It’s Christmas out there today - at least that’s what people tell me. A-religious as I am, the day means more to me for the fact that it’s a welcome reprieve from the back-to-back nine hour work shifts I’ve volunteered to suffer through this week than anything else. So here I sit, tinkering away at the guts of my new Linux desktop (openSuse 10.3 for those who wonder) between $1.30 meals of of cheap frozen entrees and store-brand macaroni judiciously augmented with low sodium soy sauce and $0.52-a-pack Blue Bonnet butter substitute. My girlfriend is gone, spending a week in Stargate-watching hell with her family while my family is off with itself - this will make the third Christmas I’ve spent entirely removed from familial obligations and I’m starting to grow accustomed to it.
Or at least I thought I was.
When I woke up today I just felt sort of wrong. Part of the blame undoubtedly rests with my choice of sustenance the night before (the same as mentioned earlier above) and the constant gray skies, occasionally spiced with flurries of fluffy little snowflakes. And I could surely blame my evening malaise on the lack of any natural light past four in the afternoon. But the simple fact of the matter is that I’m bitter - though about what I’m entirely uncertain. To make things worse, this bitter man hadn’t updated his website in nigh-on a month, and was in desperate need of inspiration.
So what’s a bitter man who runs a bizarre film website to do? Why, watch a bitter bizarre film of course!
The Beast of Yucca Flats is just such a film - it’s a staggeringly impersonal effort and every bit as bitter as one expects its creator (avid drinker Coleman Francis) may have been. A bit player in Hollywood pictures of varying production quality and writer/director of three films from 1961 to 1965, Francis was a man who, if his films were any indication, had an ax to grind with the world. Much of this could be due to the fact that he spent many of the most formative years of his youth caught up in the Great Depression (he was born in January of 1919). Whatever the cause, his attitude towards the world was something considerably less than positive.
The film in question today has become almost famous over the years, at least in the more devout sects of bad moviedom. Reasons for this are obvious throughout - it’s clear after a very short time spent watching that this film of only 54 minutes is easily one of the worst ever made, at least from a standard critical perspective. While I would never argue that the film isn’t terrible - it most definitely is - I would go so far as to say that, all awfulness aside, any audience willing to give The Beast of Yucca Flats the time and thought necessary will be rewarded with a number of intriguing ideas avoided almost entirely by popular science fiction of the day.
The film begins with an almost surreal sequence that seems (until one views the remaining 52 minutes or so) to have be been taken out of the context of the main body of the film. A young woman wanders out of the shower (wearing shoes, oddly enough) and dries herself, allowing the audience a fleeting glimpse of one of her exposed breasts. Wrapped in her towel, she then takes a seat on her bed and removes the mysteriously present shoes. Shortly thereafter an extra doubling for Tor Johnson enters the scene (face off camera) and strangles the woman to death before having his way with her (again, off camera). The entire scene unfolds with nary a scrap of sound save for the ticking of an unseen clock (this steadily increases until the moment the young woman dies).
We are then taken back in time to the beginning of the film - Tor Johnson is Dr. Joseph Javorski, a Russian scientist fleeing from behind the iron curtain and into, for whatever reason, the Nevada nuclear testing grounds. He is shown arriving at a small and dusty airport and getting into a car - presumably under secret service protection. The KGB is waiting for him, however, and after a poorly staged shootout pursues Javorski down the rural Nevada roadways in a cost effective car chase that sees at least one innocent bystander run off the road. It is with this scene that the audience first comes into contact with one of the oddities of the film - it’s all-but-complete lack of sound effects and dialogue. Music is almost constantly playing in the background, in a way very similar to that of silent films from some forty years before (indeed, the film plays a lot like a silent film), and all but a few bits of dialog are overshadowed by an omnipotent and bizarre narration provided by Francis himself. It is in this way that all narrative elements of the story are learned.
But this narration offers more to the audience than similar unending expositions, such as can be had in the American release version of the second Godzilla film (Gigantis The Fire Monster) - it consists mostly of philosophical ramblings that (seem to) have little to do with the action taking place in the film itself. The aforementioned car chase, for instance, is accompanied by the immortal line, “Flag on the moon - how did it get there?” The audience is left to wonder for a number of seconds before the narration picks up again and lets us know, in a vague way, that Javorski is on the run from the KGB with papers about a successful Russian moon shot in his possession.
The narration of the film and the action of the film have a rift between them some miles wide, and an audience forced to concentrate on both simultaneously can be left more than a little conflicted when it comes time to put the images and the exposition together. To the casual viewer the combination seems off kilter, ill-conceived, and even comically absurd. There’s good reason for this, because it’s all of those things - but it’s also much more. The distanced narration and equally distanced camera work remove all instances of human emotion - the appearance of fear, potentially, aside - and effectively prevents the cast or even the images from soliciting anything in the way of a human response from the viewer. In the act of almost completely distancing itself from the audience the film gives away its most obvious theme - dehumanization.
And what’s causing this dehumanization of the world, you ask? Why progress, of course - or at least progress in all the wrong directions.
The car chase ends when Javorski’s car is run off the road by the KGB agents. A lengthy but fruitless gun fight ensues, and Javorski is able to run (or lumber) into the rural countryside and out of the line of fire of the enemy agents. Unfortunately an atomic test seems to have been scheduled for that very moment - it is never explained what happened to the KGB agents (they’re presumably killed), but Javorski is caught by the full brunt of the blast and his briefcase of secrets lost in the fires of atomic annihilation. The film gives away a little more of itself here, with the knowledge of man (space secrets) being destroyed by the greatest accomplishment of the day (the A-bomb). It’s progress that led to the deadly shootout and car chase in the desert, the film postulates. The film fades out on a shot of a dissipating mushroom cloud. We are given no indication of how much time has passed when the film fades in again.
Two vacationers stop on the side of the road with car trouble - a man goes outside to check under the hood while his wife sits smoking in the front seat. The man is shortly strangled and left for dead - the woman is treated in the same manner but taken alive for other (insinuated) nefarious purposes. Taking into account the nature of the first scene and this one, in which another female victim is taken for what are, presumably, the same reasons, the film makes an interesting correlation between sex and violence - not as interesting, perhaps, as that shown in such films as Angel Heart (1988), but interesting none the less. Needless to say, the monster responsible for the carnage is none other than the irradiated Dr. Javorski - reduced to a lumbering beast by blind progress. While extremely idiotic in any realistic sense, this transition of Javorski from a humble and important man into an unthinking beast encapsulates the anxiety of the nuclear age perfectly - with the invention of the atom bomb mankind was finally capable of literally blasting himself back into the stone age, and that was a prospect worthy of fear.
Touch a button, things happen. A man becomes a beast.
Progress strikes again! The blind pursuit of knowledge and power has reduced a man to his basest instincts - to kill (Kill - kill just to be killing) and fuck. The idea that mankind is being forced backwards by his constant progression forwards is central to the film and is no better expressed than in the plight of Dr. Javorski himself.
A passerby soon notices the dead guy and his car off the side of the road and heads into town (what town is unknown) for help. Enter Joe Dobson - caught in the wheels of progress. The local patrolman and his Korean War veteran cohort Jim Archer are soon off an on a hunt for the beast. Jim Archer’s wife’s only scene here oddly recalls the opening of the film - laying in bed in a revealing nighty, she sits up and slips on an off-screen pair of shoes only to, moments later, slip them off and lay down again. Whether or not this mild obsession with women putting on/taking off shoes means anything or not is beyond me, but its oddity warranted some measure of attention here.
Caught up in the wheels of progress (and the rambling narrative of the film) are a family of vacationers: a mother, father, and two sons, the latter of whom are naive enough to be fascinated at the sight of “real live pigs. . . and a coyote!” behind an old convenience store. What follows the introduction of the family is a series of nonsensical events - including an overly long aerial chase of the father (mis-identified by the policemen as the killer) by a rifle toting Jim Archer (told to shoot first and ask questions later), the leaving of the father’s wife by the side of the road when he runs off to get help, and the two kids getting lost and chased by the lumbering Javorski. These sequences go on and on with no obvious purpose and lead to a lackluster ending - Javorski is finally gunned down by the policemen. There’s a moment of redemption for Javorski when he kisses a hare that hops up to him as he lays dying. The end.
While not the best (or even a decent) example of accomplished film-making, the final half hour does fit with the overall message of dehumanization present throughout the rest of the film. In the opening half of the conclusion, Jim Archer is given orders to shoot first and ask questions later. The vacationing father, wandering through the countryside in search of his boys, is thusly turned from an innocent bystander into a target by the ex-military man. Later the sides are switched, with the father gathering up a mob to hunt down the man who shot at him and find his two boys. The price of progress is best envisioned by the film in a few shots of the lost mother, gazing into the distance - with her boys lost and her husband the target of a trigger happy war vet, this woman almost pays a terrible price for the betterment of mankind. Other images of the price paid are present throughout - a coyote, for instance, run out of its habitat by missile base construction.
And what of the out-of-time opener for the film? The only place, given the events depicted in the film, that it could possibly fit is somewhere between the fade-out over the dissipating mushroom cloud and the fade-in on the two unlucky vacationers. But whether or not it could even fit there is debatable. As evidenced by the rest of the film, Javorski never leaves the anti-shelter of desert and only reacts to those entering what has become, since the nuclear test, his territory. The scene plays without any additional exposition on the part of director/narrator Francis, thus alienating itself entirely from the temporal progression of the rest of the film. It seems best characterized as a simple (and chillingly effective, in comparison with the rest of what’s shown in the film) showcase of random and reasonless sexual violence and a look into the nature of the beast that exists not only in narrative but in the substance of mankind itself. Food for thought.
The Beast of Yucca Flats is cynical and disconcerting from start to finish - its focus on dehumanization and violence is crass and unforgiving, if nothing else. Director Coleman Francis apparently remained a bitter man throughout his life, gaining huge amounts of weight and associated health problems along the way. According to Anthony Cardoza - a former friend and the producer of the film - he was found dead under quite mysterious circumstances. Whether suicide or something else, it was certainly a bitter end to a bitter life.
More interesting than good, The Beast of Yucca Flats certainly has reason for taking its place among worst of the worst in film - it is honestly awful. But such awfulness has been covered time and again and by a variety of sources. For further critical reading (and, thus far, the only other critical reading that I’ve been able to find online) on the topic, WTFFILM highly recommends The “Yucca” films of Coleman Francis , an article by Greg Woods on the three films of Francis and with a focus on this film. WTFFILM also recommends a closer look at the film itself to those whose only experience with it has been through the multiple lashings it’s received online and from the crew of the Satellite of Love - after all, you could watch a lot worse.
