This was in keeping with the Bigfoot theme started yesterday, and I might return to it in a week or two, but the rest of this week’s movies will be unrelated to cryptozoology. I think.
I tried several times to write a snarky, knowing, witty review of this, but I just can’t.
Because Snowbeast not a bad movie. It may not be a very good movie, but it’s nothing like bad, and does some pretty smart things.
The first smart thing it does might seem stupid, or at least annoyingly unoriginal: the story is Jaws, set at a ski lodge, with Bigfoot filling in on shark duty. But it took a lot of the right lessons from Jaws — you almost never see the menace directly, thanks to Point Of View shots, which saves us from a silly Bigfoot costume (and the few glimpses we get are enough to make you want to see more, which you don’t get — good job); and the characters affected are actual characters, who have functioning brains (mostly).
Of course, when I tell you that the screenwriter, Josef Stefano, also wrote the script for Hitchcock’s Psycho, you might start expecting too much. On the other hand, you at least know that some effort was put into the script by someone who, at the very worst, was pretty darn competent.
There’s not much more to say about it, other than it stars Bo Svenson, who kicks ass even when he’s bored stiff — which he’s not, here. He’s not really into it, but he puts forth some effort, more than just phoning it in.
All in all, pretty satisfying for what it is.