This is, I believe, the first bad movie I've ever recommended to anyone. 1974's Shriek of the Mutilated is terrible. But in a good way. It would've definitely been great fodder for MST3k. The problem is, it didn't really have to be, since the story is actually pretty decent. The problem is the acting, editing, special effects and editing are all total crap. Let us delve, though, into the plot itself.Dr. Ernst Prell is a college professor who believes in Yetis. Specifically, he believes there's one on an island called Boot Island located somewhere in the northern United States (!). He plans to take four of his best and brightest students - Keith Henshaw, Karen Hunter, Tom Nash and Lynn Kelly - along with him to hunt the beastie down. Before they embark, the students attend a swingin' dorm party. All except for Keith, who, being teacher's pet, goes with Dr. Prell to an exclusive restaurant and samples an even more exclusive dish which Prell claims is called gin sung.At the party, the other three receive some good old-fashioned doomsaying from college janitor Spencer Ste. Claire, who, it turns out, is a former student of Prell's and went with Prell on his last excursion to Boot Island several years before. There, Spencer claims, they did indeed find the Yeti, which attacked them. Only Spencer and Dr. Prell survived and Spencer went insane. How insane? Well, in a completely pointless scene, he goes home and cuts his wife's throat with a carving knife (!). She gets her revenge before dying, though. I won't say how, but it's a hoot.The girls find Spencer's rant unnerving, but the boys don't; Tom since he doesn't give a crap one way or the other, and Keith because (upon learning of it during the drive to the island the following day) he is fanatically loyal to Dr. Prell. He doesn't believe Prell would lead them into danger. Upon arriving at the island, the gang shacks up with Prell's longtime colleague Dr. Karl Werner. Apart from him, Boot Island's only other resident is a retarded Native American (very un-PC, that) named Laughing Crow, who works for Werner occasionally. Both claim to have seen the Yeti on different occasions. In fact, it was Werner who alerted Prell to the Yeti's presence on the island apparently.An expedition into the woods follows, whereupon Tom wanders off on his own and is killed by the Yeti. They only find his severed leg. Prell concocts a plan to use the leg as bait to trap the monster; this plan fails miserably. In the meantime, Lynn, who stayed behind at Werner's house to sit this second expedition out, finds the one-legged corpse of Tom in the greenhouse, then is killed by the Yeti herself... with a garden trowel! After her body is discovered, the increasingly unhinged Prell repeats his scheme, this time using Lynn's corpse as the bait. Again it fails. This time, Keith is knocked over the head by an unseen attacker.Karen who has been slowly losing her mind throughout the story returns to the house and is set upon by now one but two Yetis, who chase her. She runs into Laughing Crow who comes at her with a large knife, and then she promptly dies of a fear-induced heart attack. The big twist occurs here as the "Yetis" unmask themselves and are revealed as Prell and Werner! Keith, coming to, confronts them and discovers they're members of a Satan-worshiping cannibal cult that uses the Yeti costumes as a theatrical excuse to lure potential victims (i.e. Prell's students) to Boot Island to eat them. This is what befell Spencer's friends on the last Yeti-hunting expedition.Keith escapes, finds a cop, and returns with him to Werner's house to find the cult members about to dine on Karen's body. The cop reveals himself as a cult member and pulls a gun on Keith. Dr. Prell then asks Keith to join them. When he refuses, Keith says he isn't a cannibal, only for Prell to reveal he already is. He just never realized it. "Gin sung" ain't what Prell claimed it was! This movie simply fails to work, despite what is a fairly interesting idea for a story. Pretty much every actor was never in anything else, the editing is terrible and the Yeti costume is so phony that the twist of it being someone in a costume in-story is plainly obvious the minute it appears. Curiously, the fake the monster(s) turn out to be fake, combined with the gaggle of annoying college-aged kids and Prell's 1970's-era hippie van, make the movie come across as an alternate-universe nightmare version of Scooby Doo on acid. Without Scooby. Lynn even wears big glasses like Velma.Nevertheless, Shriek of the Mutilated is worth watching at least once as a good example of how to take a perfectly good plot idea and ruin it, doing everything wrong. It's so bad it's good, and the final scene is a laugh riot.Note: The film is also noteworthy for using an early version of the song Popcorn by Hot Butter, during the party scene at the beginning. Unfortunately, due to licensing issues (I guess), Popcorn has been removed from the soundtrack and replaced with a generic 70's rock song on the recent DVD release of the film. Despite this, Popcorn is still listed as one of the songs in the film's opening credits. That's just sloppy.

After following the supposedly REAL case of the Yeti corpse found in the U.S.A. I decided to watch some Bigfoot related movies like "Night of the Demon" and this one, "Shriek of the Mutilated". After watching both, I could only ask myself: Why all the killer Yeti movies are CRAP?!.Even "Night of the Demon" is a fun exploitation trash but "Shriek..." is plain bad, terrible and a demonstration of incompetent film making.I regularly recommend bad movies in the style of this one, but in this case, my advice will only be: stay away from it! It's not bloody, gory, or even unintentionally funny. It's just a horrible movie with zero budget and none production values.

Elderly college anthropology professor Ernest Prell (stiffly played by former 30's bit actor Alan Brock) and four obnoxiously hip students journey to the remote Pacific coast sandbar of Boot Island to confirm whether stories about an Abominable Snowman inhabiting the woods have any basis in fact. The professor and his students stay at the home of the professor's colleague Dr. Karl Werner (woodenly portrayed by Tawn Ellis, who's best known as the star of the 50's Grade Z sci-fi clinker "Cat Women of the Moon") along with Werner's grunting Native American manservant Laughing Crow. The yeti soon makes its vicious presence felt, randomly dispatching two students and causing the survivors to degenerate into blind panic. WARNING: Major *SPOILER* ahead. In an absolutely awful would-be shocking twist ending the yeti proves to be a hoax, a ruse concocted by closet cannibals Prell, Werner and Laughing Crow to lure unsuspecting suckers to the island so they can kill and devour them.Any movie which features Hot Butter's insufferably interminable fluke hit instrumental "Popcorn" playing in its irritating entirety at a college frat party early in the action can't possibly be any good. Not surprisingly, this worthless grindhouse garbage qualifies as a crushing disappointment considering the people involved in its production: Besides the notorious 60's husband and wife roughie team of Michael and Roberta Findley (who blessed us with the sensationally sick "Flesh" trilogy), we also got screenwriters Ed Adlum and Ed Kelleher (the two dudes who are chiefly responsible for the terrifically tacky kitsch hoot "Invasion of the Blood Farmers"). Moreover, the cruddy mix of an unremittingly nihilistic tone, a disagreeably campy sense of archly affected humor ("On the prowl/Hear him howl/Here comes the yeti now," sings some smartaleck collegian as he plays the piano), rotten gore effects, wretched acting, horrendous dialogue ("We're gonna find it, photograph it, and prove to the world that this fabled beast exists"), shoddy cinematography, and the cheesy gimmick of having a simulated heartbeat pound away on the soundtrack whenever the ersatz yeti is about to attack someone thoroughly negate any feeling of fun or entertainment value this dismal loser might have possessed. An unmitigated stiff.

I'm sorry to say I saw this one back in the 70's at a Drive In.We all laughed at it for months.We tried to determine if it was filmed in someones back yard and what the total budget was.The canniblism aspect was a good spin though.This movie was very good for laughs and comments like " Hey who's idea was it to watch this one?"I think it ranks right up there with Plan 9 ,Microwave Massacre and even Ishtar.Make sure you drink heavily when you watch it.It makes it easier.I do recommend it.Do not spend more than 2 bucks if possible.I would also recommend that you do not watch this one on a first date.Wait till at least the third,and it may even just be your last.