PR in the Philippines

(SeaPRwire) –   By 1961, the notorious Ed Wood had abandoned all hopes of breaking into Hollywood, following the flop of his Psycho-inspired ripoff The Sinister Urge the year prior, which pushed him to shift toward an exploitation circuit that suited his one-of-a-kind skills far better. Spotting an opening for low-budget genre films that intentionally ignored logic, working actor Coleman Francis made the jump to directing for a chaotic blend of Cold War espionage, boogeyman horror, and nuclear protest movie—one that made Wood look like a master of his craft by comparison.

It doesn’t take long for The Beast of Yucca Flats, named for the actual irradiated location, to leave viewers completely bewildered. In the first proper scene, we learn the Soviet Union, a country hardly known for being reserved, had kept secret that it had beaten the United States to the first moon landing. And after defecting to their fiercest rivals, their top “renowned scientist” Joseph Javorsky (Tor Johnson) is now being hunted by the KGB before he can reveal this unbelievable secret.

What follows is an endlessly long chase sequence that starts when he lands at the airfield and ends in the middle of the Nevada desert. Despite the area having almost no signage or security measures, it just so happens to host a nuclear facility. And in an incredible stroke of bad luck, Javorsky arrives right as their latest test sends up a cloud of radioactive smoke. Thus, The Beast of Yucca Flats is born.

You might notice that by this point, none of the characters have spoken. In fact, it takes roughly a third of the way through the 54-minute film for a character to speak at all—even then, their lines are delivered off-screen. Francis shot the movie like a silent film, though there’s a rumor he simply lost the original soundtrack, but lacked the ability or willingness to sync the dubbed dialogue to the actors’ on-screen faces. As a result, all of the film’s dialogue is either spoken out of frame or from a distance.

That doesn’t mean The Beast of Yucca Flats is a quiet experience, though. There’s an overbearing orchestral score that rarely matches the action unfolding on screen. The same goes for the ominous narrator who keeps popping up to deliver exposition, but whose stiff, confusing riddles—delivered as if they were run through Google Translate back and forth—leave viewers even more baffled than before. “Boys from the city not yet caught by the whirlwind of progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs,” is just one of these unhinged non-sequiturs; “Flag on the moon. How did it get there?,” is another.

Of course, the overall vibe of disorienting audio and visuals is established in the cold open. Here, a loud, distracting ticking clock plays as an unidentified, scantily clad woman is strangled in her motel room by a mysterious attacker. Amazingly, this murder (and the implied necrophilia) has no connection to the rest of the film and is never referenced again. Francis included this scene purely as a cheap attention grab that let him show bare breasts, a brazen example of Hollywood’s history of marginalizing and exploiting women.

The film’s other portrayals of women are just as poor. Jim’s wife, played by Bing Stafford, is one of two bumbling, trigger-happy cops assigned to capture the mutant. She isn’t given a name or any lines, but she does get a lingering close-up of her getting out of bed in revealing nightwear—and in a clear case of misleading marketing, this shot takes up the most prominent space on the film’s poster. And while the man killed by the Beast is left to decompose on the roadside, the barely alive body of his wife is carried up the mountain for no clear reason.

On the rare occasions Francis isn’t sexualizing women, he frames them as helpless. A mother who loses her two children at a gas station spends most of her screen time sitting still and crying instead of, y’know, actually searching for her kids. At least she avoids almost getting killed, unlike her more active husband, who is forced to run for his life after the area’s gun-toting Keystone Cops-style officers mistake him for the Beast. “Shoot first, ask questions later,” is one of the few pieces of narration that actually makes sense.

Thankfully, after nearly shooting an innocent father in cold blood, the cops realize the giant, hulking figure who looks like a low-budget take on Fantastic Four’s The Thing is far more likely to be the radioactive culprit, and they aim their guns correctly. The Beast slowly succumbs to his injuries, but not before cradling a jackrabbit that wanders into the frame—this was an unscripted, brilliant ad-lib from Johnson that ties into the description of Javorsky as a “kind man.” Yes, the film’s only truly poetic moment was completely accidental.

Johnson, a former Swedish professional wrestler who appeared in multiple Ed Wood “classics” including Plan 9 from Outer Space and Bride of the Monster, is the film’s strongest element, simply because all he’s asked to do is grunt silently and look vaguely threatening. Though this proto-The Rock saw this as his final film role, Francis and his producing partner Anthony Mendoza went on to make two equally nonsensical films—The Skydivers and Red Zone Cuba—to create the most heavily panned trilogy of the early 1960s. The Beast of Yucca Flats, however, is unquestionably their worst flop of all.

The Beast of Yucca Flats can be streamed on Tubi today.