HALF HUMAN [1958]

 AND ALL DOG! 

Yes, I'm afraid my policy of trying to see the good in all the things I review is gonna take a serious hit on this one.  Now, it must be said that this movie isn't the actual movie.  The actual movie is a Japanese film called "Jû jin yuki otoko" directed by the great Ishiro Honda and released three years earlier.  What we have here is the American bastardization HALF HUMAN which removes ALL the soundtrack and has the whole thing narrated by John Carradine who plays an anthropologist 'telling the story' of what we're watching to a couple other white guys.  It's like the insertion of Raymond Burr into GOJIRA but taken waaaaaaaaaaaaaay to the (awful) extreme! 

So.  anthropologist Dr. John Rayburn (Carradine) is lecturing what happened when a team of Japanese 'circus people" (is THIS what they're calling them in the imdb synopsis????  I assumed they were a research team.  And they probably WERE in the original Japanese film.) encounter a Yeti and his son living in an island cave (it says here) and who are worshipped by the local villagers.  Or something.  This film is only 63 minutes and it's STILL virtually impossible to pay attention to it.  Dr. Rayburn lectures a couple professors (played by Russell Thorson and Robert Karnes) and narrates the entire movie.  None of the original Japanese actors' voices are ever heard, no voice dubbing and no subtitles.  HALF HUMAN plays just like a movie whose soundtrack has been lost and John Carradine has to tell you what's happening.  If you can imagine how fun that sounds, you can imagine how much fun watching HALF HUMAN is.  It's a shame, too, because we know Ishiro Honda makes great films and the Yeti costume (more specifically the face mask of the creature) is very creepy and effective!  And the last reel of the film, which contains (finally) some monster action is really well done.  Russell Thorson (most known by me from the movie ZERO HOUR! which is the film of which AIRPLANE! is a remake) and Robert Karnes (known for tons of TV work from KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER to THE ROCKFORD FILES to M*A*S*H*) are capable actors who are given absolutely nothing to do. 

John Carradine is, well, John Carradine; always watchable even when he's phoning it in.  We even have genre great Morris Ankrum on hand to perform an autopsy on a dead Yeti - one of the few American inserts which actually feature more than three white men sitting in a room talking and smoking!  The Japanese cast (whose characters have actual names in the original Japanese film) don't even get that!  Akira Takarado (from countless Toho Godzilla movies) is known here simply as 'The Boy'.  And the rest of the Japanese cast is similarly given generic labels.  It's really a shame that the original Japanese film doesn't seem to be available as I'd like to see an actual real version of it not gutted by American scissors.