La morte viene dal pianeta Aytin [Snow Devils] (1967)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) In the mid-1960s, Italian director Antonio Margheriti (as “Anthony Dawson”) helmed four Science Fiction movies whose ramshackle production values couldn’t quite erase a certain vivacity of execution, wild premises and a clumsy attempt at future-building. (Those were the “Gamma Quadrilogy,” also made of The Wild, Wild Planet, War of the Planets and War Between the Planets.) His unrelated Snow Devils is almost interesting for being a precursor to 1996’s The Arrival in positing aliens hell-bent on terraforming Earth’s climate prior to colonization. Fortunately, our heroes are on the case, and eager to take the fight all the way to the alien base orbiting Jupiter. It’s a terrible film in most ways, but it has good pacing and a few ideas (if fewer than its predecessors). This early attempt at making something of climate change is more accidental than anything else, but the bit about the aliens being the originator of the yeti myth is fun (but not as much fun as their garish blue makeup). Snow Devils is really not an essential SF film, but it may illuminate the very, very low bar that was considered acceptable for the genre at that time, whether it’s in concept or execution.