Night Train to Mundo Fine (aka Red Zone Cuba) is about the most pointless, incredibly ridiculous movies ever made. The story follows an escaped convict named Griffen (Coleman Francis) who befriends a couple of drifters looking for work, and they decide to join the Bay of Pigs invasion force. After about 20 minutes of military training, all 8 men of the invasion force invade Cuba. They're all captured and awaiting execution, when the three friends escape and fly a plane to Arizona to look for precious metals in a mountain one of the men in the invasion force told them about in their cell. They drive around, kill a couple people, jump on a train, meet the wife of the guy who owns the mountain, and as they're heading out to do some mining G-men show up to capture them.There really does seem to be no point to this movie whatsoever. There are so many plot lines which go nowhere, and no real reason to involve the Bay of Pigs as part of the plot, other than to learn about the Arizona mountain and its riches. There's no reason for them to kill people after they go to Arizona. There's no reason for them to ditch their car and hop onto a train, only to get another car later on. There's no need for Griffen to shoot the woman after the feds are chasing him.This could have been a decent movie if it had decent directing and a budget for the action sequences. As it was, about all the action was cut out of the movie. There was little action in the invasion sequence, certainly no combat to speak of. Then when they were escaping Cuba in the airplane, one minute they're taxiing down the runway with a jeep chasing them and people shooting, next thing they're walking in a field. Same for the train sequence. One minute they're walking on top of a moving train, the next they're jumping out of a stationary boxcar. In fact, the whole train scene was no more than 1:20 or so minutes long. It's like Coleman Francis thought it'd be a great idea to take out all the best parts of the movie and leave in everything else.And in the end, there's really not much of a message to this movie, or if there's supposed to be it's difficult to determine what it is. You really can't feel empathy for the lead character because he's just not much of a likable guy. Nor do you really care about the others. Nor is the movie good entertainment, even in a "so bad it's good" sort of way.If you watch this, watch the MST3K version.

So there are good bad movies (plan 9, attack of the giant X monster movies) and then there are bad bad movies, like this one and Manos. The bots do some justice to these movies but what makes them just terrible is that absolutely nothing happens. Yes, the editing is beyond the pale, music sounds like it came out of a greeting card, the script is non- existent, and the acting is terrible and dull. We all know this, otherwise it won't be on MST3K. What makes this movie truly stand out is, like Manos, nothing happens for about an hour. You see cars moving, something about a truck being sold, pawning a gold ring, murdering some random person with a blind daughter, a "for rent" sign, and these are the memorable parts of the movie. The unmemorable parts involve wonderful song scenes of driving, flying, driving, climbing up somewhere not Cuba, flying, driving, sleeping, smoking, and more driving. Who could possibly forget the memorable and thrilling scene of buying some sandwich makings before getting into a car? If this reminds you of 10 minutes of random fields as credits roll by, it should.

The reviews on this movie seem to have the general idea covered very well, so suffice it to say that I agree, it's a horrible film. One thing that I did not see in the reviews was any mention of Cherokee Jack's sign. The version of the film I saw only flashed to the sign for about 1/2 second. I ran it back and played it twice more and I still could not absorb the whole thing. So I paused on the sign and did a screen-grab. The sign in itself is funny, so I posted the screen-grab on my personal Web site and was going to give you a link here so you could see it for yourselves. Alas, the posting guidelines for IMDb forbid giving URL's. Too bad. It's worth a look.While it doesn't do the actual sign justice, here is what it says:*******************************"CHEROKEE ~ JACK" WiLL FLiE YOU ANYWHERE? RATES - PRETTiE - REASONEBLE;*******************************All misspellings and punctuation above are correct. The "i"'s were all lower case, but capital sized. The sign was done by hand. I'll admit that the possibility exists that this was intentional, but considering how little thought went into the rest of this movie, I doubt it. So, Jack somehow managed to get a pilot's license but can't spell the word "fly"? Not exactly confidence inspiring. I was also counting how many times a cigarette was put to lips in this film, but I lost count after 27.Coleman Francis, was there any movie you couldn't make for $35,000?

Do you know what's worse than a movie directed by Coleman Francis? A movie directed by and starring Coleman Francis. I simply cannot imagine anyone watching this thing without the Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentary. I'm a fan of "bad" movies, but Red Zone Cuba would be too much on its own. A nonsensical plot involving a Cuban invasion, the worst acting imaginable, and editing that looks as if it were done by monkeys are just a few of the "highlights". I defy anyone to find a frame of this movie that in some way isn't flawed. Every moment presents a new and even more amazing decent into putrid film-making. I cannot see giving this abomination anything higher than a 1/10.But, with the MST3K commentary, Red Zone Cuba becomes absolutely hysterical. I laughed so hard during the film's second half that I had tears in my eyes. I'll put this episode near the top of my list of favorites. Episode #619 gets a 5/5 on my MST3K rating scale.