Snow Beast (2011) - Um, yeah, I guess it's okay

Er, yeah, what can you say about this film?  At least the title should tell you whether you'll - vaguely - like it or not.  Let's put this film in the league where it belongs, shall we?  Of course it'll never be up there with 'true' cinema classics like 'Empire Strikes Back' or 'The Godfather.' Movies like this belong in their own league where you can put them on after a hard day's work and switch off your mind.  Based on those terms, this film does the job.

A father and - miserable - daughter move to the Canadian mountains for a little while in order to study the wildlife with a couple other researchers.  Naturally, people start going missing and I'm sure no one will be shocked when I tell you the titular 'monster' is to blame.

It's a competent enough little horror film.  The first thing that pleasantly surprised me was the creature itself.  No, it's no classic, but the mask is actually quite scary - it's just a pity that the producers clearly just hired any old bloke to be inside the costume (probably the tallest actor they could find) as he doesn't really move the way a lumbering creature of the wilderness probably would.  Morel like just a bloke in a bigfoot costume.

The characters are at least memorable.  Or at least the father and daughter are - mainly because the father is actually quite nice and the daughter - starting off completely unlikable - at least has room to grow, character-wise.  There are some deaths which actually surprised me in terms of breaking cinema conventions, so that was nicely unexpected, too.

Overall, this is just one a thousand other similar monster B-movies.  Is it the worst?  No.  Is it unwatchable?  No.  It's perfectly fine for what it is.  Will you remember it in a week's time?  I saw it a couple of days ago and I've had to look it up on the internet to recall what happened.

5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back