Every time I come across “yeti,” I immediately think of my introduction to the word: The creature sitting its hairy ass on sno cone after sno cone lining a sidewalk — a trap set by your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man on an episode of the PBS kid series The Electric Company. Although elementary in craft, that cheap, six-minute segment carries more of a kick than the 1940s-set feature film The Yeti.

An oil magnate (Corbin Bernsen, Major League) and a group of explorers-for-hire go missing in Alaskan Territory after issuing a distress signal. The energy company assembles a veritable super septet to attempt rescue, including a radio specialist (Jim Cummings, The Last Stop in Yuma County), a demolitions expert (Gene Gallerano, Occupy, Texas) and a navigator (Brittany Allen, Jigsaw) whose father (William Sadler, Hard to Kill) is among the disappeared. 

Co-writers/co-directors Gallerano and William Pisciotta initially employ a spirited, semi-campy style that sets up The Yeti as a towering bundle of fun. Instead, it quickly stumbles into a lumbering slog of speeches. If your characters must hunker down in a cabin for a stretch, either stuff their mouths with cracklin’ dialogue (The Hateful Eight) or put a soul-swallowing demon in the fruit cellar (Evil Dead II). 

Our titular cryptid attacks here and there and not often enough. When we finally get a good glimpse of it in its shaggy, matted-hair splendor, you may be reminded of Shriek of the Mutilated meets the beast within Creepshow’s “The Crate” segment. The monster’s murders make for the best parts — sometimes literally, like when Allen’s character attempts to save another from a yeti-yanking, only to be left with the poor sap’s large intestines sliding through her grip like a greased rope. Kudos to the filmmakers for going the practical route rather than taking CGI’s easy out.

The Yeti has the post-WWII pulp aesthetic down pat. (It’s so old-school, “Farmer in the Dell” adorns the soundtrack.) However, visual appeal only gets you so far. Watching is like going on a first (and last) date with someone who looks dynamite, but before the salads have arrived, you’ve discovered little going on between the ears. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Filmmaker Barry Mahon primarily dealt in two genres: sexploitation and kiddie matinees. The Dead One is one of his few standing somewhere in the middle. Shot in New Orleans, it’s a Bourbon Street bouillabaisse of zombies and voodoo.

In the last of three movies he made with Mahon (or anyone), John McKay stars as Johnny, who takes his freshly minted bride, Linda (one-timer Linda Ormond), from the altar to a strip club, because women love that shit. As Johnny explains to a cocktail waitress, they’re combining their honeymoon with business, because women love that shit. He’s inherited a working slave plantation (!) from his grandfather, so they’re gonna go check it out.

En route, they pass a stranded motorist who happens to be Bella Bella (Darlene Myrick of Mahon’s Bunny Yeager’s Nude Las Vegas), whose strip act they just peeped. Because Johnny’s not mechanical, he invites Bella to join them on their honeymoon, because women that love shit.

At the manse, Johnny’s ice-veined cousin Monica (Monica Davis of Mahon’s Rocket Attack U.S.A.) isn’t keen on the unplanned visitor — or the whole thing, really, because Johnny’s marriage triggered a loophole in Gramps’ will that transferred the deed out of her clutches.

In fact, only in Linda’s death can Monica regain full ownership, so she rounds up all the Black people in her employ to play the drums while she conducts a voodoo ritual. This prompts her dead brother (one-and-doner Clyde Kelly) to rise from his coffin as a lumbering zombie. He sports a mullet, a prom tux and a skin tone somewhere between jaundice and guacamole.

Barely over an hour — and even then only because Mahon shows that ritual twice — The Dead One is no classic of the undead, but bears interest for leveraging the voodoo angle all but forgotten once George A. Romero came into the picture. Plus, how else will you hear Mahon’s gripping newlywed dialogue like:

Johnny: “She’s dead.”
Linda: “Can we help her?”

Being made to look stupid onscreen? Women love that shit. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.