Beast of Yucca Flats, The
Entry updated 18 March 2024. Tagged: Film.
US film (1961; vt Atomic Monster: The Beast of Yucca Flats; possibly also released as Girl Madness). Cardoza-Francis Productions. Directed and written by Coleman Francis. Cast includes Lanell Cado, Tor Johnson, Jim Oliphant and Bing Stafford. 54 minutes. Black and white.
A young woman (Cado) drying herself after a shower (see Fan Service) is strangled. We then cut to the arrival of "noted Scientist" Joseph Javorsky (Johnson) at the A-Bomb (see Nuclear Energy) testing grounds at Yucca Flats. Having recently fled from the other side of the Iron Curtain (see Cold War) after the death of his wife and children in Hungary, he brings "secret data on the Russian Moonshot" to hand over to the US Military. Javorsky has been trailed by two Kremlin agents, who plan to kill him and steal the briefcase containing details of a Russian Moon landing. A car chase leaves Javorsky's aide and driver dead, forcing him to flee across the desert, only to be caught in an A-bomb explosion that kills the Russian agents and sets his briefcase alight.
Shortly after, a vacationing couple are throttled by a scarred Javorsky, with the wife carried off into the desert. Local police officer Jim Archer (Stafford) ("Another man caught in the frantic race for the betterment of mankind. Progress."), wounded in Korea, flies over the area looking for the culprit (who, going by the introduction, has killed before). Seeing a wandering man (Oliphant), he fires at him; but he is a father looking for his sons who wandered off as he repaired a puncture ("an innocent victim, caught in the wheels of justice"). Jim parachutes down and pursues him on foot ("kill or be killed, man's inhumanity to man"). Javorsky now appears and tries to murder the boys: but Jim and a colleague are nearby: they shoot him, taking the kids away. A rabbit wanders up to the dying man – he caresses it, then dies.
There is little dialogue, but much portentous narration (by director/writer Francis) and many attempted ironies about "progress" (see Paranoia); nuclear Weapons and the Korean War, padded out with pointless observations ("Vacation time: people travel East, West, North or South") and non-sequiturs – such as, when watching a resting man, "Nothing bothers some people, not even flying saucers." (There has not been, nor will be, any suggestion of UFOs.) The main sf element – that the Russians have landed on the Moon – is dropped after the briefcase's destruction, and though Javorsky ("a once powerful humble man, reduced to nothing") is presumably supposed to be a Monster created by a nuclear explosion, his appearance is relatively unchanged. This is certainly a bad film, but the story and directing choices create a weird mood and some unintentional Humour. [SP]
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