Starring Wu Juncheng, Zhang Yongxian and Tang Xin, written by Sheng Fan Zhang and Pian Jia Leng, directed by Huang He.

Also known as SNOW MONSTER VS ICE SHARK, this was made for Chinese streaming platform Youku. The story is set in 2045 and sees the Hong Gene Research advance team exploring an unknown Arctic area which, we are informed, has unstable magnetic fields that suggest the zone could produce genetic variations. Contact is lost with the advance team, so Ren Yi Fei (Juncheng) is asked to lead a rescue mission, which he readily accepts to do because his ex-girlfriend, Xiao Qin (Yongxian), is one of the missing researchers.

Ren and his team, which includes chubby motormouth Wen (Xin), kindly Hong Gene Research exec Uncle Lin, beefy dreadlocked dude Tyson and some armed mercenary-types, don’t begin an arduous trek through snowy landscapes, which is what I expected. Instead, they actually go to a Chinese temple ruin and, after CGI rock spires thrust from the ground, enter a cavernous area littered with the skeletons of Qi Dynasty soldiers. Here they’re assaulted by flocks of jagged-beaked crow-like cave-birds that locate their victims via sound. Individual birds in this sequence look better than the CGI shots of them swarming around en masse. After tramping through the caves, the rescue team almost immediately reaches a mountainous Arctic region! Either the filmmakers have no real concept of distance, or this quick transition is due to the ‘quantum malfunctions’ and the ‘space rainbow layer hypothesis’ that Uncle Lin eagerly talks about for a while.

Passing by the skeleton of a carnivorous dinosaur in the snowy wastes, the team is suddenly attacked by a huge ice shark! At first I assumed the spiky-chinned killer fish had leapt from an unseen lake beneath an ice sheet, but no: this critter actually swims through the snow, in a way similar to the titular creature from the US cheapie SNOW SHARK: ANCIENT SNOW BEAST (2011)! Unlike in that film, or AVALANCHE SHARKS (2014), the shark in SNOW MONSTER looks pretty cool and effective! This leaping shark, which has a mouthful of super-sharp teeth, seems set to devour the team, but a gigantic yeti-like creature grabs the shark, slams it against rocks, then munches on it. This is a dumb-yet-fun sequence!

This seriously huge man-beast is the creature we’ve come to see! It has ram-like horns and is reminiscent of an enormous, more benign version of the wampa seen in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980). It seems to be portrayed mainly by a man in a suit, though the bleached-out nature of the snowy landscapes, which are nearly all green screen stage shots, make the white-furred snow monster look quite recessive much of the time, so the creature can be mistaken for a CGI creation even when it isn’t. 

Anyway, the mega-yeti seems friendly, but a scared merc accidentally fires at the snow monster, and the rescue team looks to be in big, big trouble yet again, but a tribe of elf-eared indigenous folk come to help out and it’s revealed that their queen can communicate with the snow monster, which is considered to be a sacred animal that the tribe meets on the third day of the twelfth lunar month every year.

The movie’s subtle score is quite affecting in places. I’d even go so far as to say that the music sometimes counterbalances the so-so nature of the special effects, making some scenes better than they had any right of being, such as when our heroes and the tribespeople are visited by the humungous snow monster during a key ritual. It’s actually rather poignant when Ren and Xia Qin bond with the beast by touching one of its big, black fingernails.

This quiet moment is broken when the mercenaries, led by Uncle Lin, who has revealed that he is, in fact, a dastardly cad called Mr Henry, fire missiles and shoot at the snow monster. The yeti is hit with one of Mr Henry’s electrified super-bullets and falls from view. The mercs then shoot a lot of the tribe and force the queen to lead them to the snow monster, but she takes them instead to a zone full of yet more ice sharks! The sharks get electrocuted, though, and things get ugly when the queen is shot, which enrages the snow monster. The dying queen passes a sacred bangle to her acrobatic warrior-woman daughter Kaya… and then fighter jets arrive!? The planes use magnetic sound waves to subdue the towering yeti, buying time for Mr Henry to shoot the snow monster with another electro-bullet, further entrapping the yeti so that he can hopefully extract gene samples from the creature, which the villain claims will be full of mysterious, useful qualities.

After a finale that comes complete with exploding jets, kung fu scuffles and Mr Henry getting squashed under the yeti’s huge hand, the snow monster shares a look with Kaya, acknowledging her as the successor to the dead queen.

As with so many of the tsunami of Chinese-made monster movies recently released, the poster artwork promises more than the film can hope to deliver but, damn it, I ended up enjoying this creature feature anyway, shoddy though it sometimes is in the FX department, mainly because the director managed to inject some heart into the latter stages of the production.

Let’s end with a final look at one of those nifty ice sharks…