The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961)

This movie is worse than Plan 9. Worse than Suicide Squad or BvS...it's like having a nightmare. The strange narration, the dubbing, the acting...horrible. I like scary movies, but I don't want them to be this scary!Avoid.

In my review of Red Zone Cuba, I called Coleman Francis the worst director in history, and said that watching one of his movies "is like watching paint dry in slow motion while getting a root canal in the lobby of the DMV." Now I come to his first (and worst) movie, The Beast of Yucca Flats. I want to start out by saying that this is hands down THE worst movie ever made. There is not a single minute that is watchable. Not a single frame that contains anything resembling excitement, humor, intelligence, or entertainment of any kind. It is a soul scarring vacuum, an experiment in how long a movie with no content can be stretched. Under no circumstances should it ever be watched by anyone, anywhere.Moving right along, it stars the moronic Tor Jonson as a defecting Russian scientist who is attacked by the KGB and flees into the desert, where he is exposed to an atomic bomb test, which turns him into a mindless killer. He spends the rest of the movie wandering around, waving a big stick, and yelling "Ugh, ugh!" like a victim of severe mental retardation. He kills a woman, police mistake the father of a vacationing family for the killer, and they shoot him more than a dozen times, causing no lasting damage. The beast then goes charging after the family's two young sons, and at the last minute the cops arrive and shoot him to death. As he lies dying a bunny nuzzles his corpse. That was the entire movie, except for a completely unrelated pre-title sequence. Now this would be the kind of plot you would expect from a five to ten minute home movie made by kids with an off the shelf camcorder, but Francis actually manages to drag this monstrosity out to 53 minutes. This may or may not be enough to qualify as a feature length film, but it's ten times the length this story deserves. Every scene is played out with glacial slowness, with there being many points where we stare at empty scenery, waiting for the actors to appear.Everything else about this production is equally rotten. There is nothing that can be called acting. The star, Tor Johnson, has no spoken lines aside from grunts and mumbles, and only in one unscripted moment does his face betray anything akin to thought or emotion. The other actors aren't even real actors, just a family that got conned into appearing in this. Nor can they even be considered real characters .We never learn who they are, where they're from, where they're going, or anything else about them except that they are a family on vacation. It truly shows the writer/director's utter lack of imagination that although they occupy a great deal of the runtime, and have major plot significance, they are no more developed than extras in a real movie.Then there are the continuity issues. You might not think it possible for such a shoestring of a plot to have problems with continuity, but somehow it manages to. First there's the issue of the father's seeming immortality. We clearly see bullet after bullet rip into him, but the only affect is to make him stumble and wince in brief pain. Later in the movie his shirt doesn't even have any blood or bullet holes. Secondly, how did the cops know where to find the boys at the end, and how did they get there so fast? When they were shooting the boys' father, it was from a single engine plane. But when they confront the beast, it's on foot. When did they have time to land the plane and walk across miles of desert?And then there's the aforementioned pre-title scene, in which a semi nude woman is strangled to death in her bedroom, and her corpse is possible abused. What the hell is it doing here!? It has no connection whatsoever to the rest of the movie. It's never mentioned by any of the characters. The killer (whose face we never see) looks kind of like the beast, but there's no place where the scene can fit into the main story. According to people who knew him, the director included it because "He liked topless scenes." Unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable! Has less thought ever gone into any production? And that's not even the worst part! The worst part is that in order to save money, the Beast of Yucca Flats was shot silent, with sound being added later- but no-one on this production knew how to sync the actors' lines to the movement of their mouths. So the characters only speak when they're facing away from the camera, off-screen, or off in the distance. In some shots the actors are actually filmed from the neck down. I take it back, that's not the worst part. The worst part is the narration that was included to compensate for the sparse dialogue. Now cheesy, endless narration is pretty standard for low budget films like this, but here it's even more grating and pointless then the rest of the movie! None of what the narrator says sounds like anything that any person who has ever lived would ever say. It is composed almost entirely of buzzwords, repeating the terms 'science' and 'progress' until I wanted to strangle the narrator. Then there are bits that simply make no sense in any context, like "Flag on the moon, how did it get there?" What the bloody hell is he talking about? That has nothing to do with anything on screen. It's not even grammatically correct!OK, rant over. I have to stop now because even describing this abomination is raising my blood pressure and giving me a headache. I will leave you by saying, for the love of all that is good, DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE!

I would think a movie, no matter how bad, has to get a commercial release in order to qualify for IMDb listing. Hard to believe this mess would be picked up, even at the pre-school level. But I guess it was. Anyway, for me what's notable is poor Tor Johnson. His "beast" is more like a lonely old man wandering dementedly through wastelands because nobody will take him in. He's having a heckuva time dragging that 300 lbs. over the dried-out terrain. I hope they paid him well, but I doubt it. Too bad filmmaker Francis never heard the words "storyline" or "timeline". Judging from what's on screen, I'm betting he spent his time catching bad French art movies. Then again, the narration, as other reviewers detail, sounds like a philosophy class flunk out. How fitting. The whole thing bears the stamp of runaway self indulgence. No need to go on. The movie's neither good-bad nor fun. Mostly it's just painful. Poor Tor, he deserved better.

Many years ago I read a review from colleague of mine which exclaimed that the Beast of Yucca Flats was a bad film with no defenders. No one, he said, would ever come to this film's defense and proclaim it to have some special message no one understood, no accidental genius, or no grand ineptness as with films Plan 9 From Outer Space. For years – I agreed. Yucca Flats, after all, was a film with no focus, hardly any dialogue, and a narration that made no sense. I would have gone as far to have said, I hated this movie. It wasn't fun to watch with friends, it didn't make you laugh at its stupidity and it didn't leave you feeling that any real effort was poured into the film. Recently, however, I decided that I must come to Coleman Francis' defense and give a legitimate review, and honest praise for this movie. This review is a defense of the anti-film, the bad as bad gets. And a story about how I stopped hating and learned to love this cinematic bomb. Before I divulge into why I feel that this film is a masterpiece, I think I should discuss what the storyline in the film is about: A Russian Scientist, Joseph Javorsky (Tor Johnson) has escaped from behind the iron curtain, deflected to the United States and now wants to help the US defeat the communists by giving data on certain Soviet activities, including, but not limited to, a moon landing and information about the atomic bomb. Before any of this can happen Jovorsky is chased down by two KGB agents, he manages to escape but quickly wanders off into a nuclear bomb testing area right when a test bomb explodes. The resulting fallout turns him into a monster, hungry for blood. My first realization of this films greatness was in its rewatch factor. I was not content with watching this film once, and while I never felt entertained by it, I never got bored of it either. The bleak desert atmosphere and creepy off handed narration took me into a time warp. This fifty minute film slowed time; in many cases it felt as though hours passed while I watched it. Yet, even now, after having seen it several more times than any sane person ever should admit, I still remain entranced by it. It literally feels like hypnosis. The second aspect of its greatness lays in Coleman Francis' narration. I never understood what I liked about it so much, but recently on an IMDb forum I think two users helped me come across an answer. The explanations were this: First nearly all of Francis' statements are stated as though they are haikus, i.e. "Flag on the moon – how did it get there?" Secondly, most of these questions posed by Francis could only be answered by the now insane Joseph Jovorsky. The fact that many of Yucca Flat's plot points go nowhere is directly tied to the fact that the one person who holds the answers to the narrator's cannot answer it – he himself is a victim of the Cold War—a genius whose whole entire life was destroyed by the by the American's atomic bomb and the Soviet's spies. It's interesting to note that Coleman's go to phrase is, "caught in the wheels of progress." He exclaims that nearly everyone in the film is a victim of the atomic age. It's kind of funny, because it seems to be true. Joe Dobbson was wounded parachuting in the Korean War and now works seven days a week with his partner to help protect his community. Because of this, his wife is frustrated, and his town is near a nuclear testing site. Jovorsky is also a victim, his family has been killed, his genius has been used only for the Cold War effort, and he his ultimately killed by the wars biggest symbol – the atom bomb. The film ends with Jovorsky being gunned down by the two patrolmen. Right before he dies a wild bunny rabbit visits the dying scientist, almost looking concerned for the dying man, the dying man looks at the rabbit, touches is as if finally remembering that he was once a caring man and dies. Leaving us to wonder: perhaps we are all the victims of progress, living in a world much faster, and much more dangerous than ever before.