USA, NR, 54 m, 1961
Directed by Coleman Francis. Stars Tor Johnson, Bing Stafford, Larry Aten, et al.

The action in Coleman Francis’s The Beast of Yucca Flats begins fittingly in the john. A willowy, short-haired woman has just stepped out of the shower and is beginning to towel off, permitting us a fleeting glimpse of one of her nipples. We can’t help but wonder, though, why she isn’t the slightest bit damp. No matter, our interest has been properly, er, aroused, and as our half-naked heroine moves to the bedroom, the swelling volume of a ticking clock tells us that she’s not long for this Earth. Sure enough, two big meat hooks suddenly come into the frame and envelop the woman’s neck. We take her unresponsiveness to mean that she knows the bearer of the hands, but we soon learn that she’s just too lousy of an actress to feign terror. The mysterious strangler doesn’t seem to have a firm grip on his victim’s throat, but he manages to snuff her life out anyway. The scene ends with the wordless brute (whose countenance we’re still not allowed to see) delicately arranging the dead woman’s body on the bed. Dear God, is he about to do what we think he’s about to do? Uh, let’s move on.  

Cut to a remote Nevada airstrip. Joseph Javorsky, a Russian rocket scientist (professional wrestler and frequent Ed Wood collaborator Tor Johnson), is defecting to the United States with a briefcase full of sensitive documents in hand. (Hmmm. Those are mighty big hands.) But no sooner than Javorsky climbs out of his jet, two Soviet agents looking to retrieve the briefcase are firing at him. An American representative quickly herds Joseph and his aide into a nearby station wagon and they speed away, the Commies following with guns blazing. (Well, it only sounds like their blazing; we never see so much as a wisp of smoke. The gunplay is either shot at a distance or the gun barrels are conspicuously lopped off in close-ups, the performers jerking back their shoulders to simulate their weapon’s action.) The car chase goes on and on, the background frequently shifting from desert to forest to mountains. (Alternating day and night shots make the continuity even more puzzling.) There’s no wit or momentum to this sequence; the cars motor single-file down the highway at a snail’s pace. (The KGB might actually catch their man if the driver would just step on the gas!) And when the bullying musical score finally pulls back, a narrator steps in and rattles off a string of obtuse non sequiturs: “Flag on the moon. How did it get there? Secret data. Pictures of the Moon. Secret data never before outside the Kremlin. Man’s first rocket to the Moon.” Honest to God, this hollow, disjointed rant keeps up until the picture’s closing credits. 

Eventually, the car chase screeches to a stop in Yucca Flats, an atomic testing sight, and the boring shoot-out resumes. (The sounds of bullets whizzing to and fro is nonstop. The supposedly crack Russian agents don’t seem capable of hitting the broad side of a barn, let alone Tor Johnson’s ass, which is probably even bigger.) Leaving his associates to tend to the gunplay, Jarvorsky grabs his case and makes a run for it. (Actually, he kind of waddles off.) But he doesn’t get far before the narrator pronounces his fate: “Yucca Flats… The A-bomb!” Some tattered stock footage of a mushroom cloud then renders everyone within range extra crispy. But not Javorsky; he reemerges as the title character, a barmy ogre that resembles, well, Tor Johnson with cookie batter on his face. There’s a clear foreshadowing of “The Incredible Hulk” here, but unlike Dr. Bruce Banner, Javorsky was something of a Goliath even before he got zapped. The blast doesn’t do much for his disposition, though, and he’s robbed of his ability to express himself beyond the occasional grunt. (Not that he was given much to say beforehand; the roar of a plane engine masked his few lines during the airstrip scene.) But when summarizing the protagonist’s lot, I believe our darling narrator turns a better phrase: “Shockwaves of an A-bomb. A once humble, powerful man reduced to nothing.” Oh, I like this one, too: “Touch a button. Things happen. A scientist becomes a beast.” From here on out, Javorsky spends most of his time haunting the desert, killing anyone that happens by. Of course, the wistful narrator won’t allow all this irony to elude us: “Joseph Javorsky. Respected scientist. Now a fiend prowling the wastelands. A prehistoric beast in a nuclear age. Kill. Kill just to be killing.” (Variations on this line are reiterated ad nauseam.) The narrator also seems to have a hang-up with “the wheels of progress,” and constantly scolds mankind for his heedlessness with new technologies.  Blah, blah, blah. 

You might wonder how many lives some chrome-domed fatso shuffling around the desert could possibly claim, but rest assured, the bodies do pile up. (Though the Beast isn’t the most creative killer; he favors strangulation.) One night, a car breaks down near the flats. The driver, unaware that he’s in Beast Country now, gets out to inspect the engine, leaving his girlfriend in the car to contemplate how she wound up in this turkey. As the driver (whom the narrator tells us is “unaware of scientific progress”) tinkers around under the hood, our old pal the Beast sneaks up behind him up him and sends him to his eternal reward. The car’s raised hood has prevented the girlfriend from seeing all this, so imagine her surprise when those gigantic paws seize her neck from behind. How she wasn’t able to detect a rank behemoth fumbling around in the backseat is unclear. For God’s sake, even if she was deaf and her olfactory senses shot, she still should’ve felt the car sinking as her attacker climbed in. Anyway, she passes out, and the Beast hauls her back to his cave, which sits somewhere along the side of a jagged foothill. I don’t want to even think about what he might be doing to her up there. 

Soon, a local yokel stumbles upon the Beast’s road kill, and he hurriedly summons desert patrol Joe Dobson (Larry Aten, who also serves as the production’s makeup artist). While Joe (who’s “caught in the wheels of progress”) takes in the crime scene, the narrator supplies us with a handy checklist of clues: “A man choked to death. A woman’s purse. And footprints on the wastelands.”  Joe makes no effort to secure the crime scene; he races off to fetch his partner, Jim Archer (Bing Stafford), who looks like a washed out porn star. (Jim, according to that know-it-all narrator, is “another man caught in the frantic race for the betterment of mankind.”) The two conclude that the killer abducted the owner of the purse, so they begin an exhaustive manhunt that consists of literally tracking the suspect’s footprints. (I know Tor’s a big fellah, but could he really weigh enough to leave behind an impression in rock?) Following a perilous mountain hike, Jim n’ Joe reach the mouth of the Beast’s hideaway. There they discover his prisoner, who’s still breathing, and immediately establish that she’s the owner of the purse found back on the road. But just as they start to carry her away, she up and dies on them. “No doctors can help her,” Joe laments. “Maybe angels, but not doctors.” So, the lawmen continue their ascent along the rock face, taking a gamble on the killer hanging out on top. The ensuing narration is a scream: “A hundred and ten in the shade—and no shade. Jim and Joe try to make their way up to the plateau. To reach the top, a man needs an airplane. A jump from a plane could land you on top.” Well, if a man needs an airplane to reach the plateau, how did the creature get up there? And what makes everyone so damned certain that he’s up there in the first place? No matter, Jim takes to the sky, his rifle locked and loaded. But since he has no idea what the killer looks like, any innocent party that comes into his crosshairs is up shit creek sans paddle.  

For a movie that runs just shy of an hour, The Beast of Yucca Flats feels endless. Down the road, we meet the Radcliffe family: Hank (Douglas Mellor) and Lois (Barbara Francis) and their two sons, Andy (Ronald Francis) and Art (Alan Francis). While the family gasses up at an area service station, the narrator provides us with some helpful information: “Vacation time. People travel east, west, north or south. The Radcliffes travel east with two small boys. Adventurous boys. Nothing bothers some people. Not even flying saucers.” Down the road, the Radcliffe’s car blows a tire, and while the mister tends to the flat, the boys (who “are not yet caught by the whirlwind of progress”) decide to go exploring. Incredibly, they get lost in the bare, utterly flat wastelands, and a frantic Lois sends Hank out to search for them. Unfortunately, Jim “shoot first, ask questions later” Archer is somewhere overhead in his airplane, circling the flats in search of the Beast. When he spots Hank trotting along the terrain, he assumes it must be his target and opens fire. Naturally, Hank tries to high-tail it out of there, but Jim keeps close behind, blasting away. During the chase (which at one point lifts a shot straight out of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest), Hank gets clipped, but nary of drop of blood is spilled. (For all its violence, Beast is oddly free of gore.) Meanwhile, the Beast has spotted Art and Randy. (Or is that Andy? I dunno. His name keeps changing.) He shadows them for a while, but the sequence is so clumsily edited that you can’t get a fix on how close he is to his quarry. (The film’s inconsistent geography only adds to the confusion.) When the lads (who are so dopey that they can’t identify a pool of water from ten feet away) finally notice that a roly-poly Russkie is stalking them, they scamper off, and we get a good yuk out of watching the Beast hobble after them with a big stick. (I’m also fond of the moment in which Beastie discovers that his comatose girlfriend has been nabbed from his den of debauchery and then “unleashes his fury” by heaving a small rock into the air.) When Jim and Joe finally come to the rescue, they engage in a pathetically choreographed tussle with the Beast (which permits Tor to demonstrate some of his celebrated wrestling moves) before gunning him down. Our heroes savor their kill for a moment, and then amble into the sunset, leaving the Beast to his dirt nap. “Joseph Javorsky,” the narrator sighs, “noted scientist.” But doesn’t anybody notice that the Beast is still moving? We expect him to get back up and resume his mindless rampage, but instead he gives a wild bunny a peck on the nose. The End.  

Wait a second…What about that opening scene with the bare-breasted gal meeting her Waterloo at the hands of some faceless pervert? It turns out that none of that had anything to do with the rest of the picture. Looking back, it’s obvious that those murderous mitts belonged to the Beast. After all, strangulation was his usual m.o. But the scene took place before Javorsky’s brush with nuclear fallout, and he never left the desert after transforming into the Beast. So, was this prologue intended to be a glimpse into an alternate reality? Yeah, get real.  

Beast was such an impoverished production that the makers couldn’t even afford to rent a traveling microphone; hence the entire soundtrack—including dialogue—was added during post-production. To avoid the headache of having to sync-up the actor’s voices with their lip movements, the director instructed them to turn away from the camera when speaking, cup their hands over their mouths when shouting, etc. Sometimes an actor’s line is spoken off camera while we’re observing another actor’s blank stare, and the effect is disorienting. You can’t tell half the time who’s saying what. Worse, there’s no depth to the soundtrack; it’s flat and tinny. These aural shortcomings are only deepened by John Cagle’s featureless black and white photography. Shots are badly framed and sometimes so murky that the action becomes hard to follow. But that may be a blessing. I mean, how many times can we take the sight of Barbara Francis in those ugly Coke-bottle specs? 

It’s tempting to dismiss Beast’s players as an incompetent lot, but they’re probably just as confused by what’s going on as the audience. What’s irritating is that their characters are so nondescript; they serve only to advance the story—and there’s precious little of that. Unable to secure any real talent, Francis was forced to cast several members of his own brood, and while their amateurism shows, you shouldn’t begrudge them for trying to help out the big dope. Still, this is probably the most inexpressive cast I’ve ever seen in a horror film.  

The fact that Beast was a modestly budgeted effort doesn’t excuse it for being such a stinker. I can cite a myriad of wonderful movies that were made on a shoestring, but they had something Beast lacks: a modicum of talent behind the camera. With a hack like Francis wearing umpteen hats as director, writer, producer, and bit player (as well as narrator), it’s no wonder that Beast falls apart at the seams. (Incredibly, our ham-fisted auteur went on to make another two pictures—both abysmal.) Though goofing on drive-in cheapies can be fun, I found Beast hell to sit through; it’s maddeningly incapable of functioning even on the level of camp. Noting all the dreck I’ve sat through over the years, I still feel confident in appointing The Beast of Yucca Flats to the tippy-top of the cinematic junk pile. It’s worse than Plan 9 from Outer Space.  

Coleman Francis. Bungling filmmaker. Caught between inadequate resources and a stunted imagination. Died shortly after playing a fat drunk in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Progress.

November 22, 2004

© Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.