Man Beast (1956)

‘Our offspring should be most interesting. Don’t you think so, Doctor?’

A young woman leads an expedition into the Himalayas to find her brother. He has joined up with a university professor who is looking for the Abominable Snowman after new evidence has ben found. Apparently.

Jerry Warren produced and directed 11 movies. Well, he kind of did. You see his movies normally had a fair bit of someone else’s work in there as well. These were usually Mexican films that he bought cheap, shot new footage around then stapled the pieces together. ‘Man Beast’ (1956) was Warren’s first effort and this methodology was already firmly in place. You see, stars Victoria Maynor and Tom Maruzzi were never in any real danger of altitude sickness as all the climbing and mountain sequences are long shots from some other film. How can you tell? Well, the clothing of the climbers doesn’t match all that well, sometimes they’re roped together and when we cut to our heroes they’re not and the number in the party isn’t always terribly consistent. But apart from that, it’s absolutely seamless.

Well, Ding Dong!

There is an awful lot of this climbing footage but at least it doesn’t interfere with the main thrust of our story. This centres on sinister mountain guide Varga (George Skaff) who is the go-to guy for these trips up top, even though someone always seems to die on his expeditions. You’d have thought that would ring alarm bells but apparently not…

Maynor’s search for her brother is just an excuse to bring a pretty girl into the proceedings. You see, her brother apparently had some injections back home in a ‘continuous experiment’ but, after he’d gone looking for the Yeti, his sister realised that the altitude would ‘be a factor’. We never find out what she’s on about and she never finds him anyway; he’s already dead and we didn’t even see him die!

Although the Yeti are tolerably rendered given this was 1956, what really exposes the low budget roots is some of the staging. A lot of the (stilted) dialogue scenes take place in tents, where the occupants all sit in a convenient row, rather than opposite each other. Also the finale is just stupid. Performances are fairly lifeless with the exception of Skaff, although he doesn’t exactly look Nepalese.

My favourite moment was the avalanche sequence; some library footage followed by the leading man lying on the ground being hit with snowballs thrown from offscreen.

Buy the poster for ‘Man Beast’ here