Taking a look at a box set that a fellow IMDber has kindly given me as a gift,I spotted a Horror title starring Tor Johnson.With having seen Johnson depicted in Tim Burton's excellent Ed Wood,I decided that it was time to visit the Yucca flats.The plot:Defecting from the Soviet Union, Russian scientist Joseph Javorsky goes to the US to give them all of the info that he has on the Soviets plans. Preparing to pass a suitcase with all the info to his US contacts,Javorsky and his contacts are caught by surprise,when 2 KGB spies reveal themselves,and start attacking them.Seeing his US contacts get killed,Javorsky runs away from the agents.With not knowing anything about the location,Javorsky walks onto a nuclear test site.Hit by radiation from the site (what luck!) Javorsky begins to transform into a monster.View on the film:Before I get to the movie,I have to mention that despite being a public domain title,Mill Creek have given the flick a surprisingly good transfer,with the super-dry narration being clear to hear,and the sharp picture allowing for the best to be seen in all its glory.Mostly taking place in what looks to be a park,the score by Irwin Nafshun/Al Remington & Gene Kauer takes a pretty good shot at trying to create an eerie mood.Running at 54 minutes,the screenplay by auteur film maker Coleman Francis (who tragically died from a suicide age 53 in 1973) completely ignores any sense of logic.but does very well at keeping the film running along by chucking complexly random, illogical events on the screen,which go from an opening murder scene which is not mentioned at all for the rest of the film,to the "beast" walking around like a drunk caveman,in a film with a beast who would be unable to knock any flats standing in his way.

The movie is not good - in fact it is pure junk. Yet there is something strangely entertaining about this film. IDK how a movie this junky can entertain so well but this movie can do that for certain viewers - including myself.The movie is less than an hour long. In my opinion, what was missing was a longer movie to finish telling the story. The movie had the potential to be better and all it really needed was more time to complete the story because the story was incomplete.There is something strangely good about this horrible film... maybe it is simply the fact it had the potential to be better than what it is. I liked the narration, the way the movie was filmed, the odd characters, and even the incomplete story.If you are looking for a movie that is very odd and is a bad b-rated film that is somewhat entertaining then look no further than this campy flick.7/10

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!

Here was me thinking that only Jess Franco had the ability to somehow stretch time beyond its constraints and make a relatively short film seemingly last for about six days, but I after I'd finished watching the Beast of Yucca Flats, I swear I'd aged at least two years.This is a fairly well known bad film, and although I'm the easiest viewer in the world to please, on my first attempt at watching this I could feel myself drifting in and out of consciousness. On the second attempt I'd had a couple of beers and got up the next day thinking that I'd probably missed something at the end, but no. On the third attempt I realised that I hadn't missed anything at all, and that most of the entire last half of the film involves people wandering around a desert looking for each other.The story involves Tor Johnson being a defecting Soviet scientist who gets chased by the FBI into the Yucca Flats and gets caught in the blast from a nuclear test, turning him into a monster. He wanders the Yucca Flats strangling people and two cops go after him. Meanwhile, two kids wander off from their family and their parents go looking for them, and therefore you have a film consisting mainly of the cops looking for the killer, the parents looking for their kids, and the kids wandering around the desert followed by a waddling Tor Johnson in bad make up.I read (on here, I think) that the film was recorded without sound, which adds to the sleepy atmosphere. You've got people wandering around in near silence for ages at a time while a narrator waffles on about anything that comes into his mind. I like my bad films to be delirious and hilarious (like Ninja Terminator, Clash of the Warlords or Fearless Tiger), but if there's one thing I cannot stand in a film it's people wandering around looking for each other endlessly (see Legend of the Mummy 2 or Psycho Cop for examples).There are parts to this film that are funny, from the inexplicable murder at the start, the gunshot wounds that heal themselves over time and the bad acting of everyone involved (Johnson can hardly move at all, let alone chase kids through the desert), there's too much waffle and not enough action on this film. It's more of an endurance test than anything else.