Very disappointing...

Just what I expected

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This movie is worse than Plan 9. Worse than Suicide Squad or BvS...it's like having a nightmare. The strange narration, the dubbing, the acting...horrible. I like scary movies, but I don't want them to be this scary!Avoid.

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.

Unless your day job consists of sitting in a tiny windowless room where you do nothing but count grains of sand by hand, The Beast of Yucca Flats will probably be one of the most boring things you ever experience. I had seen Red Zone Cuba so I knew that this would be boring coming from Coleman Francis. But I had no idea it would be this boring. In Red Zone Cuba at least stuff happens. The pacing is awful but things go on. But this doesn't even get that distinction. Also like Red Zone Cuba, The Beast of Yucca Flats is annoyingly pretentious. The narrator just says simple (and sometimes random) things, but he sounds like he's narrating the Twilight Zone. The acting is also bad, but what can you really expect from Tor Johnson? There are also a lot of random scenes that were put there just for the sake of taking up our time. The beginning scene is of a woman getting out of the shower and then suddenly being strangled. What's the point of this? Why is it in the movie? What significance does this have to the plot? It's never explained! Throughout the rest of the movie it's never even acknowledged. Simply put, this scene would be better left out of the movie. On second thought, so would the whole movie. The only two ways to watch it are on MST3K, or if you have insomnia. End of story.

*Spoiler/plot- The Beast of Yucca Flat, 1961. A large Russian scientist defects and lands in the USA and is chased by KGB agents to get him and his secret papers of his moon rocket experiments. The us agents protecting him drive into a atomic bomb test area, and the scientist walks into the test area to become radiated. After his atomic exposure, he becomes a killer on the loose in the community. He murders townspeople and tourists until the local police shoot him.*Special Stars- Tor Johnson.*Theme- Atomic energy makes you do crimes and murders.*Trivia/location/goofs- B & W, Huge amount of continuity problems with this film. The whole film's dialog and sound problems are apparent with the constant nonsensical narrator story interruptions. The film opening of a nude female being murdered scene sequence has little to do with the film's plot set-up. According to the film's director, the rabbit at the end was not scripted; a wild baby jackrabbit wandered into the final atomic beast's death shot. Look for the dead atomic beast keep moving after being shoot by multiple firearms and bullets. Tor Johnson's last film appearance before his death.*Emotion- I wanted to enjoy this film but it's terrible production values and paper thin and phony plot line killed this film for me. It's truly a waste of your time and energy to see. Even the great an watchable Tor Johnson can't save this stinker of a film.*Based On- 1950's atomic bomb and radiation hysteria.