It's a fine time to have a panic, just before our Winter Carnival.
Was able to kill three birds with one stone since today's "Chilling Classic," 1977's Snowbeast, is also included in Mill Creek's "Drive-In Movie Classics" set and Brentwood's "Beasts of Terror" collection. Not too shabby for a TV movie about a rogue Bigfoot stalking and killing the guests at a Colorado ski lodge during its annual Winter Carnival. (It's such a blatant Jaws knock-off at times that you half expect sheriff Clint Walker to say, "We've got to close the slopes!") Written by Joseph Stefano (who was a long way from Psycho) and directed by television veteran Herb Wallerstein (who never made the leap to features), the film stars Bo Svenson as a former Olympic skier who hasn't been on skis since he won the gold medal in '68 and has found he can no longer coast on his former glories. To that end, he drags his TV reporter wife (Yvette Mimieux) along with him to the ski lodge run by his best friend (Robert Logan), who is more than happy to give Svenson a job despite the fact that he's got enough on his plate what with the hairy, hulking beast that's killing the guests.
Actually, when Svenson and Mimieux roll into town it's only attacked one guest so far -- and her fate is still unknown at that point -- prompting Logan's grandmother (Sylvia Sidney) to tell him to keep things hush-hush so the Winter Carnival can go on as planned. That doesn't stop one intrepid ski patrolman from going off on his own and looking for the girl. And looking. And looking. And looking. (The MST3K episode The Sidehackers featured a song called "Only Love Pads the Film." If they had ever done Snowbeast on the show, it would have been "Only Skiing Pads the Film.") Naturally he also becomes Bigfoot chow, leading to the first fade to red (which come at regular intervals to let you know when the commercials would have been) and the promise of more shortsightedness to come. Even Sidney can't ignore the problem, though, when it attacks the school where the Snow Queen-crowning ceremony is taking place. This eventually leads to more padding in the form of snowmobiling as Svenson, Mimieux, Logan and Walker all set out to take care of the menace once and for all.
Admittedly, I'm skipping over a lot of plot involving Svenson and Mimieux's shaky marriage and Logan's shameless flirting with her. The film also hits most of the standard creature-on-the-loose tropes, as when Logan proclaims, "This wasn't an animal! And it wasn't human, either." Or when Walker guns down a grizzly bear which the heroes know for a fact isn't responsible for the killings. There's even a spirited debate about the creature's very existence, which prompts Svenson to recall the hard-hitting report Mimieux did on the Bigfoot controversy, because that's the sort of thing serious journalists covered back in the '70s. In the end, the Snowbeast is vanquished (after nearly outsmarting our heroes, admittedly not the hardest thing to do in the world) when Svenson shoots it a bunch of times and stabs it with a ski pole, leading to one of the funniest point-of-view shots ever as it stumbles around with the pole sticking out of its chest. But that's still not as funny as the credit "And Michael J. London as The Snowbeast." I guess Jerry Mathers wasn't available.