by Lisa Nystrom
Worth: $12.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Richard Joseph Paul, Juliet Mills, Tai Thai, Walker Brandt, Leon Russom
Intro:
It's goofy and camp, everything you want from a film about sasquatches battling their evil overlords in a secret mountain arena.
Over-the-top, cartoonish and entirely self-aware, this is Classic B movie fare 50 years in the making.
A passion project of director, animator, and stop motion effects master David W. Allen, the film was a tribute to the late, great Ray Harryhausen. Taking his inspiration from the fantastical creatures of Harryhausen’s imagination, Allen created a world filled with monsters, cryptids, and mysterious beings, beginning life in 1968 as a short film titled Raiders of the Stone Ring. The concept grew legs and became something much more ambitious, with the majority of the creative process getting underway in 1994 before, sadly, Allen himself passed away from cancer in 1999 during the filming, and the project was shelved for decades.
While Allen didn’t live to see his work released to the public, his fans and collaborators never gave up hope, and the film is finally seeing the light of day in 2024. The story is everything you’d expect from a classic Saturday matinee style adventure: rugged PhD student Matt Connor (Richard Joseph Paul) is the laughingstock of his program until his controversial research on the abominable snowman turns out to be based in fact. Journeying alongside his supervisor Dr. Claire Collier (Juliet Mills), and their guide, hunter Rondo Montana (Leon Russom as the discount version of Jurassic Park’s Robert Muldoon), the researchers head to the mountains to uncover the secrets of the Yeti, and unknowingly, something far more ancient and dangerous than any of them could ever prepare for.
It’s goofy and camp, everything you want from a film about sasquatches battling their evil overlords in a secret mountain arena. No one here is looking to win the Academy Award for acting, the performances are exactly as they should be — bad, leaning towards cringeworthy, and all the more delightful for it. The technical detail of the stop motion animation is an absolute joy to behold, and the editing is masterfully done, footage from across decades blending together in a way that feels cohesive. As tragic as its origin story may be, the film is likely to receive a better reception by today’s audiences yearning for nostalgia than it might have back in the ‘90s, it’s truly a film that was made by the fans, for the fans.
s
