An atomic blast turns Tor Johnson into, well... Tor Johnson in a ripped shirt. He then wanders the desert. A couple of lost kids also wander the desert, and so does their dad and a pair of deputies. Other than that, nothing much happens. Like other Coleman Francis movies, this one plays like it was actually a much longer movie and all of the interesting stuff was cut out. A Soviet scientist arrives in the US carrying defence secrets. We see him arrive by plane and depart in a car. In another movie, this would be filler. To Coleman Francis this is plot. We get endless scenes of people getting into cars and driving away, or parking cars and getting out. But then nothing happens. People look around, say nothing of value, and then leave, or the film cuts away. Often we don't even have dialogue, just an off screen narrator paraphrasing what characters say. We get sixty minutes of filler and no action. Two KGB agents have followed the scientist with orders to retrieve the stolen secrets. The viewer expects some sort of cold war thriller plot to develop, but the blast that turns Tor into a beast also kills the KGB men and burns up the secrets. We are ten minutes into the movie and have been stiffed on what looked like some actual plot development and this pattern continues. Characters are introduced who don't do much. Murders occur but there is little investigation of them. What we get is the filler. Francis clearly thought that having somebody get into a car and drive away satisfied the action requirements for a thriller, and having Tor spread his hands wide and growl like an animal covered the horror part. In this he was mistaken. Maybe he also thought that keeping the audience guessing as to whether anything that happened in the movie actually mattered constituted suspense. He's dead, and we can't ask him. Some bad movies make you laugh at their ineptitude, while others make you want to strangle their creators. This one just makes you sleepy. The title and box art for the movie suggest a drive-in creature feature, but even as a grade z movie it fails, since there is nothing campy here: no bad special effects or overwrought performances or shameless exploitation, none of the usual elements of a good bad movie. What we get is an hour of watching people wander randomly in the desert, and it's exactly as entertaining as it would be to do that yourself. I gave it two stars for being marginally more watchable than Red Zone Cuba, and for possible value as a non-narcotic sleep aid.
Review of The Beast of Yucca Flats
