Ishiro Honda, fresh off of making Lovetide instead of the first Godzilla sequel (Godzilla Raids Again), was given a similar task by Toho: another monster film. Instead of a giant reptile tearing up major Japanese cities, Honda directs the story of a slightly larger ape-like monster in the Japanese mountains. This isn't exactly a huge step up in the monster genre, being a confused combination of three storylines inelegantly woven together in ways that make the whole point of the film muddy at best. I get the sense that this script was thrown together very quickly, the production rushed, and no one was particularly invested in the exercise.
A mountaineering club is coming back from the mountains after an adventure that has left them shaken. They get interviewed by a journalist, and we get the whole thing in flashback (it's a structural decision that I don't think contributes anything to the film). Anyway, the club had gone into the mountains months previous for skiing when one of their group, Takeno, disappeared with mysterious large tracks marking where he went. The winter weather was too much, though, and the club returned after the spring thaw to look again. This group is led by Professor Tanaka (Nobuo Nakamura) and features most prominently Machiko (Momoko Kochi), Takeno's sister, and her lover Iijima (Akira Takarada). At the same time, another group, led by Oba (Yoshio Kosugi), are animal trappers looking to find the mysterious animal and bring it to a circus.
So, this would be enough for a story. Two opposing groups looking for the same animal with completely different purposes. However, instead of just some lonely yeti in the mountains who may or may not have a young Japanese student prisoner for months, we also get the introduction of a remote, isolated, and primitive village that calls the yeti the Old Master. This is honestly just one major subplot too many for a simple monster movie, and the plight of this remote village in competition with the rest of the story, especially the fate of Takeno, being the actual focus. It seems odd to say that the fate of a village is less interesting than the fate of a single missing student, but considering the point of view of the story and the general focus, yeah, it is.
And point of view is just a shambles here. The story is being told by the students who have their own recollections and the journal left behind by Takeno, but they're telling bits of the story that they never saw, mostly around Oba and his men. Without the flashback structure, this doesn't matter at all. With the flashback structure, it's weird and makes pieces that should fit together easily enough at a basic level no longer fit together. It's also a relatively minor complaint with the film.
The bigger complaints I have are about how isolated the three stories are from each other. The two that are the most connected are between Oba's men and the village through the young woman Chika (Akemi Negishi) since Chika actually leads Oba to find the yeti and the yeti's son. This action leads to the yeti being very mad and tearing up the village itself. However, the mountaineering club is completely disconnected from it. Hard cut all of this out and, well, you get a 40 minute movie. However, it would be a clear series of actions of the club getting into the dangerous valley and finding their way to a cave where the yeti resides. It still wouldn't be a smooth action because they do follow the village fire to get there, but heck, it could be just a random fire.
The other problem inherent in the film is that there are just so many characters in the limited runtime. Oba has henchmen who get attention. The mountaineering club is more than the three characters named. The village has an elder. And then there's the journalist on top of that. All of these characters have to compete for screentime with monster action and some beautiful photography of the Japanese mountains.
That being said, the monster action is...decent. It's not great like the attack on Tokyo in Godzilla, but the yeti itself looks decent (its face having a surprising amount of articulation), and the action around it has some skill. That's helped in no small part that even though the script is a mess, Honda can still frame things nicely and gets some good compositions pretty consistently, especially at the attack on the village.
Apparently the film is some kind of embarrassment for Toho not because it's kind of terrible but because its portrayal of the mountain people is supposed to be a manifestation of the Burakumin. It's supposedly kind of racist at this point. Honestly, it should probably be more ashamed because this was a rushed product that completely wasted a high quality talent like Honda to take advantage of a quick fad poorly. But it looks decently and the monster action is fine. That's not much, but it's not nothing.
