HIPPOLYTA- This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.
THESEUS - The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.
HIPPOLYTA - It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.
THESEUS - If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men. --- Shakespeare, Midsummer's Night Dream
NARRATOR - Flag on the moon. How did it get there?
- Coleman Francis, Beast of Yucca Flats
(Night 9 of the 12 Days of Ed Wood)
Not to brag, but those of us who were kids in the 70s had great imaginations. Forged in the banal eternity of backseats spent on long drives for hour after hour while dad chain-smoked, cursed the traffic and the radio blared static, our minds imagined whole movies we'd only heard about from start to finish. I remember taping a picture of Charlie's Angels to the back of dad's seat and pretending it was a built-in TV screen. Unless we had a super 8mm projector and a highlights reel bought from the camera store or the back pages of Famous Monters of Filmland, everything we saw onscreen was transitory, never to be rewound to 'check' if what we thought we saw was really there or not. If you missed it, you then had to take some other kid's word on what happened the next day until, maybe years later, it showed up again as a rerun (and the part you remember may well be edited for time and/or content so now way to prove what you saw wasn't there). From recess and lunch time synopses of the previous night's TV movies or shows, our minds filled in enough wild effects to make Lucas and Spielberg give up and go home. For us, movies were just the finger pointing to the moon. Our imaginations followed the direction and filled space with an array of monsters.
Now, with CGI, we laugh at anything other than the finest finger, the most vividly rendered CGI moon. Our imaginations have shrunk from misuse, the way our brain's ability to produce dopamine shrinks when when addicted to opiates.
Not all bad movies are gems. Contrasting the totemistic ardor of auteurs like Cozzi, Wood, and Steckler, bores like Jerry Warren, "Vic Savage," Larry Buchanan, and W. Lee Wilder seem contemptuous of anyone who watches their films anywhere but on the late-late show for any reason other than to put themselves to sleep. Films like The Incredible Petrified World, The Creeping Terror, Face of the Screaming Werewolf and Mars Needs Women make perfect coma inducers when you can't sleep in some cheap motel and they show up at the 4 AM late late late show.
But! There is yet another, for sometimes the sublime is awakened almost despite the filmmakers' best efforts towards mediocrity. Sometimes we get the nouvelle vague child's eye surrealism and the coma-inducing flatline. The perfect storm of un-storminess. Probably the best example is Coleman Francis' Beast of Yucca Flats. One can never tell if he's trying to actually make a good film or not. I hope I never find out.
"Touch a button.
Things happen.
Things happen.
A scientist becomes a beast."
The first few minutes of Beast of Yucca Flats create a grim, sleazy claustrophobic atmosphere that runs counter to the rest of the film with its outdoor desert expanses. First thing is what we hear: the loud ticking of a clock, time's relentless nightstick strike. A pretty young woman gets out of the shower, sits down on her single bed against the wall in a closet sized room, and get strangled, killer POV-style. The camera seems to crowd her into the corner of her bed--so tight it's like she's caught on a glass slide. As we fade to credits the killer holds onto her legs and we see the bed starting to rock - leading to whatever weird rape-necrophilia sleaze one's mind can conjure in 1961 without waking the censor. Roll the opening credits! Let us never speak of this scene again, except to wonder if Francis shot it, or it was inserted later by some profit-minded producer who wanted to at least give the people something salacious, so wisely tagged up front, like Bardot's nude scene in Contempt. (1) It keeps us on edge for the rest of the film, slightly unnerved. But not to worry, there's nothing else like it ahead.
And that's fine. It's not why we're here. Coleman's weird fractured poetic narration and Tor Johnson presence are the reasons, which means we're Ed Wood-ophiles. Here he starts things out as a Russian defector who has a flammable brief case with secret information on his nation's moon landing (hint: the"flag on the moon" Francis' narration mentions isn't ours, which is still eight year away). KGB spies intercept him at the airport, shoot his CIA escorts, chase him out to an empty field in the desert right before a nuclear bomb goes off. (he didn't see the "Testing Range" sign in his haste) No longer a scientist dedicated to "the betterment of mankind" but "a beast." The moon forgotten, Tor wanders around the desert, strangling people with his meaty sunburned fingers like a combination Hulk and the mutant father from Barn of the Naked Dead. When he's riled, which is often, Tor waves a cane and makes dubbed "yaargh!" noises (I think that's Coleman's voice dubbing him as well). Two local police search for the killer and end up shooting at the wrong man, a father trying to find his two "adventurous boys" after they get lost wandering around in the scrub of "Yucca Flats" after the family stops for a picnic.
The film is barely an hour long, at least ten minutes too short to be just an actual movie. And yet it feels like forever, despite the beauty of the rock formations that look like a drunkenly passed-out Willdendorf Venus.
Why this film is one of the 12 Days of Wood not only cuz Tor Johnson but because the thunderous "Wagner with the DT's" library score is the same one Ed used for Plan Nine from Outer Space (and Ed's pal Ronnie Ashcroft used for Astounding She Monster)."Yucca Flats" isn't a real place, apparently, but the name of an apartment complex Ed once lived in (making Ed the real beast?). Some of Francis' voiceover seems a bit slurred (!) and some of that Ed Wood madness is apparent in both the narration's associative leaps, and the ease with which a big nuclear blasts erupt at any given time in any given place (ala the end of Bride of the Monster). The only debit: Francis lacks Wood's cock-eyed genius. If Wood wrote the script, Yucca might have more cult status. Instead, for Yucca to improve on repeat viewings, you need to surrender to it the same way you might surrender to Jess Franco or Jean Rollin, i.e. to be half-asleep when you start. When you need to escape even the confines of comfort and retreat into a kind of holding pattern, void of all meaning and value, move to Yucca Flats. It's a film you can fall to sleep to every night for years on end and never see the same movie twice, or any movie at all, really. While Coleman's narration postulates that all the events you see onscreen are linked to the inevitable backlash against mankind's relentless scientific searching beyond the atom. The agents of cold war doing terrible things to humanity, the images show strange looking people running and shooting and waving their arms as they race around the middle of Southwestern scrubland or hang out at a small local airstrip (maybe the same one from Wood's Fugitive Girls? Either way, we know Francis must have a plane there; it's practically a co-star of all three of his films).
Say what you will about Ed Wood, he had a sound recording engineer on the set, and a boom mic. Sometimes. And Criswell's narration was surging ever higher on plumes of uniquely Woodian giddiness and not some labored striving for sociopolitical resonance.
Still, Coleman's narration is pretty special: a weird series of fractured haiku that works as the bitter existential Korean war vet drunk to Ed's rapturous WW2 vet boozy cinemania. Obsessed with progress and the way if you're not careful you could wind up in the wrong hunk of desert at the wrong time and be zapped by an A-bomb, or shot at by a deputy from an airplane, Francis' jaundiced view of 'scientific progress' seems to be that it's better to be either high in the sky or asleep in your bed. We agree. Be the one killing, not the killed. And if you're going to get caught in something, let it be a race for the betterment of mankind rather than the grinding wheels of progress, or the blast radius of the nuclear age. Warped, deep, occasionally slurred, Francis' jaundiced outlook is rife with strange and abstract tangents that makes the Ed McMahon rants of Daughter of Horror seem like Raymond Carver. Furthering his bitterness, a girl is rescued alive from the beast. "She's still breathing," and then seconds later "doctors can't help her. Maybe angels, but not doctors." We don't see any noticeable change, she seems asleep. It's such an odd choice on Francis' part. Either she's dead or she's alive. In the Francis zone, she survives, only to die somewhere right in front of you. Or the cop can't find a woman's pulse to save his life.
If you're up for it, though, Francis' voiceover is a thing of slow-action beauty, and perhaps influential on future filmmakers. Watch Yucca and then watch Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg back and you'll hear the same hypnotic repetitions of words and ideas, the same mix of sensationalism, poetry, and somnambulistic drifting. Sentences come back around like the shooting gallery ducks you missed the first time. Always with the wheels. With Maddin, it's the wheels of moving train taking him away from Winnipeg while he drifts in and out of sleep; for Francis, it is surely the wheels of progress, ensnaring everything and everyone while they're rousted from the planes and beds and sent staggering dazedly into the unceasing desert sun.
One element that would have helped things along would be some indoor soundstage shots. After that opening, we seldom leave the glaring outdoors during the day (or day-for-night) but at least it's in black-and-white and well-preserved; it feels like looking at an Ansel Adams or Dorothea Lange desert photography book while wearing very dark sunglasses. Is it supposed to be (day for) night, or did the photographer put on a sun filter? The answer is just the howl of the wind, or is it a coyote? Either way, it's not on the soundtrack. Nothing is... except Francis' narration, the occasional gun shot or snatch of dialogue (never synced to lips) and that incessant Plan Nine music (its brassy stabs never once synced to the editing).
There are so few indoor shots in Flats though, and so little in the way of foley/diegetic sound, you may get a little wacky after awhile. But Francis know what he's doing. Aside from the opening murder shot there is one more scene set in the one-floor bungalow of one of the deputies, that makes us instantly feel calmer and sleepy. It's the morning, the killer has struck; a deputy, Jim Archer, is roused from his morning shut-eye by a visit from the sheriff, irritating his sleepy wife who sits up and makes sure to show off her deep tan legs and cleavage (terrible bangs though). "See ya later honey" we hear a voice says, in that ghostly post-sync echo so familiar to fans of Doris Wishman. The wife scowls and gets back into bed so we can dig those tanned legs. We never hear her voice, just look at her dirty blonde wig; her heavy tan and her nice legs as she gets into bed. Would we could stay with her and go to sleep instead of going outside in the heat to shoot at innocent men and climb mountains to nowhere. Instead we're back out amidst the yucky flats, the voluptuous curves, the rocky hills.
"Vacation time - man and wife; unaware of scientific progress."
Their car pulls over on the road so the man is checking the oil; Jeff's scarred and meaty hands wrap around him from behind, killing him instantly. We think surely "wife" is next!
She nods off a bit in the sun, unaware of the scientific progress that has left her husband dead. We're expecting Tor to grab her from the front seat, like he did with Mrs. Trent in Plan Nine, but instead his hands slowly emerge from the dark of the backseat! Tor in the backseat; how did he get there? Or if he's not, how could he reach right through the back of the back of the VW hood without the wife looking anywhere but her cigarette?
Close-ups of the man Joe Dobbs picked up, Jim Archer (Bing Stafford) "wounded parachuting over Korea... also caught in the race for the betterment of mankind." He's "trained to hunt down his man, and destroy." Here is a man who never closes his mouth or opens his eyes. We get a close-up so we can wince at his crooked teeth.
Another family meanwhile is on the road. ("Vacation time. Man and wife. Unaware of scientific progress"). They stop at a gas station. The gas station attendant is lazy, cooked by the heat. Francis' narration sizes the guy up for us. Whatever wheel he's caught in or progress he's unaware of, well, count him out.
"Boys from the city, not yet caught in the wheel of progress, now feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs."
It's clear this was never a movie meant to be studied. It hopes you are paying, at best, moderate attention so you don't really notice there is no 'movie' per se, just a very familiar library score and calming but urgent narration over shots of the desert and people running around. The playing card named Jeff Dubrovsky rattles every spoke on the wheel of progress. The reels of the film keep spinning, barely pausing to observe the passing absurdity. I could listen to it forever, dozing in and out of a pleasant Remeron coma.
Erich Kuersten... dozing off...
in a Remeron coma.
Watching.
Watching because Tor.
Jeff throws a huge rock (which is clearly a real rock. Way to go, Tor!) and then shakes his fists at the sky like an old codger at those rascally kids, but since it's Tor he also evokes an infant. As Francs' narration might put it: The old and the new, all at once.
Rock thrown, fist shaken, Dubrovsky begins the laborious process of laying himself down on the very hard and rocky ground to take a nap. His reticence to just plop down onto the cave floor brings to mind how painful it must be to be Tor's sunbaked Nordic skin, smashed between a hot, rocky surface and that immense wrestler weight, like a gentle cashmere sweater packed under a bowling ball. We feel bad watching a man of Tor's age, skin pigment, and girth, forced to stagger around under the blazing desert sun for hours on end. Surely there are easier ways to make a living? But we're here; we may as well make sure he did not sweat in vain. So onward Tor raves; motionless mom stands; relentlessly dad flees; incessantly Jim Archer shoots; gingerly the boys wander. Having sought shelter in Jeff's cave, we get the second best shot of the film, when we see Tor lying down in the shade from the boy's POV deep behind him in the shadows, and then they're carefully creeping past his sleeping girth out into the blazing (?) day/for/night sun.
There she is (above), Mrs. Francis, standing cactus-like in the middle of the desert; picnic basket ever at the ready, forgotten by all but Colemanm's camera, which does at least cut back to her occasionally. She's so gone it never even occurs to her she can put the basket down. Maybe she thinks some average bear is going to rush out and grab it the moment it's on the ground? Even a hungry coyote smelling the food might bring some kind of relief to her awful isolation.
"Vacation time. People travel east, west, north and south. "
Though his entire oeuvre was more than a bit bent by his joyless outlook on life, his natural affinity for the grotesque, and his utter lack of attention to filmic detail, this Luddite tale of an obese scientist turned into a ravening atomic Beast survives as his weirdest anti-achievement. - Alfred Eaker, 366 Movies.
We end the film with the the wife wandering alone and forgotten around in the scrub; the two boys are rescued in long shot with the 'officers.' Dad is still wandering with the 'neighbor.' The night, like life, crawls onward. Mom is still there, somewhere presumably. As Jeff dies, a fearless young jackrabbit comes up and start trying to get at whatever snack the dying Tor has in his shirt pocket. Gingerly, with the gracefulness of a tender giant, his meaty hand pets the rabbit and then he is dead. This is life in Yucca Flats. No mercy for the loser. The cops and kids don't even think to put a blanket over him to keep the coyotes off the carcass. Off they wander, perhaps to get a look at those pigs or flying saucers.
But these are the rewards to the few who made it to the end, those who used their stupefied bemusement to transcend rather than doze off. Or both. The beauty of the Coleman Francis' opus, is that you can do it all.
NOTES:
1. I remember a very disturbing opening scene from a film called Monster of Piedras Blancas, where a young couple sneak away from their friends to a nearby cave to fool around, but are surprised by a monster who rips off one of (or both of) their heads. Too disturbed to continue watching, we flipped the channel to either the opening song of Bikini Beach (I just remember a couple kissing while eating a long piece of red licorice, which seemed, after the decapitation and the girls pitiful screaming, to be extra horrific to my six or seven year-old mind, burning the juxtaposition into my childhood mind). Now going to watch Piedras on DVD, that intro scene is gone, was it not part of the 'actual' film? Like Yucca, the rest of Piedras Blancas seems very boring by comparison. The DVD even has the aftermath of the scene - the headless couple found on the beach but now we only see them from way up atop the dunes looking down. What happened?
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See also the Other 11 Nights of Wood, and Wood-esquery:
