A movie. Trying to make sense. Failing. A plot. The director searches but can't find it. A narrator speaks and says nothing. This is the beast. The Beast of Yucca Flats.
I, too, was going to post a review that read 'Flag on the moon, how'd it get there?' But when I think about it, that would imply that this movie was fun, and without the MST3K, I'm quite sure it isn't. The pseudo-beat-poetry in the beginning might make you think something interesting is going to happen, and there are moments not long afterward where the director made some smart choices--but the rest is a series of disappointments, somnolent pacing, and unfunny failure.
Despite the low rating I bestowed this film, I actually love it. It's hard to tell whether Coleman Francis seriously thought this was a coherent film or if he was actually an avant-garde filmmaker in disguise.
A pretentious mess of a voice-over and sparse dialogue make for a viewing experience that is surreal and unique but still boring as fuck. I'm sorry, but there's no excuse, even at this, the lowest tier of filmmaking, for a film under an hour long to be so slow. And we never do find out how that flag on the moon got there.
I recently ran a triple feature of Coleman Francis films, which I dubbed "The Hell Trilogy" (it is of no consequence that no one accepted my invitation). A mercifully short low budget snoozer, where it becomes painfully obvious that Tor Johnson's girth made it difficult for him to walk. Almost no dialogue is spoken directly on camera, with an omnipresent narrator spewing some of the most dismal lines ever written into a script. There are bad movies, and then there is The Beast of Yucca Flats.
Unlike fellow auteur Hal Warren who chose to portray the protagonist of his movie with a sympathy that elicits from the audience an affection for a man lead down the wrong path yet with a heart of gold, Francis, with the character of Javorsky, chooses instead to focus on a man, clearly disillusioned with the world around him, and his connection with the natural world over the "progress" created by his fellow man's inhumanity. Whilst they both have valid points, I feel they both fail somewhat.
Coleman Francis sparsely narrates a bunch of footage of people driving, parking, walking around, you get the idea. So little happens that it's surreal; it follows an obscure and indecipherable logic, like dream logic, which makes the entire thing feel unreal. And like dreams it too stretches out a short amount of time, and is only meaningful to the person who dreamed it. Who knows what Francis was thinking, and why he decided to share it with us.
The defiance of basic convention in terms of editing, sound mixing, narration, plot, pacing, logic, and dialog is so blatant that I initially considered whether it was artistically intentional. But I soon realized that Coleman Francis was just indescribably, utterly cheap and incompetent.
One of no-budget auteur Francis's few excursions into sci-fi/horror, this brain cell-crushing motion picture (and I use the term loosely) makes Ed Wood's movies look like the work of Welles or Fellini -- or both.
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