Argh. This movie is atrocious, every little bit as much as I was led to believe it was. To start off, I consider Nostalgia Critic’s scathing review of this flick as mandatory viewing:
Honestly, there isn’t much to add to that. “Garbage Pail Kids” is so loosely structured and plotted that there isn’t much to talk about. I will get to review of this film as well soon, but there are a lot of similarities between this and “Blubberella”: they both rely on tired, crass humor, and they both depend far too heavily on improvisation for content. You will notice in clips that the Garbage Pail Kids are constantly just making noise in the background, or filling up their scenes with rambling noise. There is just no way that was all scripted: I can almost guarantee that the voice actors were told to just riff away in the recording booth, and the result is a jumbled mess. Which brings us to the voice acting…
To call the voice acting “bad” is beyond generous. It is a chorus of screeching, wailing, cackling cacophony. To be fair though, I imagine that the voice actors were doing exactly what they were told to do. The Garbage Pail Kids are supposed to be repulsive, which would justify them sounding so horrible. That said, it doesn’t make it any easier to listen to, and the fact that they are usually all making noises at once throughout their scenes makes the experience all the worse. The in-person actors are just genuinely bad in this movie, most notably the child protagonist and the band of (much older) bullies who torment him.
they are almost certainly a decade older than him
I would be remiss to not mention the nightmarish puppets in this movie. Just take a good look at these:
I think that is all I have to note about the horrific work on that front.
Last but not least, I have a serious issue with the message of this movie. It claims to be a “beauty is what is on the inside” tale, with the GPKs as an example of good people (creatures? aliens?) who look strange/ugly. The writing has all of the subtlety to take a subplot to break people out of the “State Home for the Ugly”, where apparently all of the greatest minds in the world are held because of physical imperfections. Back to the titular kids, though: there is nothing to indicate that they are, in fact, beautiful on the inside. One of them threatens to eat the child protagonist on more than one occasion, and another one brandishes a knife more than once with minimal provocation. They are just horrible beings, outside and inside.
The alligator actually eats human body parts on screen
I would never recommend this movie to anyone. The meandering plot structure would make the movie boring even if all other elements were on target. As it is, there is nothing on par about this movie: everything is mediocre to abysmal. I am genuinely shocked that this is no longer in the IMDb Bottom 100, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it show up back on the list before long. In short, this movie is an assault on the senses in every possible way, as if it were an art project manufactured with the intention to cause cinematic displeasure.
Episode 3 of the (Plot)opsy Podcast spotlights one of my favorite good-bad movies, 1986’s “Maximum Overdrive”. Stephen King took up the role of director for the first and last time in this cult classic about killer machines possessed by aliens…or a comet…or something. It features some of the most ridiculous deaths in mainstream cinema history, and is a must-see flick for bad movie fans. As it turns out, there are some interesting narratives tied up behind the scenes of this one as well. Enjoy!
AC/DC wrote a number of original songs for “Maximum Overdrive”, including the hit “Who Made Who”Stephen King’s cameo at the beginning of “Maximum Overdrive”, in which an ATM calls him an assholeAn accident involving this radio-controlled lawnmower took the eye of the Director of Photography on “Maximum Overdrive”. A hefty lawsuit followed.One of the most famous sequences in the movie features a murderous vending machine, which attacks a little league baseball team“Maximum Overdrive” star Emilio Estevez alongside the Green Goblin truck, which serves as the primary villain of the movie.DVD cover for “Trucks”, a 1997 movie made from the same source material as “Maximum Overdrive”
The trailer for Maximum Overdrive oozes with hubris on the part of Stephen King, who introduces the film in much the same way that Alfred Hitchcock once did. King does this while simultaneously putting down the many well-regarded adaptations of his works by other film-makers in the past. I’m sure this trailer is one of the more embarrassing entries in the history of Stephen King.
The good folks over at Rifftrax are going to be doing yet another live simulcast for the holidays! The former Mystery Science Theater 3000 gang are taking on an old favorite: IMDb Bottom 100 member and cult classic “Santa Claus”, a Mexican-made children’s movie in which St. Nick lives in a sky-castle with Merlin and battles demons for the souls of children.
You can check it out in select theaters around the US and Canada (maybe elsewhere?) on December 4th. To check where it is playing near you, go to the Fathom events page here, and throw in your local ZIP code. Or, if you happen to be in the Nashville, TN area, you can go to the in-person showing at the Belcourt Theater! I went to the live Rifftrax of “Godzilla (1998)” at the Belcourt this summer, and it was an absolute blast. I recommend making an evening of it if you can.
Also, I highly recommend checking out the old MST3K episode on “Santa Claus”, which is among the best of the series. I’ll be covering the movie later in December here on the blog as well for the IMDb Bottom 100 reviews, so keep your eyes open for it!
“The Wild World of Batwoman”, in case you couldn’t have guessed, has no relation to The Dark Knight or DC Comics. That said, the movie is a clear attempt to capitalize off of the popularity of the Adam West “Batman” television show (enough so to get sued): yet the hammy style and the bat aesthetic was about as far as the similarities went content-wise, however. The majority of the film consists of dancing sequences, clips from unrelated movies, and inexplicable vampirism (yeah, Batwoman is a vampire). Who needs crime-fighting and bat-related gadgets/shenanigans when you have vampires who occasionally dance?
There are a lot of phone conversations too. Not even exciting ones.
The plot centers around a near-magical piece of spying equipment: a newly-developed listening device that can hear anything that is spoken (or something to that effect). A mysterious villain named Ratfink is dedicated to stealing the device, and through kidnapping and blackmail attempts to have Batwoman (an apparently famous vigilante leader) do the deed for him. It all gets needlessly complex and nonsensical from there, with a few shots of mole people pulled from a different movie, but ultimately Ratfink is defeated and unmasked. He then confesses that he only wanted the device because he is a voyeur, which means that the sinister plan and super-villainy was all way overboard.
Ratfink is the one who is dressed like a villain.
The acting is “Batwoman”, if you can call it that, is very bad. It wouldn’t have made much of a difference considering the writing, but it is very clear throughout the movie that the majority of the cast was not there for their acting abilities. The villain characters, as you would expect from the time, are either buffoons, racist stereotypes, or mustache-twirlers. Again, no actor could have made the characters passable, but that doesn’t change the end result on the screen. Outside of Batwoman herself, there isn’t an adequate performance in the movie.
I can’t think of any reason to recommend this movie. There is a lot of dancing, the plot is old-school silly, but the pacing and editing is so abysmal that the movie is nearly unwatchable. You can check out the MST3k version of the film, because there are a few laughs to be had in there, but outside of that frame the movie is absolutely skippable. The movie could have actually been a fun “Batman” rip-off with better writing beneath it, but that just isn’t the case here. It reminded me a lot of “Horrors of Spider Island”: there is a large cast of non-actors who are essentially there to dance, and the writing is a step below amateurish. “Spider Island” at least had some effects in it though, whereas “Batwoman” doesn’t really go anywhere or do much of anything. This was a movie designed to make a trailer out of, and trick audiences into a theater.
Here are the MST3k highlights of “Batwoman”, which is going to be more worth your time to watch than sitting through the whole damned movie.
“Ram Gopal Varma’s Indian Flames” (also known as “Aag”) was the first Bollywood movie to make it into the IMDb Bottom 100, and helped start the growing international trend of the list. As you should expect, it isn’t a good movie. However, as is sometimes the case, there is more to the negative reputation of “Aag” than the poor quality of the movie on the screen.
The poor quality of the movie is a big part of it too, though. A very big part of it.
“Aag” was initially planned as an official remake of the beloved Bollywood classic “Sholay” by Ramesh Sippy. It was even titled “Ram Gopal Varma Ki Sholay” during development, until it was ruled to be in violation of Sippy’s copyright and trademark on the film (the character names were ordered to be changed as well). To make things worse in the court of public opinion, numerous members of the cast and crew of “Sholay” spoke openly against “Aag”, meaning no one was particularly excited about the movie even before it hit theaters. The best parallel I can think of is whenever someone has done a remake of Hitchcock: audiences and critics are not usually receptive to the idea of readdressing films regarded as timeless.
Unsurprisingly, the movie was a massive critical and box office failure. After all of the production shenanigans, I honestly think it may have failed regardless of the quality of the movie. But, as it so happens, “Aag” is no masterpiece.
To start with, the movie is far too long for what it is, and is not structured in such a way that the length is justified. The run-time is 164 minutes, but the structured made it feel even more inflated from there. There were numerous points throughout the second and third acts where I thought the movie was coming to a conclusion, only to have the conflict fizzle out and the pieces on the board reset. To say that this was frustrating doesn’t cover it in the least, mostly because of the entirely uninteresting characters the audience is subjected to throughout.
Except for that dude with the giant face on the right, he’s awesome.
While “Aag” has a fantastic villain character (Babban) played by Amitabh Bachchan, the rest of the cast is a stone’s throw from abysmal. Whenever Babban isn’t on-screen, the movie screeches to a halt underneath the shittiness of the acting and writing. The leading duo, who should carry the film, are two of the least interesting characters in the story. One of them primarily fills the role of comic relief (poorly) until the last act, whereas the other does less emoting than Keanu Reeves. There are love interests shoe-horned for both characters, most notably Gungroo, who might be the worst-played and worst-written character in the movie. She spends most of the movie either threatening violence on people or being harassed by one of the leads (named “Heero”, groaningly). She ultimately magically falls in love with “Heero” after a jarring musical number and a handful of shenanigans, because of course she would. There is one other decent character outside of Babban (Inspector Narsimha), but he is more passable than he is good, and he never owns a scene in the way Babban does.
Gungroo is one of the worst woman characters I’ve seen in years, and that includes all of the Paris Hilton movies I have had to watch. She exists to be grating, and eventually to fall in love.
You can tell that there is the skeleton of a decent movie buried underneath the layers of dull sediment of this film, but that just makes the experience all the more disappointing. It feels like someone took the story beats and concepts from a classic story, and then locked a bunch of unpaid interns in a room and demanded that they recreate the movie before they could get fed. Rushed, amateurish, and without any regard for an audience: that pretty much nails the writing issues with “Aag”.
I do not recommend watching “Aag”. There isn’t a lot of entertainment to squeeze out of this, and you could do far better things with the time you would spend watching this movie. The performance of Amitabh Bachchan as Babban is pretty delightfully over the top, but not good enough to redeem the movie as a whole. I haven’t seen “Sholay”, but I am willing to wager that it is a much better time than “Aag”.
“Breaking Wind” is yet another “[Movie] Movie” (a term used for modern, lazy parody movies in the vein of “Scary Movie”) in the IMDb Bottom 100, joining “Miss Castaway”, “Epic Movie”, and “Disaster Movie”. I have basically exhausted everything I have to say about the inherent issues with this particularly abysmal genre, but “Breaking Wind” does at least have some specific issues all its own. First off, it is about farts.
Also, fat werewolves
“Breaking Wind” is a parody of the “Twilight” movies, deriving the title from one of the sequels (“Breaking Dawn”). As you can gather from the title, a large quantity of the attempted jokes in the film center around farting. There is what I would describe as an aggravating number of fart-related gags throughout the film. The few attempts at humor that aren’t directly fart-related are at least crass and lazy, or are so dependent on knowledge of the “Twilight” franchise that casual moviegoers are not going to understand them. Check out the following clip, in which Danny Trejo cameos to fart a bunch, reference random things, and parody what I assume was a specific scene in one of the “Twilight” movies:
Wasn’t that nauseating? The whole movie is pretty much like that. I wonder if this was the low point of Danny Trejo’s acting career?
On top of the lazy humor, “Breaking Wind” also suffers from the fact that it isn’t even the only “Twilight”-centered parody movie. Friedberg and Seltzer, the typical “[Movie] Movie” duo who were behind “Epic Movie” and “Disaster Movie”, released their own “Twilight” parody (“Vampires Suck”) a good year and change before “Breaking Wind” hit theaters. And, unbelievably, “Breaking Wind” writer/director Craig Moss has a worse track record than the Seltzer/Friedberg duo when it comes to parody films. His only other credit at the time was the annoyingly-named parody “The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It”, which has a whopping 2.7 on IMDb: only marginally better than “Breaking Wind.”
Not only is it lazy and second-rate, but “Breaking Wind” doesn’t seem to understand its audience either: for a movie that nearly requires knowledge of the “Twilight” franchise to follow, it is incredibly mean-spirited towards fans of the books and movies. The movie ends over clips pulled from YouTube of “Twilight” fans reacting ridiculously to “Twilight”-related events. It comes off as really uncomfortable and unnecessarily shitty to a group of people who could theoretically be buying tickets to the movie.
As with any of the modern generation of parody movies, there isn’t anything redeeming enough about “Breaking Wind” to justify recommending it. The humor is dated and crass when it does exist, which is not often. This one just needs to be chalked up and archived as yet another dumb parody movie, and never re-addressed again.
“Track of the Moon Beast” is yet another forgettable entry in the IMDb Bottom 100. Like a good number of the films featured on MST3k, this is one that feels like background noise. There are a few memorable moments, but definitely not many. I haven’t had as much trouble recounting a movie since “Zombie Nightmare”, and I think that one is a good deal more entertaining than “Track of the Moon Beast”.
One thing I can give this movie credit for is some kick-ass box art. That muscle-bound blue alien creature stretching its claws towards the moon is pretty bad-ass. Unfortunately, the monster in the movie actually looks like this:
Not very impressive. And yes, the creature is shrouded in darkness almost the entire movie, probably an attempt to hide how crappy it looks. The only exception I can recall is the excessively colorful death scene, in which you still can’t make out much in the way of details:
So, bad effects are definitely an issue that hampers this movie. I will say that the transformation effects aren’t too bad, especially in comparison with something like “Laserblast”, where they just painted the actor’s face green. There is even some alternate box art featuring the transformation makeup that doesn’t look too bad.
some more box art that is way too good for this movie
However, there are a lot of issues with this movie beyond the mediocre effects work. For instance, the plot is just a wee bit ridiculous. The main character becomes the “moon beast” because a tiny meteorite lodges into his brain without him noticing. Weirdly enough, it is later stated that there is a local, native legend about an identical creature existing in the past. So, the story implies that more than one person in the history of this town has had an evil moon rock lodged into their skull that transformed the victim into a were-alien. Honestly, it sounds like they had two origins written down, and couldn’t make up their mind between the two of them.
This monster looks better than the one that made it on screen
All of that said, you can make a good movie with a ridiculous plot. In fact, I like where they take the plot as it moves on. Unlike most werewolf features, doctors discover his ailment and try to fix it, and don’t hold him accountable for his crimes. Unfortunately, they ultimately can’t help him, and the main character decides to run away and attempt suicide so his moon beast form can’t hurt anyone else. He is eventually stopped from carrying out this plot, after which he to transform into the moon beast and is shot. The ending is kind of a bummer, really.
Honestly, there is some promise in this movie, but there’s not enough talent behind the film on any level to make it work. With better writing, better effects, better acting, and someone with a better eye for shooting in charge, this could have been a fun little sci-fi story. As it is, “Track of the Moon Beast” is a really boring movie to sit through, and it isn’t one I can recommend. I do, however, recommend the box art. That is, again, very bad-ass.
Cushing/Lee ’72 is a ticket that would have gotten my vote.
A couple of days ago, I decided to dive into my immense backlog of DVDs to find some blog fodder. I was planning to watch through some Hammer films to compare with Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow”, based on an interesting theory I came across on “The Nostalgia Critic” last week.
That “Sleepy Hollow” theory is something I may get into at another time. In any case, I pulled a couple of Christopher Lee / Peter Cushing combos out of my collection, and popped them in for an evening of British horror. I honestly assumed from the casts that both would be Hammer films, which I don’t think was an outlandish assumption for a film from that time period. Interestingly enough, only one of them was Hammer, but both films came from the good ol’ year of 1972. Also, they were both thoroughly delightful. So, here they are!
First up is a delightful international flick called “Horror Express.” A couple of months ago, this was recommended to me based on some of the outrageously ridiculous science in the film, so I decided to pick it up when I spotted it in the bargain bin. What they didn’t mention is that the film is an absolute blast, and the cheesy pseudo-science in the plot is just icing on the cake.
There is a mad monk, a snarky Soviet commander who takes over the train (played by Terry Savalas, who is awesome), pale-eyed zombies, a possessed defrosted neanderthal, and an alien adversary that kills people by staring at them with glowing red eyes. It is a delightful time, and the whole thing is hanging out on YouTube.
Nearly the whole movie takes place on the Trans-Siberian Express, which gives the movie an interesting claustrophobic vibe (one of many things that reminded me of “The Thing” in this movie). Cushing and Lee play rival anthropologists who coincidentally wind up on the same train, but they learn to cooperate fast when things turn bad. Lee’s character has discovered a corpse he believes to be the “missing link” in the history of human evolution, and tries to hide his cargo for the first section of the film. Of course, things go wrong when the ancient corpse wakes up and starts killing people. It winds up being dispatched pretty quickly, at which point Lee and Cushing poke at its eyeballs a bit during an autopsy. After looking at images of dinosaurs and space in the creature’s eyeball fluid under a microscope, they come to the brilliant conclusion that the missing link was possessed by a parasitic alien, and that the parasite has found a new host on the train. Spooky!
The rest of the movie involves some great alien possessions, care bear stare deaths, a train explosion, and some generally delightful practical make up effects. Here are a few stills:
I can’t recommend “Horror Express” highly enough. It dances along the line of being a good-bad movie and being just a good movie, but it is a train-load of fun either way. It might actually be my favorite Cushing / Lee movie, though there are a lot of good ones out there. Including the next flick…
“Dracula AD 1972” is one of the later Hammer films Dracula movies, and probably the most ridiculous of the bunch. It starts with the supposed final battle between Cushing’s Van Helsing and Lee’s Dracula in 1872, which ends with both men dead (Lee is notably impaled to death by the spokes of a broken buggy wheel).
The movie then hops to the modern setting of 1972 (100 years to the day), where a young man named Alucard is dead set on reviving Dracula. He is played very hammily by Christopher Neame, who went on to have a successful career as a television character actor. Honestly, he is most of the reason why I like this movie so much. He goes over the top and beyond as Dracula’s #1 fan.
Coincidentally (or not?), Alucard is in a friend group that includes the great-great-granddaughter of the original Van Helsing. Cushing of course plays her protective grandfather (the identical grandson of the original Van Helsing), who is an aging expert on the paranormal. In fact, there isn’t any perceptible difference between this Van Helsing and the original at all, which I honestly didn’t mind so much. No need to mess with a good thing.
Through a particularly silly string of events featuring a plethora of 1970’s slang, partying, and astounding British-ness, Alucard successfully resurrects Christopher Lee’s Dracula via a blood sacrifice (of a Bond girl, no less) in an abandoned church. Dracula immediately makes it clear upon his reconstitution that he has come back specifically to wipe out the Van Helsing clan, but doesn’t do a whole lot to see that goal through. Most of the actual vampiric antics are left to Alucard and his goon, during which time Dracula presumably just hangs out in the abandoned church, mostly satisfied to let others take revenge for him.
“Hey, you. Go do my revenge plot.”
Most of the movie plays out kind of like a cop drama, with Peter Cushing offering advise to a somewhat skeptical police investigator who is digging into the string of clearly vampire-inspired murders of the Van Helsing granddaughter’s friends. My favorite piece of advice Cushing gives to the cops is that they should look into Alucard as a prime suspect, because his name spelled backwards is “Dracula”. That is some deep detective work.
“I think the guy with the teeth is the bad guy”
As you might expect, the young Van Helsing girl is ultimately kidnapped by the Dracula gang, leading to a pretty underwhelming final battle between Cushing and Lee that involves a tiny spiraling staircase. More notably I think is the fact that Alucard is dispatched by Van Helsing via a shower.
so, do vampires just not bathe?
“Dracula AD 1972” isn’t quite as fun or as good as “Horror Express”, but it was still a pretty good watch. The Alucard character and all of the 70’s youth slang are hilarious, and the Satanic blood sacrifice scene is delightful. Really, the first 30 minutes or so has most of the best parts, between the wagon chase battle opening, the Satanic sacrifice, and the 1970’s youthful partying. I’d recommend giving it a watch if you want to see a campy Dracula movie, or just need an emergency dose of the early 70’s in your life.
I empathize with the characters on the left
Ah, and last but not least, “Dracula AD 1972” has a theme song for the ages. It is just amazing. Nothing says Dracula quite like funky french horns and saxophones. Give it a listen:
“From Justin to Kelly” is a somewhat unique member of the IMDb Bottom 100. It has been hovering at the bottom of the list for some time, and has held the top spot on a few occasions, but it isn’t quite what I typically expect from the list. The production values are good, it isn’t a parody movie, and Paris Hilton is nowhere to be seen. All of that said, this is a movie that deserves a slot in the Bottom 100, without any doubt.
As with many films, you can’t truly appreciate “From Justin to Kelly” without knowing a little bit of the story behind the scenes. In fact, this is a movie that doesn’t make any sense at all without context. Eponymous stars Justin Guarini and Kelly Clarkson were the finalists on the first season of the television singing competition “American Idol”. “From Justin To Kelly” was apparently an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the show in a different medium. Unfortunately, neither Justin nor Kelly had any meaningful acting experience, which should have sent a red flag up on the project from the start. The movie attempted to bank on their singing talents rather than their acting, and this relied on choreography and musical numbers to make up for the lack of a acting ability, sensible plot, or decent dialogue. This tactic, as you might imagine, did not work well.
A good number of movies on the IMDb Bottom 100 at least have a workable concept behind them, but are ultimately executed poorly. “From Justin to Kelly” has an inverse issue: the concept is unworkable (make a movie around two non-actors), and a lot of (more or less) competent people were brought in to try to make it work. So, the result is a movie that looks fine on the outside, but doesn’t have a foundation beneath it.
While the choreography and directing are done by veterans (though still pretty badly), the job of writing “From Justin to Kelly” was clearly not given the same amount of thought. All that was needed from the film was music and a serviceable trailer from a financial point of view, so why would anyone stress the script? It seems like everyone knew that they were dealing with non-actor leads anyway, so a good writing job would just be wasted on the flick. The writing was tasked to Kim Fuller, who has had a career in television, but is best known for penning another notable musical train wreck (and IMDb Bottom 100 alumnus), “Spice World.” That tells you all you need to know about how the horrendous writing of “From Justin to Kelly” came to be. The dialogue is stilted, the characters are entirely unbelievable, and the plot is a jumbled mess: all because no one particular cared to make it better.
The guy in the middle gets an entire side-story about internet dating or something. Ugh.
“From Justin to Kelly” feels like the manufactured product that it is, which makes it an incredibly off-putting viewing experience. Most movies, including bad ones, are made in the honest attempt to create something good. “From Justin to Kelly” has more in common with Z-grade exploitation films than it does any of the other Bottom 100 features, because it was made without any desire for quality or artistic value. Even more so than the many contrived blockbusters out there, this is a soulless movie. Blockbusters at least, on some level, aim to entertain an audience. “From Justin to Kelly” was not made to even entertain: it was made to profit. Luckily, it failed miserably in this regard, and is remembered as one of the most universally loathed movies of the decade.
The one in the middle with the cowboy hat is the villainous mastermind of the movie. Really.
There isn’t a whole lot of entertainment value to extract from this film. The characters are so inconsistent, unbelievable, and unlikable that there is at least somewhat of an awe factor involved in watching their stories unfold, though. In particular, one of Kelly’s cohorts is almost certainly the most inexplicably conniving villain that I have ever seen in a movie. Still, the vapid plot and tortuous, twisting love story between Justin and Kelly is immensely tiring. Not only can they not act, but their characters are written to be dumb as rocks, and are constantly manipulated into fighting each other. Their ineptitude is amusing for a while, but it gets old very fast. The fashion is pretty laughable as well, particularly the skirt made of ties, but none of it is enough to make it worth sitting through the movie.
tie skirt
So, I do not recommend watching “From Justin to Kelly.” Unless, of course, you want to watch a poorly-written, abysmally-acted, inexplicably PG spring break movie with a bunch of early 2000s pop music threaded throughout. And, hopefully, no one does.
What happens when you put “Red Zone Cuba” and “Plan 9 From Outer Space” into the blast zone of an atomic bomb? Ideally, both movies would be destroyed. Alternatively, they could synthesize into a mindless creature of a movie called “The Beast of Yucca Flats”.
Starring the hulking Tor Johnson of “Plan 9 From Outer Space” infamy, and directed/written by “Red Zone Cuba” visionary Coleman Francis, “The Beast of Yucca Flats” is exactly the quality of movie you should expect: it is absolute garbage. The only saving grace of “Yucca Flats” is the curious charm that is occasionally the side effect of absolute incompetence.
Pictured: charm
First off, eponymous “Beast” (Tor Johnson) cannot act. He spent most of his career in the background of movies as a muscle-man, but he never really had the chops for acting. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you look at it) for him, in “The Beast of Yucca Flats”, he doesn’t really have to act. Due to some of the most baffling sound work in cinema history, all of the dialogue in the film is spoken from off-screen. This means that Tor’s lead role is more or less relegated to a silent beast (I don’t recall if he even got a line before his transformation). This mechanical issue also leads to some awkward off-screen conversations set against still images, and numerous disembodied voices with unclear sources moving the plot along. Clearly in an attempt to cover this horrific sound work, the movie also has narration throughout. Unfortunately, the narrator rarely speaks in complete sentences, and never quite makes any sense. Ultimately, all of the film’s problems mentioned here (and many more) boil down to the same fellow at the rotten core of this attempted film: Coleman Francis.
Coleman Francis is the writer who cooked up all of the horrendously stilted dialogue. Coleman Francis is the narrator who rambles incoherently throughout the movie. Coleman Francis is the director who allowed the astoundingly horrible sound and cinematography decisions to made. “The Beast of Yucca Flats” is entirely and unequivocally the fault of Coleman Francis. Even the perplexing opening scene that has no connection to the rest of the film was reportedly inserted after-the-fact because Francis “liked nude scenes”.
The kind-of touching final shot had nothing to do with Francis. The rabbit just showed up.
Yet, despite the countless issues with the film (or maybe because of them), “The Beast of Yucca Flats” is almost certainly the most entertaining and best remembered of the Coleman Francis movies. As mentioned before, there is a certain intangible charm that certain movies have that can only come from the honest incompetence of the filmmaker, and “The Beast of Yucca Flats” has it. The movie is rightfully considered to be one of the classic considerations for “worst film of all time”, right alongside “Manos: The Hands of Fate” and “Plan 9 From Outer Space”. The Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode on the movie is also considered to be one of their finest:
It is mind-boggling to compare “Beast of Yucca Flats” to Coleman Francis’s other IMDb Bottom 100 movie, “Red Zone Cuba”. Both movies are arguably of equal incompetence, but “Yucca Flats” is far and away more entertaining to watch. Watching them back-to-back illustrates the hazy boundary between an entertaining bad movie and an unwatchably bad movie, at least in my opinion. In any case, I can recommend checking out the MST3K of “The Beast of Yucca Flats”. but I certainly wouldn’t say the same about “Red Zone Cuba”.
However, “Yucca Flats” doesn’t have nearly as catchy of a theme song:
“The Beast of Yucca Flats” isn’t going to be as much fun for a casual group today as “The Room” or “Birdemic”, but it rightfully has a place among the classic bad movies of yesteryear. If you can enjoy “Plan 9”, “Manos”, and other bad flicks from back in the day, then you don’t want to overlook “Yucca Flats”.
Reviews/Trivia of B-Movies, Bad Movies, and Cult Movies.
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Misan[trope]y 