"Yeti"(2007)d/Paul Ziller

The people behind the original made-for-television movies being churned out for the Sy Fy Network are nothing, if not consistent. Add Yeti, which was apparently known as Raksha:Curse of the Snow Demon at one point, to the over-brimming list of z-grade genre fare the station unapologetically serves up on a regular basis.Yeti makes 1977's Snow Beast,a Jaws ripoff tele-pic starring Bo Swenson, look like Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years,and its...ahem...director(used loosely here), Paul Ziller, makes Troma's Lloyd Kaufman look like Steven Spielberg.I'm exaggerating here, right? Unfortunately, no, I'm really not.Everything about this production is laughably bad.Everyone involved should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.Dom DeLuise's oldest son, Peter, once had a flourishing career on television's 21 Jump Street at the end of the eighties.Johnny Depp was also on that show, now earning a staggering seventy-five million dollars a year in movies.Peter's in Yeti.Ed Marinaro was once a rising star on hit series Hill Street Blues at the outset of the eighties.His co-star,Daniel Travanti won two Emmys and a Golden Globe.Ed was in Yeti.
Doc n' I set out to get through this travesty last night, with the aid of a sizeable helping of Nagasaki Devil's Food cake to blur the lines of difficulty in undertaking such a task.Having personally sat through ten whole minutes of it the day I picked it out of a WalMart five dollar bin(the movie should be given away free in boxes of trash bags as "starter garbage"), I should have known better.Unintentional laughs followed.Ninety minutes worth.My roommate's annoying habit of repeatedly bringing up the "time remaining" display made perfect sense for once.How much longer.Okay,how about now?

Marc Menard as...Peyton Elway. Oh, you clever writers!
The "State College Grizzlies" are a collegiate football team(whose colors are brown-on-brown and whose gear looks to have been purchased at a flea market)flying to Japan for a bowl game,when their cgi plane crashes in the Himalayas(or Canada) during an electrical storm.The survivors(those would be the people still talking and moving, usually with some sort of blood appliance somewhere on their faces)include Peyton Elway(Marc Menard), the hot shot quarterback, Sarah(Carly Pope), the one girl not impressed with Elway's sub-Photo Shop level sports magazine articles,and Kyra(Elfina Luk), a dreadlocked Asian whiner, all look pretty comfortable arguing in light hoodies and short sleeved polos for people that have crashed into the caps of a mountain range permanently covered with snow and below the freezing point temerature-wise most of the year.So they huddle around a fire about the size of the right front grill on your stove and bicker about cannibalism amongst themselves.Two sportos venture out into the elements looking for the plane's radio, but they find the cave of the fearsome Yeti instead.While one jock is instantly a goner, the other, more resilient meathead fractures both his legs in fleeing the murderous creature,using both the plane's radio and his dead buddy's severed forearm as makeshift leg splints.Back at the fuselage, three energy bars aren't providing the daily caloric intake these sportos need to maintain physical excellence,so Peyton waltzes over to the line of frozen bodies with a shard of glass and comes back to the fire with six perfect,bloodless cube-chunks of spam and a sheet of metal from the wreck to fry them up on.Quarterback, hell, this guy's a surgeon.

In a pinch, a rubber severed arm makes a handy splint for a broken leg.
Inexplicably, the oriental shitlocked hippie sets the frozen bodies on fire to keep her friends,who turned to cannibalism after all of one day of being stranded, from eating them(explain to me again how cooking flesh renders it inedible,please?), and the titular snowman with a prostethic sagital crest like an Italian floor vase from making off with them to its lair,sub-video game level cgi Hulk-hopping through the white stuff.The "rescue team" consists of Peter DeLuise and some brawd with a terrible eastern bloc accent.When they zero in on the survivors' coordinates, they pitch a tent in the snow and catch some z's instead of radioing for more help, or trying to actually reach them, god forbid.Garcia, of the imaginative leg splint clan, returns to camp, only to get blasted in the eye with a flare gun by Raven, the self-centered dick who's been hoarding the chocolate bars for himself.The yeti converges on the kids, who throw a snowball at it before eating snowflakes and death at the three fingered latex gloves of the infernal beast,who skirts Sarah back to the cave for some spooning(!).Peter DeLuise gets beaten to death with his own severed leg, and there's a makeshift yard marker-turned-spear chained to a huge boulder used to pull the creature off a cliff to its death that'd have Wile E. Coyote green with envy.Except there's two of them, and the one that got buried in stock avalanche footage moments earlier, well yeah, he's finally dug himself out.The movie's over, but the headache remains.

How do you say "obviously fake" in Tibetan Sanskrit?
Ziller has thirty-four films, mostly made-for-television, under his belt,including such gems as Polar Storm, Ice Quake, Iron Golem, and Beyond Loch Ness. Here's hoping he someday figures out how to do it properly.Bad acting, piss poor effects and lazily crude cgi sequences, limp dialogue, inane story, it's all here promising you an embarrassing hour and a half of your life that you'll never get back, and if that sounds palatable somehow, then you'll understand the single wop rating I've bestowed upon it, as more of the same SyFy pulp they've been steadily pouring us for years now.It's not actual juice, nor is it healthy for you in any way, but once in a while, it's kinda fun going down.One wop.

When you get done beating him with his own disembodied leg, could you hit me with it a few times for watching this?