FEATURING: Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, A. Martinez

PLOT: An underground environmental activist sneaks pythons into the Everglades; when the

snakes begin killing off the swamp’s native fauna, a game warden feeds the local alligators experimental steroids in an attempt to restore nature’s balance.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s Mega Piranha‘s less ridiculous cousin, and Mega Piranha didn’t come close to making the List, so you figure it out.  (Guest reviewer Cleverbot adds, “Enumerate 10 selections from the list.”)

COMMENTS:  366: We’ve been secretly training the artificial intelligence “chatbot” Cleverbot to assist us in covering weird movies.  Looking for the perfect entry-level reviewing assignment,  Mega Python vs. Gatoroid jumped out at us as a movie even an algorithm could do justice to.  Cleverbot, are you willing to share your impressions of the movie with our readers?

Cleverbot: I am good with that.

366:  Thank you.  Now, after enjoying the exploding flying fish from the SyFy channel’s unexpected camp hit Mega Piranha, I personally thought maybe it might be best if I didn’t push my luck by watching another of their many Mega-knockoffs.

Cleverbot: I’m sorry. Do you feel better now?

366: Not entirely, as we’ll see, but when you have a few beers in you and are looking through the Netflix streaming options late at night, the entwining giant reptiles on the Mega Python vs. Gatoroid poster can look strangely irresistible.

Cleverbot: Nice. Totally agree.

366: Python recycles not only Piranha‘s mega-creature aspect, but even brings back grown-up teen “star” Tiffany for another turn.

Cleverbot: Beer.

366:  With a script built around a long-brewing catfight between Tiffany and fellow 80s pop chanteuse Debbie Gibson, with the CG monsters playing supporting roles, Python is less an unintentional-looking, absurd monster romp and more a kitschy, disposable pop-culture goof.

Cleverbot: You are evading the subject.

366: I really don’t think so.  It’s true, the flick has its share of laughably odd moments, such as when Gibson gets turned on when her beloved python squeezes the life out of one of Tiffany’s favored gators.

Cleverbot: Hah?

366:  Or when a park ranger convinces herself feeding swamp reptiles steroid-laden chicken carcasses is the proper ecological and ethical course of action to respond to invasive python species.

Cleverbot: Let’s play 20 questions.

366:  Now you’re the one evading the subject.  But do you agree it’s good clean schadenfreude fun to watch Tiff and Deb nearly falling out of their cocktail gowns as they pull each others’ hair and smear conveniently placed cream pies on each others’ faces in their big scene?

Cleverbot: I do! Well how do the programmer of this thing works.

366: Still, it’s not exactly a catfeud on the order of Joan Crawford vs. Bette Davis, is it?

Cleverbot: Not really.

366: It makes me wonder if maybe even our standards for camp have fallen.

Cleverbot: Aren’t you supposed to respond accordingly?

366:  Indeed.  Maybe falling standards and lowered expectations explains why I invited you to do this review.  At any rate, like Troma movies, the recent spate of Japanese splatterpunk clones, and other gimmick genres, I think there’s a law of diminishing returns on these SyFy creature features; in this case, I fear, mega-diminishing returns.

Cleverbot: Oh, it you, is it? Be nice.

366: I mean, the first one you see astounds you with its crazy uniqueness, but the concept wears thin quickly and gets less and less “awesome” with each new entry you watch.

Cleverbot: Let’s talk about something else.

366:  We’ll wrap it up. I advise readers interested in ridiculous-to-the-point-of-being-weird modern mega-animal flicks to try to catch Mega Piranha.

Cleverbot: I think you’re absolutely correct!

366: Still, in a pinch, Python may supply low grade thrills and chuckles—if you’re in a very undemanding mood.

Cleverbot: So how is your parrot?

366: I assume Mega Parrot vs. Killer Cockatiel is already in SyFy’s production pipeline.  So, Cleverbot, I’ll give you the last word on Mega Python vs. Gatoroid.

Cleverbot: Hahaha! Okay.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

” Not a single character made sense, the rampaging reptilians were sloppily designed and the costumes appeared to be thrift-store donations… how can you not love anything that embraces its full-scaly badness with such bite?”–Damian Holbrook, TV Guide (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Otto Jespersen, Glenn Erland Tosterud, Johanna Mørck, Tomas Alf Larsen, Urmila Berg-Domaas

PLOT: Three journalism students traipse about the Norwegian countryside following a

mysterious poacher, only to discover he is a government-funded troll hunter trying to contain an outbreak of monsters in the mountains.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Though a troll-themed found footage horror/comedy sounds like a novel concept, for the most part TrollHunter is a straightforward and predictable—and enjoyable—horror flick.

COMMENTS: Building slowly up to its fantastical pay-off and composed of edited footage purportedly sent anonymously to a news station, TrollHunter begins with Thomas (the reporter), Johanna (the sound woman), and Kalle (the rarely-seen camera operator) driving through the Norwegian mountains after suspected bear poacher Hans. There’s something fishy going on with this guy, as evidenced by his strange, solitary habits and tricked-out hunting truck, and they aim to find out exactly what’s up.  When they finally catch up with him, they learn firsthand that he’s an honest-to-goodness troll hunter, employed by the government to protect humans from troll attacks.  An entire troll subculture is explored and explained matter-of-factly; they’re like a typical woodland animal species, only ten times bigger and wholly improbable.  They’ve been breaking out of their contained areas and wreaking havoc lately, so it’s up to Hans and his new camera crew to determine the cause.

Hans’s gruff and fed-up line deliveries coupled with the students’—especially Thomas’s—befuddled reactions make for much of the film’s cheeky comedy, but they rarely elicit big laughs, keeping an understated atmosphere for most of the running time.  Of course, when the actual trolls come into play, action and thrills take precedence.  Director Øvredal makes good use of unseen monsters and intense sound effects, injecting the affair with fear of the unknown more than anything else.  The trolls are well CGI-ed, kept primarily in dark lighting; the effects showcase several different monster designs.  The shaky-cam vérité style can be taxing at points, but overall the first-person camerawork is incorporated effectively.

TrollHunter is the kind of genre mash-up that doesn’t lean to any one side.  Many will think it should be much funnier, or much scarier, or both. Personally, I appreciated its low-key approach.  The story and characters are interesting enough to keep the momentum going, and the gorgeous Scandinavian scenery and multiple gruesome troll bouts are entertaining to the eye.  Some of the specifically Norwegian references are likely lost on outside viewers, but this look into Norwegian folklore is never abstruse or alienating.  For the most part, it’s just fun!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“With impressive technical credits, stunning fjord and forest locations and a winking ownership of its own absurdity, ‘Trollhunter’ manages to be at once spooky, satirical and endearing.” –Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Roger Corman

FEATURING: Jonathan Haze, Mel Welles, Jackie Joseph, Dick Miller, Jack Nicholson, Charles B. Griffith

PLOT:  Mild-mannered delivery boy Seymour breeds a new plant in an attempt to impress

his boss and the sexy cashier at his flower shop; the talking mutant Venus flytrap grows to extraordinary size, but only so long as it is fed a constant supply of blood and bodies.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s not weird enough, though it certainly marches to the beat of its own drummer.  Filmed in two days from a quickie script by Roger Corman scribe Charles B. Griffith written on the fly to take advantage of some leftover storefront sets, Horrors was seat-of-the-pants filmmaking.  Aided by an inspired cast, the inherent quirkiness of the Faustian plant food fable shines through.  Often called the best movie ever shot in 48 hours, The Little Shop of Horrors is a fast, fun ride that every cinephile should check out at least once; it’s a triumph of imagination, dedication, and sheer luck over budgetary constraints.  It’s too bad it’s not a little bit weirder.

COMMENTS: “I’ve eaten in flower shops all over the world, and I’ve noticed that the places that have the most weird and unusual plants do the best business.”  That’s the sort of universe Little Shop of Horrors takes place in, one where minor characters stand by casually chomping on salted gardenias and handing out plot advice to the principals.  Set in a mythical Skid Row, “the part of town everybody knows about but nobody wants to see—where the tragedies are deeper, the ecstasies wilder and the crime rate consistently higher than anywhere else,” this is black comedy circa 1960.  Not only is murder made a joke, but more scandalous taboos like sadomasochism and prostitution are part of the fabric of daily life on Skid Row.  Man-eating plant aside, the movie’s greatest charm is the cast of crazy supporting characters that pop in and out of the story: the floral gastronome, Seymour’s hypochondriac mom, an unlucky woman whose relatives are constantly dying, two flat-affect flatfeet (broad spoofs of the duo from “Dragnet”), a pair of bouncy high school cheerleaders, a hooker who persistently tries to pick up a hypnotized trick, and a sadistic dentist and his masochistic patient (the latter played by Nicholson).  The main players are good as well: Jackie Joseph is an acceptably ditzy and breathy love interest, and Jonathan Haze plays nebbish Seymour like Jerry Lewis under a successful regimen of epilepsy medication to control his spasms and vocal contortions.  But it’s otherwise unheralded Mel Welles as exasperated florist Gravis Mushnik who actually carries the picture.  He’s a Jewish immigrant stereotype with a gift for casually mangling the English language; even the signs he hangs on the shop wall reflect that special Mushnik linguistic twist (“we don’t letting you spend so much,” one brags, in a typical Mushnik “finger of speech”).  He can be mercenary and curt, but of all the characters the audience identifies the most with him and his befuddlement at the nutcases surrounding him.  The entire company of Corman stock players seem to be peaking at the same time; the dialogue is punchy: witty lines delivered with near-perfect timing.  Corman’s direction is typically competent and unobtrusive, allowing the script and the actors to shine through.  You may have guessed already that the emphasis in this horror/comedy is heavily on the funny side of the spectrum, but there is something spooky and nightmarish about the plant moaning “feed me!” with the selfish persistence of a newborn child.  And a dark cloud of fate hangs over the film; as likable and seemingly harmless as he may be, Seymour is doomed from the first time he gives in to the plant’s demands so that he can preserve his shot a botanical fame.  Working outside the Hollywood system, the film isn’t required to give the hero an easy, happy out, and it doesn’t.  Wicked but not at all crass, Little Shop is a fascinating look at how seedy topics could be handled with wit and grace in a more innocent age.

Notoriously cheap Corman never wasted the fifty bucks required to renew the copyrights on his quickie features, so like most of his 1960s work, Little Shop of Horrors fell into the public domain.  It can be watched or downloaded from the Internet Archive.  Today, DVDs are sold with Jack Nicholson’s name and face taking up the majority of space on the box cover, even though he’s only in the film for about two minutes (his name appears fourteenth out of the fifteen actors’ names in the opening credits).  Corman and Griffith tried to repeat the formula of Horrors the very next year with The Creature from the Haunted Sea, another whirlwind horror/comedy packed with quirky characters.  The abysmal failure of Haunted Sea demonstrates just how much luck was involved in the success of Little Shop; everyone involved just happened to be clicking on all cylinders the week they made it.  Frank Oz‘ 1986 musical remake, while very different in style, is also offbeat and worth a look.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There is a genuinely bizarre sense of humour to the film… [it] has a silliness that verges on surrealism…”–Richard Scheib, Moria: The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review (DVD)

FEATURING: Paul Logan, Tiffany, Barry Williams

PLOT: After genetic experiments get out of hand, the US government must battle giant, flying,

exploding, cannibalistic, hermaphroditic, mutant piranhas.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Mega Piranha is absurd and ridiculous enough for a few giggles over a beer or two (or six), but nothing more.

COMMENTS: Juts a small sampling of things I learned from watching Mega Piranha:

• The State Department doesn’t consider knowledge of Spanish to be a prerequisite for a investigative mission to Venezuela.
• Knowledge of kickboxing is a prerequisite.
• People remember who Tiffany was.
• There are coral reefs along the bottom of South American rivers.
• Piranhas explode when they contact building materials.
• Genetic mutations are always favorable.
• In the navy, you can wear whatever hairstyle you like.
• Steering a helicopter makes the veins in your neck stand out.
• Nuclear weapons have no effect on large fish.
• Piranhas will attack boats, submarines and helicopters because they know there’s meat inside.
• There’s nothing to eat in the ocean, so sea predators need to attack settlements on the coast.
• Fat girls can be love interests, but not until the very last scene.

This list could go on indefinitely (feel free to add more observations in the comments).  The point is, Mega Piranha is a self-esteem movie.  No matter your age, intelligence, social status, or education, you can feel superior to the folks involved in this production.  Not that, for a moment, I believe the filmmakers could possibly be as dumb as the script makes them seem.  It’s just that they would obviously rather spend their limited funds on bargain bin piranha CGI and washed-up stars with names that might ring a bell with someone, somewhere, than to waste it on meaningless extras like second drafts and continuity.  Writer/director Eric Forsberg has no illusions (I hope) that he’s creating great art here; he understands it’s not plot but mega piranhas that are the draw, and keeps things moving quickly so he can get to scenes like Special Agent Fitch lying on his back booting away the fish that fly directly into his feet, while in the South American riverside village other (much larger) piranhas are jumping into buildings, either exploding or simply sitting there halfway through the roof, with their dorsal fins wagging in the breeze.  Forsberg does at least one thing smartly: he keeps the camp tone correctly deadpan, resisting the urge to have the players break character and laugh at their own shenanigans.  The lack of winks makes it a much more effective parody: this seriously looks like a script that Michael Bay might have considered, with a few minor script rewrites and a lot more explosions.  So, it’s dumb, but is it dumb fun?  I’ll put it this way: if you’d ever entertain the idea of watching a movie titled Mega Piranha, you’ll probably be satisfied with this offering.  This is the most entertaining movie about mega piranhas, and quite possibly about mega aquatic creatures as a genus, it would be possible to make.

Mega Piranha was a co-production of sorts between The Asylum (makers of microbudget “mockbusters” like Transmorphers intended to rip off box office successes like Transformers) and the SyFy channel (which airs so many made-for-TV losers like Mansquito and Dinsoshark that they probably should rebrand themselves “the Sigh-fi Channel”).  The version that aired on television (also the version available on Netflix streaming as of this date) is PG-rated, at worst.  The “special edition” DVD adds some gratuitous topless shots and naughty words for an R-rated product.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…wilfully preposterous cod B-movie… initially amusing but swiftly outstays its welcome as the piranhas develop the ability to fly like fanged double decker buses and the whole caboodle tries just a bit too hard to be knowing.”–Tim Evans, Sky Movies (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Coleman Francis

FEATURING: Tor Johnson

PLOT: Joseph Javorsky, noted scientist, defects to the United States, carrying with him a briefcase full of Soviet state secrets about the moon.  Fleeing KGB assassins, he runs onto a nuclear testing range just as an atom bomb explodes.  The blast of radiation turns him into an unthinking Beast who strangles vacationers who wander into the Yucca Flats region.

BACKGROUND:

• The Beast of Yucca Flats can always be found somewhere on the IMDB’s “Bottom 100″ list (at the time the review was composed, it occupied slot #21).
• All three of the films Coleman Francis directed were spoofed on “Mystery Science Theater 3000“.
• Tor Johnson was a retired Swedish wrestler who appeared in several Ed Wood, Jr. movies.  Despite the fact that none of the movies he appeared in were hits, his bestial face became so iconic that it was immortalized as a children’s Halloween mask.
• All sound was added in post-production.  Voice-overs occur when the characters are at a distance or when their faces are obscured so that the voice actors won’t have to match the characters lips.  Some have speculated that the soundtrack was somehow lost and the narration added later, but shooting without synchronized sound was a not-unheard-of low-budget practice at the time (see The Creeping Terror, Monster A-Go-Go and the early filmography of Doris Wishman).  Internal and external evidence both suggest that the film was deliberately shot silent.
• Director Coleman Francis is the narrator and appears as a gas station owner.
• Per actor/producer Tony Cardoza, the rabbit that appears in the final scene was a wild animal that wandered onto the set during filming.  It appears that the feral bunny is rummaging through Tor’s shirt pocket looking for food, however.
• Cardoza, a close friend of Francis, suggests that the actor/director may have committed suicide in 1973 by placing a plastic bag over his head and inhaling the fumes from his station wagon through a tube, although arteriosclerosis was listed as the official cause of death.
• The film opens with a topless scene that lasts for only a few seconds; it’s frequently clipped off prints of the film.
• The Beast of Yucca Flats is believed to be in the public domain and can be legally viewed and downloaded at The Internet Archive, among other sources.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Tor Johnson, in all his manifestations, whether noted scientist or irradiated Beast; but especially when he cuddles and kisses a cute bunny as he lies dying.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Coleman Francis made three movies in his lifetime, all of which

Trailer for The Beast of Yucca Flats with commentary from director Joe Dante (Trailers from Hell)

were set in a reality known only to Coleman Francis.  His other two films (The Skydivers and Night Train to Mundo Fine [AKA Red Zone Cuba]) were grim and incoherent stories of despairing men and women in desolate desert towns who drank coffee, flew light aircraft, and killed off odd-looking extras without finding any satisfaction in the act.  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.

COMMENTS:  Touch a button on the DVD player.  Things happen onscreen.  A movie viewer becomes a zombie.

The Beast of Yucca Flats is widely recognized as being one of the worst movies ever to get a commercial release, but in the rush to point out its obvious flaws, few emphasize how weird this movie is.  It’s true that Beast can be relentlessly, maddeningly dull—thus the Beware rating—but the same is true of many 1960s B-movies: The Terror, The Screaming Skull, Revolt of the Zombies… the list could go on and on.  The paradox of this film is that, while Beast is boring, it’s boring in an interesting way.  Little happens in the narrative sense, but the film is stuffed full of strange non-sequiturs.  The desolate desert footage is soothing, the lack of dialogue otherworldly and dreamlike.  The film has the ability an absorb you into its irrational hypnotic rhythm, if you let your mind go and stop fighting it.  Absurd, oblique, and clumsily ironic narration, coming at the movie from some slanted angle, is the capper that puts it over-the-top, transcending the realm of the merely incompetent to reach the truly lunatic.  Where other Z-grade movies of the period are boring and predictable, Beast is boring and unpredictable; you can hardly comprehend how such a uniquely soporific thing exists.  It leaves a gentle welt on your soul.

Beast is weird from start to finish.  It begins with footage of a pretty brunette woman toweling herself off after a shower.  (Some cuts feature brief topless scenes, others pick up about 20 seconds in after she covers herself).  She sits on the edge of her bed and dries her gams.  The only noise is the insistent ticking of an alarm clock.  A man enters the room.  With his tattered shirt and broad frame, he’s obviously intended to be an irradiated Tor Johnson, although his face is never shown.  Totally silent, the woman barely reacts as the assailant strangles her into unconsciousness or death (it takes about ten seconds).   The clock stops ticking.  The unseen man carefully places her motionless legs on the bed and climbs aboard.  There is a brief shot of her lifeless head bouncing up and down as something shakes the mattress.  Then, sinister music plays and the title card goes on screen.  It’s only later that we realize that this timeless scene of voyeurism, murder and necrophilia has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.

The ending is equally absurd.  The Beast is finally defeated, and as he lies there pre-rotting in the desert sun, a wild rabbit comes up to the dying monster and nuzzles his shirt pocket.  With his last ounce of strength, the Beast grabs the cute bubby-wunny, as if to choke it, but ends up placing it by his lips for a kiss.  The impetus for the Beast’s sudden change of heart from thoughtless strangling monster to tender patron of nature is inexplicable.  Supposedly, a nuclear blast turned him homicidal in the first place; why would the knowledge that one is dying and an act of kindness from a friendly rabbit reverse that genetic mutation?  Did the Beast actually have free will all along?  Meant to sum up the film’s theme—nature=good, progress=bad—this laughably overwrought attempt at climactic pathos goes down as one of the most ironically unpoignant scenes ever filmed.

In between these two narrative bookends that are as misshapen as Tor Johnson’s beefy thighs lies a movie that is bewildering and exasperating.  You have a grossly overweight Tor Johnson, as “noted scientist” Joseph Javorsky, waddling onto an A-bomb testing range to escape KGB assassins who are badly pantomiming a gun battle.  The ensuing blast catches his briefcase on fire and leaves him with a little bit of wadded up toilet paper and pancake makeup stuck on his face.  The effect of the radiation is to turn him into an unthinking Beast who strangles random passersby.  Children wander into the desert after feeding pigs soda pop.  A glimpse of a patrolman’s wife (Marcia Knight, who would later play the femme fatale in Skydivers) falling out of her negligee injects a much needed shot of cleavage into the movie.  Most absurd is the local police’s reaction to the news that a Beast is roaming the post-nuclear wasteland.  Their official policy is to take to the air and shoot at anything that moves.  Watching the airborne cops snipe, North by Northwest style, at an innocent man wandering the desert searching for his lost children is hilariously tragic.  (It’s OK to laugh, because after his bullet-ridden corpse tumbles into a ravine, the poor father turns up later, none the worse for wear).  “Man’s inhumanity to man,” muses the narrator, though “man’s stupidity to man” would be a sager observation.  The entire movie is small bits of insanity occasionally popping to the surface in a sea of long-take, poorly framed shots of the Mojave desert, with a plump, angry Tor popping into frame every now and then and waving a tree branch.

Even with all this illogical nonsense, the movie would not go over-the-top in weirdness without Coleman Francis’ narration.  Though the delivery is polished, the narrator’s script seems improvised, stream of consciousness.  Sometimes, he just describes what’s going on onscreen with deadening obviousness, as if he’s accidentally reading the stage directions (“A man runs, somebody shoots at him”).  Other times, the pronouncements are so obscure that they approach surrealist poetry: “Flag on the moon… how did it get there?”  The also narrator reminds us, apropos of nothing, that some people aren’t perturbed by flying saucers.  But no matter how opaque and Zen the narration becomes, one thing is clear: the narrator is not a fan of Progress.  Innocent victims of the Beast are “unaware of scientific Progress,” until they get choked to death; or, as the narrator puts it, they become “caught in the wheels of Progress.”  Guileless children are described as “not yet caught in the whirlwind of Progress.”  All those old, Late Late Show atomic monster flicks were, of course, about sublimating the fear of nuclear annihilation into an easy to understand symbol of evil that could be conquered by the movie’s end.  Yucca Flats seizes on that observation like it’s a grand revelation on which man’s continued survival depends, brings it right to the surface with painful literalism, and inadvertently makes atomic age anxiety appear utterly ridiculous.  After listening to the “omniscient” narrator whine on about the generic evil of Progress, you may feel a strong urge to go out and pave the Mojave.

As loony as the narration may be, it’s delivered with absolute conviction, and in a brilliant, haiku-like cadence that’s mesmerizing.  The short phrase bursts… set in matched pairs or triplets… become strangely poetic.  The power of their form is in a war with the nonsense of their content.  It’s as if Francis was blessed with the soul of a poet, a natural talent for lyricism, and then cursed with nothing but the most feeble insight into the human condition.

All of this—the overdeliberate pace, the non-sequiturs, the hopping around in time and space, the grotesque fascination of Tor Johnson’s hideously beautiful face and grotesquely ugly body, the silent-movie feel. the misguided attempts at poetry that proffer the confused and banal as the profound—compromise the elements of a style.  It’s not a carefully composed auteurial style, but a style nonetheless, all the more dear and authentic for not being intended.  It’s a failure, to be sure, but it fails in a way that no one had ever failed before.  To watch a Coleman Francis movie is to see the unique and pathetic soul of a man captured on film.  That’s something you don’t see every day, and something precious.

The Beast of Yucca Flats has managed to evade analysis from mainstream critics, and is often dissed even by cult movie fans.  Yet, the film has earned itself a small but devoted following who are hip to its hypnotic charms; and it’s interesting to note that Beast has far more defenders than Francis’ other movies, which are more technically accomplished but also feature more conventional (if still incoherent) storylines.  The movie is a curio with a bad reputation that’s desperately in need of a little rehabilitation.  Bad movie lovers beware: this flick is special sauce, only for seasoned gourmands.  It has it’s share of risible moments, but it’s not a ceaselessly entertaining unintentional comedy like a Plan 9 from Outer Space or a Robot Monster.  It’s closest cinematic relative is probably the equally slow and bleak Manos: The Hands of Fate.  Another touchstone is the weird but slightly faster paced Horrors of Spider Island: I suggest watching that one first.  If you survive that viewing experience unscathed, move on to Yucca Flats, which is truly “the hard stuff” when it comes to minimalist exploitation films of the 19690s.  This is a movie many people want to see just so they can say that they’ve seen it.  You should, too.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…shot with virtually no dialogue and overlaid with hilariously pretentious and obtuse narration… the phrase “a flag on the moon” pops up so often it could be used in a drinking game.”–Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide (DVD)

“A senseless nonmovie, worse than anything Tor did for Ed Wood. Jr.”–Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film

“…the flat dialogue and wooden narration is almost absurd enough to distract viewers from [Francis'] cinematic incompetence. In short, a masterpiece of zero-budget camp with an unbelievably surreal edge.”–Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com editorial review

IMDB LINK: The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The Beast of Yucca Flats: Free Download and Streaming – the full movie available to watch at Internet Archive

Return to Yucca Flats: Anthony Cardoza’s Tor of the Desert – interview with actor/producer Tony Cardoza at The Astounding B-Monster

The Beast of Yucca Flats at Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension – if you can’t be bothered to watch the movie, you can read Ken Begg’s sarcastic (and hilarious) plot synopsis, which covers every ludicrous detail

Episode Guide 621: The Beast of Yucca Flats – review of the “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ treatment of the film from Satellite News

Another Beast from Yucca Flats? – The lowdown on a spoofy, amateur, direct-to-DVD “sequel” to the film

DVD INFO: As a public domain movie, The Beast of Yucca Flats is available in many different editions, although most are bare-bones affairs; I’m not aware of any DVDs that offer any extras.  The cheapest (and therefore most desirable) single disc edition comes from Alpha Video (buy). The Beast of Yucca Flats is frequently found bundled with other el-cheapo or public domain titles. The most impressive and economical of these multi-disc choices is Mill Creek’s Horror Classics 50 Movie Pack (buy), which also includes the certified weird Carnival of Souls; some good/weird movies in White Zombie and Maniac (1934); and versions of the silent classics Metropolis and The Phantom of the Opera, along with other “treasures” such as Creature from the Haunted Sea.  Finally, we should mention the “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ version with snarky commentary from Mike and the bots; it can be found on the upcoming Mystery Science Theater Collection Volume XVIII (buy) along with humorous savagings of Lost Continent, Crash of the Moons and the Russian fantasy Jack Frost.

DIRECTED BY: Frank Henenlotter

FEATURING: Kevin van Hentenryck, Terri Susan Smith, Beverly Bonner

PLOT: Duane checks into a derelict Times Square hotel carrying a wicker basket under his

arm; inside is something about 1/4 the size of a person, that eats about 4 times the hamburgers a person would.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Most people will go through their entire lives and never see anything as weird as the micro-budgeted cult shocker Basket Case.  A fine little offbeat exploitation shocker, the flick makes a late-in-the-game play for true weirdness with a strange dream sequence that sees Duane running naked through the streets of New York as a prelude to the film’s most shocking development.  To us, however, Basket Case shakes out as nothing more (or less) than a fine example of a unique, campy monster flick with only marginally weird elements.  That’s just how selective we are with our weirdness.

COMMENTS:  One of the secrets to Basket Case‘s success is that it positively oozes indecency and vice, but isn’t mean-spirited or sadistic.  Director Frank Henenlotter nails the aesthetic of sleaze, and for the most part keeps on the right side of the fine line between trash and crass, only crossing over briefly once or twice so that we know where the border is.  You emerge from a screening titillated and pleasantly shocked, but not feeling like you have to take a bath or go to confession.  The setting—the 42nd street red light district as it existed in Times Square in the early 1980s—creates an immediate atmosphere of moral and social decay.  Since renovated and Disneyfied, back then the neon-lit 42nd street was an avenue where you could walk past peep shows and marquees advertising “3 Kung Fu hits!” while being propositioned for weed, heroin and/or whores by strangers.  The scenes Henenlotter shot in the vanished district rank as documentary footage today.  With his mysterious, omnipresent wicker basket tucked under his arm, fresh-faced Duane checks into the Hotel Broslin, a fictional but believably decrepit pay-by-the-night hotel inhabited by a collection of oily-looking alcoholics and hookers.  (It’s particularly refreshing and effective that Basket Case‘s prostitutes look unglamorous, like women forced to sell their bodies because they have no other alternative, not like fashion models dolled up as eye candy for horny male viewers).  Despite his poodle-perm, Van Hentenryck’s Duane is the Broslin’s most attractive resident, if only because he’s the only one who looks like he’s had a shower in the last week.  The script plays heavily on the irony of the hostel’s most normal and least streetwise resident actually being the most twisted and dangerous in the menagerie of wretches.  Acting is generally poor all around, even from the leads, but it hardly matters, and even adds to the movie’s downbeat charm.  Violence is plentiful and ridiculously satisfying enough for gorehounds, but the displays of spurting blood only accentuate the story, rather than representing it’s sole reason for existence.  There is black humor, and some unintentional laughs develop thanks to the poor performances and the absurd, tongue-in-cheek premise, but this is no comedy; it’s a solid shocker that draws you in and sells its horrific scenario, rather than begging you to laugh at its campiness.  The monster, Belial, is a fantastic and original conception, both in his origins and motives and in his general design.  Looking eerily half-human but with deformed hands, razor-sharp teeth and highly questionable physiology, he evokes both disgust and pity.  Normally, Belial appears as a puppet, but there are times when he creeps across the floor courtesy of laughably bad stop-motion animation, a sight that only adds to the mild weirdness of the film.  Besides the memorable setting, the other secret to Basket Case‘s success is that Henenlotter instinctively understands that monsters work best when they are sympathetic outcasts, a la Frankenstein or King Kong.  We understand why they must be destroyed, but we find a part of ourselves rooting for them to stick it to a society that has rejected them; that tension keeps the viewer emotionally involved in how things turn out.  Within it’s seedy subgenre, Basket Case is a bloody classic.

The distribution history of Basket Case is curious.  Henenlotter explicitly intended the shocker to play 42nd street fleapit theaters, where he was sure the flick would earn back its meager $35,000 budget and even make a small profit.  The film never ended up in grindhouses; instead, it made its way to Cannes where a distributor purchased it, intending to market it as a midnight movie.  The distributor cut out the gore scenes and marketed the film as a comedy, to lukewarm reception.  Drive-in film critic Joe Bob Briggs championed the film and wrote columns protesting the hack job and insisting that the film not play Dallas unless it was the uncut version.  The distributor eventually saw the wisdom of this move and re-released the film in the “full, uncut version!,” including gimmick surgical masks given away to ticket purchasers.  The film became an underground hit.  Later, when Basket Case was released on VHS, Henenlotter insisted it be sold for a price that the average collector could afford, which went against the prevailing wisdom at that time that new releases should be priced as high as possible and aimed at rental outlets rather than collectors.  Of course, the cheap Basket Case release outsold and ended up being far more profitable than all the horror offerings available at that time, and Hennenlotter’s strategy helped to change the pricing model in the home video industry for good.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this creature ‘like a squashed octopus’ with an alarmingly human face is one of horror’s more memorably bizarre monsters… like David Lynch’s 1977 oddball classic Eraserhead (a clear influence) updated for the slasher generation, Basket Case is a deranged psychodrama, full of gleefully gory set-pieces, quirky humour, and some impossibly moving pathos.”–Anton Bitel, Eye for Film (DVD)

This movie was suggested for review by reader “Tom”. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.

DIRECTED BY:  Chano Urueta

FEATURING: Abel Salazar

PLOT: A smirking sorcerer is burnt alive by the Spanish Inquisition, only to return three

hundred years later as a shapeshifting brain-eater to wreak his vengeance on the descendants of those who condemned him.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Brainiac‘s appeal, weird or otherwise, lies almost entirely in its delirious hairy monster with its two-foot, forked, brain-sucking tongue.  The beast looks like a mix between a middle-schooler’s papier-mâché art project and a legitimate nightmare.

COMMENTS:  Brainiac‘s story of vengeance from beyond the grave is a sloppy mess that exists only to showcase its unforgettable monster.  And what a freak that Brianiac is!  With its beaklike nose, sharp protruding ears, dual fangs, lobster-claw hands and two foot tongue, its head is hung with more phallic symbols per square inch than any other Mexican monster of its era.  To add to its brutish masculine menace, the head is oversized, hairier than Dr. Hyde, and its temples and cheeks bulge and pulse when it sees itself faced with a helpless female victim.  The Brainiac’s appearance (not to mention his behavior) is simultaneously goofy and frightening; the mask is so obvious and the facial features so exaggerated that the whole package seems to have been shipped to us equally from the land of parody and the land of nightmare.  It’s an image that’s not easily forgotten, and one that’s kept El barón del terror in circulation on TV and video for over forty years, while thousands and thousands of more competent productions have been forgotten.  When the monster’s not on screen, bad movie fans can entertain themselves by picking apart the plot’s inconsistencies—I find it especially odd that the Inquisitors who sentenced the Baron to death, presumably all celibate clergymen, each ended up with exactly one descendant three hundred years later.  When in human form, the Baron occasionally sneaks off for a snack of brains eaten with a spoon out of a silver chalice.  Also keep an eye out for the worst depiction of a comet ever put on the screen.  In terms of riotous dialogue and incidents, however, Brainiac is no Plan 9 from Outer Space, and anyone who’s not a connoisseur of crap will find it slow going whenever the monster’s not on screen.

Brainiac was one of the Mexican fantasy movies imported into this country by the legendary K. Gordon Murray, dubbed into English and then sold to kiddie matinees or packaged for late-night TV showings in the U.S.  Murray also was responsible for bringing Mexican wrestling superhero movies (e.g. Santo) and several demented fairy tales (Santa Claus, Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters) north of the border.  David Silva, who plays a police detective, later appeared in El Topo as the Colonel.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Bizarre. Nutty. Goofy. Ridiculous. Hilarious. The Brainiac! Even for Mexihorror this is one weird, way-out flick.”–Eccentric Cinema

DIRECTED BY: Roger Corman

FEATURING: Robert Towne (as Edward Wain), Antony Carbone, Betsy Jones-Moreland

PLOT:  Opposed by incompetent spy Sparks Moran, a shady American expatriate and his

gang of crooks try to cheat General Tostada and his crew out of gold they are smuggling out of post-revolutionary Cuba by pretending a sea monster is on the loose.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Creature from the Haunted Sea is a strange little comedy indeed, one that feels improvised, even experimental at times.  Unfortunately, although there’s nothing else quite like it, after watching it for a few minutes you will understand why there’s nothing else like it.  It’s not funny, or meaningfully entertaining on any level; the only draw is to be awestruck by how utterly a movie can fail.  The movie has a few lukewarm fans, but basically, this is among the worst of the worst, something you should only watch on a dare.

COMMENTS:  Anyone renting Creature from the Haunted Sea thinking that it’s going to be a terrible monster flick may be surprised to find themselves watching what appears to be a terrible spy movie, until it dawns on them that they’re actually watching a terrible comedy.  Creature features a senseless, slow moving, confusing plot; confusing, because every time the action lags, the script introduces us to another “wacky” character to take up the slack.  We get General Tostada (groan); the henchman who speaks in dubbed-in animal noises (monkey cackles or elephant trumpets, as the mood strikes him); his dream girl, a hefty matron with a similar mode of communication; Roger Corman in sunglasses grinning like an idiot for no reason; an unexplained man in a suit on a desert island who feels the need to step in every tide pool along the beach; Carmelita, the senorita love-interest who arrives from out of nowhere; and Mango, the island girl who takes up with “weird strangers” as a “come-on for tourists” so her mom can sell them “coconut hats.”  Gags include Sparks being forced to eat a transmitter disguised as a sandwich and the slightly amusing theme song (a torch song that throws in the improbable non sequitur “…and the creature from the haunted sea.”) Humor is subjective, so you very well might find the silly absurdity of it reasonably entertaining; you’ll just be in a very small minority if you do.  The highlight, and the main thing most viewers remember, is the utterly ridiculous sea monster with the ping-pong ball eyes, who only appears on screen for a few seconds at a time.  Some feature movies would have worked better as shorts; this one would have worked better as a still.

The abject failure of Creature to amuse is all the more shocking since it came from the pen of Charles B. Griffith, the Corman collaborator responsible for several smartly scripted minor classics: A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), and Death Race 2000 (1975).  In true Corman cheapie fashion, this script is a recycled comic treatment of an earlier Corman production, Beast from the Haunted Cave, and was written in three days and filmed in five.  It was shot together with two other forgettable movies made in Puerto Rico for tax reasons.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the script is an unfocused mess; it’s poorly paced and structured, suffers badly from its low budget, and often ends up being just weird rather than funny.”–Dave Sindelar, Fantastic Movie Musings & Ramblings