IMDb 1 hour and 5 minutes, 3.9/10 from 395 addicts.
Novelty value there is. This is a Swedish-American co-production, a rarity of the time. Moreover, it is set in the far north, Lappland, and features Sami in their costume. The ‘Seventh Seal’ also gets a look in. For the denouement read on.
A Yankee lobby card.
A Swedish lobby card.
Prof is at a conference in Sweden and his niece, an Olympic athlete, is training up north, when a meteor strikes Sami country. Prof just loves meteors and takes no convincing to go look at the object that may have come ’from another world.’ It is a nice line and delivered with conviction by Robert Burton, instantly recognised from countless 1950s and 1960s television programs where he invariably played authority figures: judges, senators, colonels, deans, and even professors.
Barbara Wilson is the athletic niece who starts off confident, poised, smart, determined, and no nonsense, which fits the Olympic achievements, and she can skate and ski. After her character is established it is thereafter destroyed by endless demands to scream and faint, four times that were counted by the fraternity brothers between trips to the beer fridge.
What is all the screaming about?
Prof joins with a Swedish love interest for his niece and some police officers to go investigate. Many shots of the white blankness of snow fields and of Lapplanders in their curly-toed shoes and frilly hats, each designed to deal with the snow. While the testimony of the Lapps is treated seriously by the Swedish authorities, pretty boy is dismissive.
What testimony?
They say that the meteor glided in at a low angle for kilometres and then skidded for a distance on a nice soft snow bank. Gasp! It sounds like a controlled descent. Sure enough, Prof confirms it. Meteor just hit. Wallop! No gradual descent. Pretty Boy shrugs. This gesture turns out to be his dramatic range but he speaks English.
Just where the Lapps said, the Prof’s party finds the object and it is no meteor. It is the same ship that featured in ‘It Came from Outer Space’ (1955). Only part of it is visible in the snow bank. Much musing follows. Meanwhile, Hairy turns up. Hairy is big and hairy. BIG. He wanders around leaving enormous footprints which the investigators finally notice. Gulp. More musing.
The party divides. Some will stay on site. Others will go for help. Many will wait off camera.
Hairy grabs Niece who goes through her repertoire of screaming and fainting. It is King Kong all over again once more and anew. Hairy has found love and when she screams ‘No!’ he knows it is a come-on, and means try harder. He stashes her in a ice cave, and wanders around some more smashing balsa wood miniatures that someone spent hours making. Such are the frustration of interspecies love. Naughty, Hairy! But he is meeting his Yeti KPIs, that is Ka-blooie Performance Indicators.
Then his managers show up, and this is the best part of film. Three sketal skin heads in hoodies with bleached faces silently surround Niece, who…. [yep, screams and faints]. They do look like Death who played chess with the Knight in the ‘Seventh Seal’ (1957).
The Hoodies.
They an silent and stare at her. She screams and faints. Again. When she recovers, they point at an enormous footprint, and she screams and faints. Again. (Is it any wonder Barbara Wilson quit acting after this outing?)
They leave. Who knows why and where? Not the scriptwriter for sure.
Hairy returns and scoops her up as required in creature features. By this time the Samis are mobilised with torches. Remembers that scene from ‘Frankenstein’ (1931). Like that, except it is bright daylight on blinding show. They corner Hairy on a cliff edge over an abyss. Hairy thinks, ‘What would my hirsute brother King Kong do in a situation like this?’ To think he puts down Niece on a nice bed of snow.
While he is thinking the Lapps fling so many torches at him that all that hair he has catches on fire and on the ensuing excitement he falls over the edge into the abyss.
Pretty Boy then scoops up Niece and Prof muses over what just happened. So did I. ‘Dunno’ was the unanimous conclusion of the fraternity brothers.
Were the skin heads keepers of Hairy? Did Hairy escape and were they looking for him? If so, such inept aliens should have stayed home if they could not spot a thirty foot pile of black costume hair against the white backdrop. Or was Hairy a local and the skin heads wanted to Yeti-nap him for a zoo back on home world? But there was nothing earlier to indicate the neighbourhood had a Yeti problem. Were the skin heads surrogates for Commies, all quiet and insidious. Was Hairy a metaphor for….the Welfare State, Volvo hegemony, IKEA tyranny? Pick one! Pick two!
Apart from its resonances with other films of the ilk, it is distinguished by the exotic locale, long before SBS brought Norseland to the a television near everyone. All that snow. All those Swedish accents, and some Swedish spoken. (A film with even one untranslated sentence in a foreign language was often regarded as a box office killer in Hollywood.) The Swedes wear Swedish clothing. It looks like it was filmed there but the backstories on the web are not decisive.
There were two subsequent re-editings for the USA drive-in market. One is by Jerry Warren and the other by the unstoppable Roger Corman and released as ‘Invasion of the Animal People’ in 1959 with an opening voice over from John Carradine, who never said no to a gig.
The Corman lobby card.
In these two versions nothing is left to the imagination. The Beast has come for women. He is looking for fraternity brothers with whom to party and needs a date.
Web critics disparage both versions. The IMDb does not distinguish among these derivatives. The You Tube version I found looks like the original.
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