FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

swifty77 A nice cross between an adventure film and a horror that places a bunch of character archetypes into the dangerous conditions of the Himalayas. It's a surprisingly good movie although a lot of it doesn't hold up for a modern audience; for example, the abominable snowmen themselves do just look like men. However, the team behind this film played well to their restrictions by keeping the snowmen offscreen until the end, building up the suspense effectively until the big reveal. Cushing's British scientist and Tucker's gruff American are nice contrasts as our protagonists, with their interests and intents being revealed to be more and more different as the film progresses. Director Val Guest leaves us on a rather poignant note, however; using the Yetis as a metaphor for the genuine exploration and endangerment of animals, which was common news at the time.

Prismark10 Despite the title this is really not a monster on the rampage horror movie that you might expect from Hammer. Writer Nigel Kneale goes for quirky science and director Val Guest adds atmospheric direction on a low budget in this spooky thriller.Peter Cushing is principled botanist John Rollason searching for evidence of the Yeti in the Himalayas with an expedition team that includes dodgy Forrest Tucker who is more like a sinister Barnum type showman looking for monetary gain by capturing a Yeti.The creature is very much kept off screen for a lot of the time as Kneale explores humanity's darker side as represented by the likes of Tucker. It is suggested that the Yeti are gentle, intelligent beings from a superior civilisation that one day will take over from humans and Rollason does not view them as monsters.The film has a moral message aimed at perils of human greed and its penchant for destruction.

GusF Although this is neither one of Nigel Kneale nor Hammer's better regarded works, it was one of my favourite on both counts. It was based on a sadly now lost BBC play called "The Creature" broadcast in 1955 and the always brilliant Peter Cushing reprises his role as a botanist named John Rollason who is searching for evidence that Yetis exist in the Himalayas. I don't think that the first credited star Forrest Tucker could act, frankly, but he and Cushing are nevertheless ably supported by the likes of Maureen Connell (the only woman in the film), Richard Wattis, Michael Brill and Arnold Malé. However, Robert Brown is a bit over the top as the obnoxious Ed Shelley.I think that the reason that this film is often unfairly overlooked by Hammer fans is that it's not standard Hammer fare. While it's atmospheric, spooky and claustrophobic like many Hammer films, the villain of the piece is not a supernatural or alien force but us. In fact, that is the reason that the original version of the story was called "The Creature" as Kneale wanted the title to be ambiguous, a subtlety that is lost in the film version. This is a morality play in which Kneale explores the darker side of human nature by suggesting that the Yeti are a superior civilisation in the sense that they're less inherently destructive than humans. They're actually gentle giants who are waiting for the opportunity to succeed humanity as the dominant species when we ultimately destroy ourselves. While other Hammer films keep Dracula or Frankenstein's Monster, etc., off-screen for much of the film, the Yetis are never seen in full at any point. When we do finally see their eyes towards the end of the film, it is clear that they are indeed the gentle creatures that Rollason believes them to be. It predates both series by several years but the film's storyline would have easily fit into either "The Twilight Zone" or "The Outer Limits".

ShootingShark John Rollason is a scientist studying the ecosystems in the frozen Himalayan mountains. He joins a team led by Tom Friend, an ambitious adventurer who wants to trap the elusive creature known as the Yeti. Will they return from this perilous expedition ?This minor black-and-white creature feature, made by the same team responsible for the two excellent Quatermass films of the fifties (director Guest, writer Nigel Kneale and production company Hammer) is an agreeable and intelligent if undistinguished genre flick. The obvious approach would be to do a simple monster movie with the standard ten-little-Indians setup; instead, Kneale's intelligent script approaches both the locating of the creature and its evolutionary position with sympathetic and scientific detachment. The movie is more a critique of the commercial exploitation of such a phenomenon, and the lengths Friend will go to in pursuing it. Cushing and Tucker exploit these ideas very well in their performances, and the support cast is good, including a nice turn by a young Brown (better known as spy boss M in four eighties James Bond movies) as the trapper. While the film has its budgetary limitations it's still good to look at, mixing second unit work shot in the French Pyrenees with some cool looking sets, and it manages to evoke the mystique and sense of mourning the script is aiming for. A thoughtful little flick, and one of a trio of agreeable horror movies American star Tucker made in Britain at the time, the other two being the oddball The Strange World Of Planet X and the not-to-be-missed cult favourite The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye).