what his enemies are saying he is... he comes over as something like a cross between the two roles. Pulling it off enough to fool Salamander’s chief of security but still being different enough from his performance as Salamander throughout the serial that you can almost see The Doctor going through a learning curve.

The companions in this one are two of my favourite ones, Jamie and Victoria and, of course, age old unrealised sexism raises its head again when, to help The Doctor, Jamie makes it appear that he is saving Salamander’s life so he can get a job as one of his personal bodyguards. He asks Salamander to sort out a job for Victoria and she gets... cook’s assistant. Well, it is ‘of it’s time’ I guess and I’m not too worried about those kinds of gender stereotypes, especially when some of the episodes have smart performances by Mary Peach as a resistance fighter and Carmen Munroe as a food taster, the latter being an extremely strong role with no clear black and white division on the character who finds herself working for Salamander, even though she hates him, before eventually switching sides and... well, I’ll leave you to discover the final fate of her character here.

The music in this one is quite prominent in the mix in some places for a show of this nature in the era it was broadcast and the plot itself, while a little reminiscent of an old Flash Gordon serial in its twisty/turny revisiting of terrain and locations backwards and forwards as the narrative continues, is still quite entertainingly told... even if it doesn’t have an inhuman monster bent on the destruction of The Doctor and his companions, as many of the shows had.

As usual with the Troughton stories, there’s a lot of humour involved and one of the things that got me chuckling was when someone mentioned they should rendezvous at the old, disused jetty. “Disused yeti?” proclaims The Doctor, slyly referencing the robotic creatures from the, now sadly lost, story The Abominable Snowman. The creatures were quite popular and had made their debut only two stories prior to this one. They would make their second appearance, in updated and perhaps a bit less appealing costumes, in the very next Doctor Who adventure, The Web Of Fear (reviewed by me here).

As a lot of the earlier Doctor Who serials did in those days, the end of each story would directly cliffhanger into the next story and this one is no exception. At least, however, we are able to watch the other side of the cliffhanger in this case. At the end of the sixth episode of The Enemy Of The World, the TARDIS is in flight in space and time but the doors are open and The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria are trying to hold on for dear life in case they get sucked out and scattered in time and space (I won’t tell you why... "spoilers sweetie"). Luckily, we now have the majority of the episodes recovered for The Web Of Fear and after the prologue of that adventure, we once more rejoin The Doctor and his companions in this predicament until Jamie can get the TARDIS stabilised once more. So, in that regard at least, it’s nice that running stories were rediscovered and restored.

The Enemy Of The World is quite a nice, pacey Doctor Who adventure and it’s also better for the fact that not everybody is what they seem. The bad guys and good guys aren’t as clear cut until the final episode and doubts about the intentions of certain characters do rear themselves right from the onset. If you’re a fan of Doctor Who and the Second Doctor in particular then The Enemy Of The World should definitely be on your ‘watch list’. If, however, you are new to the programme then I suspect a more ‘monstercentric’ episode might be a better jumping on point than this. Still, hard to go wrong with Troughton in such fine form and, once again, this charming actor doesn’t disappoint. And with Donald Trump voted in as the president of the USA at the moment, the idea of a dodgy dictator such as Salamander ruling the world of 2018 with an iron fist doesn’t seem like a million miles away from the real world, to tell the truth.

Doctor Who - The Web Of Fear

Where Snowman
Has Gone Before

Doctor Who - The Web Of Fear
UK Airdate 3rd February - 9th March 1968
BBC Region 2

I’ve wanted to see this serial for most of my life and certainly never expected to see the bulk of the episodes that are on this BBC DVD release from the end of 2013. You might remember the news story at the time? Five out of six of the episodes of The Web Of Fear and all of the complete serial to Enemy Of The World, two Patrick Troughton Doctor Who serials which had been, like many, purposely wiped out from the BBC archives in the early 1970s, were found and quite quickly released onto DVD. There are no extras on the discs (apart from a reconstruction using the original sound recording and surviving stills for the missing third episode on The Web Of Fear) but the DVDs still managed to hit the top of the DVD charts for weeks and there was a lot of excitement about the releases.

This is an important story for two reasons... the first being that this is the second appearance of the Great Intelligence and his robot servants, the Yeti. This is actually the sequel to the original Doctor Who adventure The Abominable Snowmen but we only have one surviving episode, to date, of that first Yeti story. The Great Intelligence was later to return a few times in the form of Richard E. Grant during the Matt Smith era of the show but the only other time the Yeti were seen after this was, of course, the anniversary story The Five Doctors, when Patrick Troughton’s second incarnation of The Doctor and Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart briefly took one on although, if memory serves, not much more than an arm was seen on that occasion.

And talking of the Brigadier, although this is not actor Nicholas Courtney’s first appearance on the show (that was in a part in the William Hartnell story The Daleks’ Master Plan), it is the first appearance of him playing his most famous character, Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart... although this is before the character was the Brigadier of UNIT and was, at this time in his chronology, a Colonel in the army.  Unfortunately, and as luck would have it, the third episode of this serial, marking his first appearance, is the one missing episode which has been “reconstructed” using stills so, alas, you can hear his first episode but you can’t see it. He is in the next three episodes too, though, so at least we can get a proper look at Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart in his earliest story.

So The Web Of Fear starts off with Professor Travers, played by Jack Watling, and it must have been strange for audiences who remembered the character from the previous year to see him playing the part in “aged up” make-up at the start of this serial because, in the 1967 serial The Abominable Snowmen, he’d played the character as he was 40 years before this second adventure takes place. He is seen at the start arguing with his daughter and a private collector, who has the one surviving Yeti robot shell in his personal museum. However, Travers has been doing some experiments and the Yeti control sphere he is working on has disappeared. We see it break into the museum and activate the Yeti which, because of the impracticalities of the original costumes (if I’m remembering rightly), suddenly transforms before our eyes into the Mark 2 Yeti which, in all honesty, don’t look all that great compared to the original creatures but... hey, I’m really not complaining.

The Doctor and his companions, Jamie and Victoria, arrive some time after this in the underground system in London, which has been locked down and is one of the places where the army is holed up because the Yeti have taken over London. Once The Doctor and his companions arrive, after some fair amount of shilly shallying back and forth among the tube tunnels for a couple of episodes, they lend their assistance to the Army, Travers and Traver’s daughter Anne. However, while his on screen daughter is played here, very nicely, by Tina Packer, this serial is also noted as being the second time that Jack Watling has also played opposite his real life daughter on Doctor Who (the first time being the aforementioned serial The Abominable Snowmen). Victoria is, of course, played by his daughter Debbie Watling and, towards the end of the serial, she shares a fair few scenes with her father. This, of course, wasn’t the last time a parent and child actor would be playing opposite each other on Doctor Who... the Matt Smith era story The Crimson Horror (reviewed here) also featured Diana Rigg and her daughter... but it’s certainly interesting to see how the chemistry between father and daughter works here.

All in all, I had a lot more fun with this serial than with the one I’d watched a few weeks before (The Ice Warriors, reviewed here) as it’s very much a fun romp typical of serials which use a few locations and lots of running to and fro between them as new plans to conquer the alien menace are introduced and tried. The writing continues to be more interesting than a lot of modern era Doctor Who stories in that the B-characters are more fleshed out, even when they have only a very subsidiary role to the plot, and the actors playing those kinds of parts have more to do, with the writing allowing them to bring more of their personality out in the roles. Of course, this is partially because the story and characters have more room to develop in a multi part serial, rather than trying to cram everything into 45 minutes in one hit like they usually have to today, so I guess I’m comparing intergalactic apples to Gallifreyan oranges here... but either way you cut it, the minor characters also have room to leave their mark in these shows.

The Yeti are still a great creature, even if they’re not as pleasing to the eye as they were in the more cumbersome costumes of the previous serial, making nice growling noises and being quite lethal and dangerous, despite suffering from ‘they’re moving so slow they’ll eventually catch up with you through sheer will power of plot function’ syndrome for most of the time. The ending of the story is cool too, in that things don’t quite go as The Doctor had originally planned and, to cap it off, you have everyone running around in what look like genuine sections of the London Underground like Covent Garden, Holborn and various Circle Line locations. I’ve always kind of liked the idea of stories set on and around the London tube system but they’ve mostly managed to let me down. The studio sets on this one are so well done that apparently the BBC received complaints from London Transport at the time, saying they’d filmed in their tunnels without their permission... so the sets are that good.

One thing, however, really puzzles me and it’s something I am hoping one of you readers might know the answer too. As Troughton is running around in a station in the last episode, he passes a movie poster which says it’s starring Rod Steiger and Sydney Poitier and it’s definitely the same graphics from the advertising for In The Heat Of The Night from the previous year (although The Web Of Fear itself is set in the ‘future’, in the early 1970s... which makes me wonder about the continuity between this story and the UNIT stories later in the show... up to and including the Brigadier character’s last appearance as a cyberman in the Peter Capaldi story Death In Heaven - reviewed here). However, instead of being called In The Heat Of The Night, the film is called BlockBuster... which makes no sense to me because I can find no record of In The Heat Of The Night being retitled to that in any international territories and, definitely, not in the UK. Now it may have been that the BBC, who wouldn’t be seen to have any advertising on their channels at that point in time, had changed the title to avoid advertising the film. Even the cartoon show Top Cat was always announced on air and listed in the Radio Times as Boss Cat to avoid having the same name as a recognisable brand of cat food. However, if that’s the case, why use a clearly recognisable and famous movie poster and leave the actors’ names on it? And why change it to a term like blockbuster when, to my knowledge, that particular generic term for an extremely successful film hadn’t slipped into usage yet in the late 1960s, when this thing was written? I’d be interested if anyone has got the definitive answer to this unusual “guest appearance” and, if you do, please leave it in the comments section below.

Despite suffering a little from not having a proper third episode... which is a great shame but, you never know, it may turn up some day... The Web Of Fear is a really nice little Troughton serial and I’m delighted to be able to finally watch the thing at last. Fans of Doctor Who, and the Second Doctor in general, will love this one and, with so few of the Troughton stories surviving the whole “missing presumed wiped” scandal, it’s one of the few stories we have to remember this Doctor and these specific companions by. Definitely a nice addition to the Doctor Who library and I’m very much looking forward to picking up the preceeding serial, Enemy Of The World, sometime in the course of the next year.

The Werewolf and the Yeti

Yeti’s Burg

The Werewolf and the Yeti
aka Night Of The Howling Beast
aka La maldición de la bestia
1975 Spain
Directed by Miguel Iglesias
West Minster Fayre Films Ltd 
DVD Region 0

Warning: Big hairy spoilers at the end... 
but it’s not that kind of film and it’s all to be expected anyway.

Depending on your belief as to whether the “lost” 1968 film, The Nights Of The Wolfman, was ever shot or not, The Werewolf And the Yet is either the 7th or 8th in the series of 13 (or 12 or 14 depending on your viewpoint on other movies including this character) films featuring Paul Naschy as his famous werewolf creation, Waldemar Daninsky (aka The Hombre Lobo series) which he made between 1968 and 2004. It’s also one of the few in that series that I’ve not seen before and one I’ve been trying to get a hold of for a long time (as has my supplier, also a Waldemar Daninsky fan).

What I'd completely forgotten when I was watching it, until I did a touch of research for this review, is that one of the reasons it’s been especially difficult to see, in this country in particular, is that it was a victim of the “video nasties” act back in the 1980s. Looking at it now, of course, when so many things shown on popular television are far stronger meat than anything on the menu here and when films like the banned, uncut Zombie Flesh Eaters are readily available nowadays at your local video store (if you can still find a video store standing), one wonders why it was even on the radar as a video nasty in the first place (see my review of a documentary detailing that particularly dark period in the BBFCs evil history here - Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide). Of course, looking at the majority of films on that list, some of which seemed quite tame even by 70s and 80s standards, one could ask oneself the same question of pretty much most of the films that had the misfortune of ending up on that list.

The Werewolf and The Yeti, however, is not a great hidden gem, as it turns out. It’s certainly one of the more competently shot in the series, with some occasional nice designs and transitions...  and with a certain clean, uncluttered look about it... but it’s also less interesting in terms of the Daninsky series as a whole, which is a shame because the setting and plot, such as it is, are something which could have fuelled a really great “hombre lobo” film.

It starts off quite strongly with three snowbound explorers being attacked by the yeti of the title. Our scene then shifts to London, Westminster. And how do the Spanish film-makers further support the obvious visual and tell the audience that this part of the movie is set in England? Well that’s easy isn’t it? You just play Scottish bagpipes over the shot, so people know it’s London. Um. Wait! What?

Anyway, an elderly professor and his beautiful daughter are planning a trip to Tibet to track down the yeti who destroyed the last expedition, so the professor sends for world famous anthropologist and psychologist Waldemar Daninsky, as played by Paul Naschy.

Wait. Hang on!

"Since when is Waldemar Daninsky a world famous anthropologist and psychologist?" you may ask yourself. Well, since they decided to make this movie, I guess? The professor wants Daninsky, not just for these credentials but because he can apparently speak fluent Tibetan.

Of course, right? Whatever...

We’ve often seen Daninsky burst into snatches of Tibetan before, right? Maybe that’s the growling sound he makes whenever he turns into a werewolf because I’m buggered if I can remember a movie where he was a master of such foreign languages.

Moving swiftly on...

After the expedition has started, Daninsky and his guide, who looks like a giant bear, cross eyed version of Peter Lorre on steroids, scout ahead for the professor and his team and the guide promptly vanishes under the snow when he goes mad about being in the valley of the howling devils, or some such. It all happens so fast. Waldemar is alone against the elements but, a minute or so later, he stumbles into some kind of Tibetan temple cavern in a mountain and promptly faints. He is alone with two good looking ladies, guardians of the temple, who nurse him back to health and decide to keep him prisoner as he will be, and I quote, “a good companion and an ardent lover.” Obviously not happy about being the dedicated sex slave of two gorgeous women (because who would be, eh?) he tries to escape, only to stumble across the two of them eating bits of somebody, possibly Daninsky’s former guide, in their dining area... also known as “the floor”. The women promptly turn into she-wolves and bite Waldemar before he escapes, quickly transforming him into the angst ridden werewolf creature we know and love.

Oh hold on a minute!

This is preposterous. How many bloody times do we have to put up with another origin story for this character! We saw him turn into a werewolf back in 1968 in Mark Of The Wolfman (aka Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror) and since then we’ve seen him rebooted and re-bitten afresh with absolutely no reference to his past in almost every movie. What are these writers playing at? He’s Waldemar Daninsky. He is always played by Paul Naschy but... he has a different origin in practically every movie. C’mon guys! Nobody’s memory is that bad! I just don’t get it.

Anyway, while Daninsky has been having his adventures, the main expedition has been set upon by bandits who are lead by a man who is clinging on for life and who is manipulated by the evil scientist woman who has promised to keep him alive through alchemical means derived from her hobby of torturing people. The professor’s daughter is her prisoner, as is Daninsky who has since learned that a special flower that grows only in Tibet, mixed with the blood of a woman who loves him, will cure him of his werewolvery ways (which I think must be the fanboy who is Paul Naschy referencing the Marifasa Lupina flower from my all time favourite werewolf movie, Werewolf Of London, which was Universal’s first attempt at establishing a werewolf myth back in 1935) . All hell soon breaks loose and the beast lurking inside Waldemar’s tortured heart kills all the villains (and pretty much everyone except his main squeeze) before he is suddenly startled by the roaming yeti (finally) from the pre-credits sequence.

In a startling let down of expectations, werewolf and yeti fight... and when I say fight I mean trade a couple of blows before Daninsky bites the yeti on the neck and kills him, right before the girl accidentally finds the flower and, following the instructions she wasn’t in any way present to hear in the scene in which they were revealed, mixes her blood with it and gives it to Waldmemar to eat. Waldemar is cured and the two go off arm in arm into the sunset.

In the snow.

In the snowy, snowy, snow setting sunset in Tibet where they probably won’t make it back alive before freezing to death but, hey ho, you’re not supposed to imagine what comes next after the credits have rolled in these kinds of movies, are you?

The Werewolf And The Yeti is a nice looking entry into the series, to be sure, but ultimately it’s also one of the weaker ones and I wasnt’t all that entertained by the onscreen antics past the opening promises of snowy settings to the werewolvery action. And, big tip for the marketing people? The print I saw of this movie is called The Werewolf And The Yeti. This raises expectations of their being some sizeable “yeti action” in it. However, the time spent with the actual yeti is abominably small - a few seconds at the start of the film and, maybe not quite two minutes right at the end does not constitute the kind of yeti co-starring status I was expecting from your title. So all in all, I would only recommend this one to people who are already fans of this series of films. This is not a good jumping on point (which might explain why it’s so maddeningly hard to get hold of) and I would point people in the direction of something like the much better Dr. Jekyll And The Wolfman for a good one in this series to watch instead.

My review of the book Muchos Gracias Senor Lobo is here

Some of the other films in this series are reviewed by me here...

Assignment Terror
The Beast And The Magic Sword
Fury Of The Wolfman
Howl Of The Devil 

Doctor Who - The Snowmen

There’s No Business Like Snowbusiness

Doctor Who - The Snowmen
Airdate: 25th December 2012. 
UK. BBC1

Warning: Oh yes. A positive web of fearsome spoilers here in this one.

Oh my God! They killed Kenny! Err... oh no... best not say that, it’s one speculative spoiler too far, perhaps... but whatever... um...

Okay then. That was bloody good.

I’m so glad and, frankly, relieved that, after complaining about four of the last five episodes in the current series, this mid-season Christmas special turned out to be... well... a little bit special after all.

This is probably going to be a fairly short review because I’ve really not very much to complain about and everything to praise... except for one thing (oh c’mon... you knew I was going to complain about one thing, didn’t you?) and that is... why the heck is The Doctor being such a sulky, stick in the mud after losing “The Ponds”. I’m not sure you can really go and sulk in Victorian London for so long and change your basic character to one of so much “bah humbug” as that. And then to change it back in a flash... that’s pretty silly. I mean, okay, you can use the riddle of the double death in this season of a character (and possibly more... will Moffat stop at just two almost impossible deaths?) as impetus to bringing The Doctor out of his sulky rut... but if you ask me the gentleman was perhaps protesting too strongly anyway, in certain sequences.

So anyway, other than that, there’s so much for people to take away and ponder from this episode...

There was the return of the lesbian silurian Madame Vastra and her wife Jenny Flint, running around London with Strax the Sontaran (all three of whom first appeared in A Good Man Goes To War - reviewed here) and who I would still like to see more of. Then there was the brilliant new assistant who first appeared in Asylum Of The Daleks (reviewed here), the first episode of this season, and there to give rise, apparently, to the kind of nerdy timey wimey and, indeed, timey-whiney attitude that stray reviewers such as myself (especially myself) are apt to engage in when it comes to complaining speculation about the tying up of loose threads (often in a less than satisfactory manner, I might add) in the Moffat shows. But thats okay. It gives us something to keep us busy complaining... so that’s all good.

Then there was the great idea of intelligent snow that mirrors thought and is looking to create a more stable being to wreak havoc on our tiny planet... and it’s at that point very early on in the proceedings that I should have figured out who the real villain was, but it took a little while longer and I can kick myself a little really because, when I first saw the new shots of the doctor wearing the top hat I thought to myself it was very reminiscent of another long gone Doctor who I remember being drawn in a very similar fashion in reprints from various Doctor Who annuals when I was a kid.

Okay, so the theme for this episode, and perhaps this series is, if I’m not very much mistaken... and I might well be, let’s face it, I’m probably wrong almost as often as I’m right on this stuff... is my favourite Doctor, Patrick Troughton... the second Doctor. Honestly, the title The Snowmen was already reminiscent of the title of the story The Abominable Snowmen, after all, so it really shouldn’t have been that much of a leap for me.

Pennies began to drop only when The Doctor mentioned a good strategic attack plan would be the London tubes in 1967... which gives them time to set up shop just before Troughton’s second pop at this villain in the tubes of London in 1968. Then, when the GI initials on the card, that Richard E. Grant’s villainous character was giving out, were properly revealed as being The Great Intelligence... that was all the confirmation needed. The Great Intelligence was the villainous “thing” controlling the Yetis in the two Troughton adventures The Abominable Snowmen and The Web Of Fear. Woohoo... are we heading for our very own Yeti story at the culmination of this season? Are we heading towards a special edition of the programme where The Doctor and Clara will be CGI spliced directly into the action of whatever surviving footage there is of the Troughton episodes of The Web Of Fear in much the same way as the Deepspace Nine episode Trials And Tribbleations CGI spliced the DS9 crew back into the classic Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles, all in time for The Doctor’s 50th anniversary celebrations in November of next year?

Well, probably not that last, I suspect. Wishful thinking, the CGI splicing bit because, frankly, this is the BBC not Paramount Pictures... it probably costs a bomb to do that kind of thing well. But, you know, if they do go down that path... you heard it guessed here first!

Okay... so there was all that in this episode... what else?

Well, everything else, actually.

A bit of magical wonder as Clara Oswald Oswyn trails The Doctor to his secret, cloud hopping TARDIS lair (oh, okay, two things I didn’t like then... the new TARDIS interior sucks, it has to be said, in comparison with the last two). A bit of the old run, jump, monologue about gobbledy-gook physics and then run around a bit more... which is always good for screen time in Doctor Who (and talking about going on about Doctor Who... can they please stop pushing those two words throughout the latest series please... okay, so that’s three things I didn’t like then). The dialogue was fantastic, with some brilliant high comedy in a three hander between The Doctor, Clara and Strax as the audience are introduced to the inherent properties of a “memory worm” in, probably, the most humorous way they could. The framing was clean and the editing pacey and coherent (coherent is good and not always something which can be counted on these days, to be honest) and the music, elegant and melodically Victorian, was very impressive... with Murray Gold’s Eleventh Doctor sub-theme only being pushed about three times in the episode, saved for the occasions when The Doctor was doing something extremely... well... Doctor-like. Which is what good leitmotif should do, I guess. There was also a nice but of musical parody when The Doctor was pretending to be Sherlock Holmes where Gold wrote and orchestrated a cue in a nod to the music being used currently on Moffat’s other succesful TV show, Sherlock... so that was a nice bit of business.

Okay, so I’m not going ot labour the point here... this episode was a marked change in tone and pace (by which I mean it wasn’t deadly dull like a lot of the episodes this series) and overall, this and the usual promise of puzzling things to come, which I’ve fallen for yet again (even though Moffat usually lets me down big time with his end games) is enough to keep this viewer on board for the rest of the series, for sure.

Really strong episode. Well worth your time and especially if you’re a fan of the Troughton era... now if they can just bring Jamie and Victoria or Zoe back for the finale, then I will be fairly happy. Great episode... well worth a watch. Can’t wait to watch again on DVD.