Man Beast

Man Beast (1956)

Hair-raising excitement in the icy lair of man-like creatures roaming the roof of the world!

Concerned about her brother who disappeared during his scientific expedition into the Himalayas, where he was searching for the elusive yeti, Connie Hayward sets out to scale the Himalayas. During her trek, she survives attacks by groups of vicious yetis. When she arrives at her brother's final campsite, she encounters a mysterious native guide who harbors a sinister secret.

Date of release
1956-12-05
TMDB
4.2 / 10 (14)
Runtime
1h 2m
Genres
Horror, Science Fiction
Director
Jerry Warren

Casting

Interesting facts

Man Beast is a 1956 American horror film directed and produced by Jerry Warren. It was Warren's first directorial effort and the first film distributed by his Associated Producers, Inc. The film is about a young woman who persuades some mountain climbers to trek up to the Himalayas to attempt to find her missing brother, who hasn't been heard from since he went there on an earlier expedition to find the Abominable Snowman. A mysterious guide befriends them, but winds up actually in league with the Yetis who inhabit the mountains, and he secretly works against the explorers behind their backs, killing them off one by one.

Production

Warren grew up wanting to get into the film business in Los Angeles. He appeared in small parts in a few 1940s films such as Ghost Catchers, Anchors Aweigh and Unconquered. After meeting with producers, he took on his first film as a director and producer with Man Beast.

He rented the small Keywest Studio off Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, and cast the film with actors from the Pasadena Playhouse and other small theater groups. He also used Hollywood's famous Bronson Cavern as a background for some of the exterior scenes, and spliced in stock footage from an old 1940s Monogram picture and some old Allied Artists Studios pictures.

To film certain scenes representing Tibet, Warren had his actors climb over a fence into a major studio lot and shoot the scenes on their Mongolian sets. Warren reworked the old gorilla costume from the PRC film White Pongo into his Man-Beast. When asked about the budget for the film, Warren described it as "about one-half of what the normal low-budget picture cost in those days. This was very, very low-budget."

Although a "Rock Madison" was given top billing in the credits for playing the part of "Lon Raynon," there is no such character anywhere in the film. Modern sources state that "Rock Madison" was just a fake name made up by Jerry Warren to make his cast seem larger.

Brianne Murphy also stated she had no idea who the credited screenwriter "B. Arthur Cassidy" was either, saying it may have been Jerry Warren himself under an alias. Warren wrote some of his films' screenplays under the pen name "Jacques Lecoutier" (which he sometimes misspelled in the credits).

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended