In the purgatory of bad filmmakers, giants like Ed Wood and Andy Milligan tend to overshadow the work of relatively insignificant but just as awful second stringers.  One of the latter is a filmmaker who managed to make--get this--the worst Tor Johnson film ever made and also managed to make the then-hot topic of the Cuban revolution as exciting as watching paint dry.  Now swig down a few cups of black coffee as we present...

By GREG WOODS

(Once again, we have the distinct pleasure of welcoming a new writer to HORROR-WOOD. Greg Woods is a video editor who also runs the quarterly movie fanzine "The Eclectic Screening Room" (in which this article first appeared), which is dedicated to the obscure, the offbeat, and the forgotten, with regular articles on cult and experimental films. Greg's obsession for cinema began at the tender age of nine. Upon seeing Latrry Buchanan's The Eye Creatures on an afternoon "creature feature," he knew he had found his calling.)

Many directors started out as actors who were fed up starring in other people's claptrap, and sought to share their own visions from the director's chair. Not always, but sometimes, these people made films not easily digested by the mainstream. This anomaly includes such people as Stroheim, Welles, Cassavetes, and…Coleman Francis.

In his lifetime, Coleman Francis was better known as a barely employable bit player of films Grades A to Z, whose well-known drinking habit prejudiced many people against hiring him. Like Cassavetes or Stroheim, he is better known posthumously as a director of a handful of films, which in the grand tradition of Erich Von, snub their noses at Hollywood conventions and commit their peculiar visions to celluloid either within or without the system-- mainstream acceptance be damned.

Between 1961 and 1965, Francis wrote and directed a trio of grimy, washed-out Grade Z genre pictures: Beast Of Yucca Flats, The Skydivers, and Night Train To Mundo Fine (better known today as Red Zone Cuba). Beast has been lauded as an all-time bad movie for quite some time, but the latter two films have gained a new audience thanks to their inclusion in the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 sweepstakes.

Amazing, isn't it? People pay money to see a movie in which three silhouetted figures in the foreground make their own comments about whatever cinematic atrocity is unspooling before them (and us). Are these the same people who "shush" others in a theatre when they crinkle their popcorn bag too loud? However, despite the misgivings about the MST3K's snideness towards their films (the franchise misses the point about what is endearing about these pictures they flog), one must commend these folks for unearthing the otherworldly films of Coleman Francis, which would probably remain obscure otherwise.

Even the best-known work, Beast Of Yucca Flats, was unavailable for years on home video. (Prior to its release on DVD in 2001, I had to get a bad video dupe from a collector). With the ways in which video distributors try to wrap releases around numbers, I'm surprised no one had the audacity to brand Beast Of Yucca Flats with the label "40th Anniversary Edition". Why not? They put out It’s A Wonderful Life and Citizen Kane with similar monikers. And why should we have brandished this film with such a banner, you ask?

Whereas Stroheim, Welles and Cassavetes advanced the film language, Francis set it back about forty years. Therefore, everything you may have read about Beast Of Yucca Flats is true. It really is one of the worst films ever made... or are we missing the point? Surely no one would aspire to make something this terrible, or is this film an intentional gob of spit in the face of Tinseltown?

Right from the beginning, all properties of cinema are reduced to their crudest forms. We are given a teaser of an introduction, as a cute brunette (who is briefly seen nude) gets ready for bed, and then is strangled to death by a slightly off-screen brute. Then we are given the opening credits sequence, displaying all those responsible for this film. The next scene shows a plane touching down, and exit Dr. Joseph Javorski, played by none other than Grade Z Legend, washed-up wrestler Tor Johnson.

As luck would have it, suddenly standard-issue hired guns show up to waste him and his associates. After a lame car chase, the doctor runs away on foot as his pals try to draw the fire of the enemy agents. Somehow, no one is able to aim at the 400-pound doctor, or at least to catch up to him.

Alas, none of that matters, as an A-bomb goes off. Due to the radiation, the good doctor is now reduced to the basest form of existence, namely hulking around and strangling people.

Just in these few scenes, you are introduced to the modus operandi of this film, which is to invert and pervert all that one holds dear to cinema. As the beast is humanity at its most primal state, the movie is the basest form of filmmaking. This work's most distinctive property is the absence of a soundtrack. Even in the first scene, it is glaringly obvious; the strangulation sequence has the sole sound of a clock ticking, conveniently replacing all diagetic sound. As much as this film devolves cinema, it is also ahead of its time.

Although we do not realize it at first, the opening scene is out of the time frame of the rest of the film, which unfolds in standard A to B narrative. Was this scene included much earlier in the filmmaking process as a little teaser (certainly so, especially because nudity was still rare for 1961 non-raincoat cinema)? Or is it much more than that?

We are watching something that hasn't happened yet (never mind that this segment is never referred to again); at this point, the man is not yet a beast. This interruption of temporal logic was rare in 1961, especially in American cinema; it still would have slightly predated Resnais' Last Year At Marienbad. The single most important movement in cinema of the past 50 years is undoubtedly the French New Wave. It has meshed itself now into so much Western culture (you need look no further than to commercials or MTV) that it is easy to forget how radical this movement was circa 1959 to 1964.

John Cassavetes is the person most attributed to being the western hemisphere's first filmmaker influenced by the New Wave, but I would argue that the revisionist attitudes of the movement are more found in the work of Grade Z filmmakers. Cassavetes was more interested in creating impressionistic works geared to performance. However, it may be truer that the movement's inversion of technique and re-invention of movie forms is better found in the works of people like Coleman Francis or Ray Dennis Steckler.

In the Grade Z universe, Beast Of Yucca Flats predates the Creeping Terror school of filmmaking in that it appears that someone may have lost the soundtrack, but so many scenes appear to have been shot entirely without dialogue in the first place. The only "onscreen" dialogue is present during long shots or overlong cutaways-- in fact, they are merely voiceovers. The "you are there" feeling of the standard Z movie small town and grassy knoll settings is sabotaged by the crude canned sound.

The rest of the film's soundtrack, if not limited to spare sound effects, is filled with a tired narrator (Mr. Francis himself) reciting the most absurd psychobabble, which has nothing whatever to do with the onscreen action of the moment. During the early chase scene, the deep-thinking voice utters: "A flag on the moon, how did it get there?" It gets better.

A gas pump attendant is taking an afternoon nap to the soundtrack of "Nothing bothers some people; not even flying saucers". (Huh?) The two-hard-working cops investigating the murders are separately introduced as men "caught in the wheels of progress". A rare sound bite that actually kind of makes sense is the footage of The Beast carrying away a body while the lamenting narrator mourns: "Joseph Javorski; noted scientist- dedicated his life to the betterment of mankind".

In someone's warped mind, however, all of this could have a point. Perhaps we are too quick to assume that what may be mind-boggling for some is simply incomprehensible. One may assume that this film's narration babbles on to all oblivion to make up for a missing soundtrack. Instead, the onscreen action could act as more of a springboard for Francis' turgid philosophizing. In other words, by having a film whose sound and image work on two entirely different planes, we get a work that could be as dense, multi-layered, or perhaps as meaningless, as anything by Godard's films, or William Burroughs' cut-up novels. This seems almost probable due to the fact that we are also missing images that would give an indication that dialogue scenes were actually shot at all.

When Officer Joe Dobson "caught in the wheels of progress" picks up his partner Jim Archer, "another man caught in the wheels of progress", the scene's decoupage is NOT of two-shots of the men greeting one another (which would at least give the narration some relevance). Instead, we get a long shot of Joe going in, cut to an extended single take of Jim's angry wife slumping around in a nightgown (surely another law was soon to have been broken?), cut to a long shot of Joe and Jim leaving.

Also, when Dr. Javorski gets off the plane and starts talking to someone, we don't hear any of the dialogue. Here, Francis may have sabotaged the one "genuine" performance in the film, and it is from Tor Johnson, for God's sake!! He of course devotes the rest of his film lumbering around like a zombie with what looks like a fried egg on his face- just like in Ed Wood's Night Of The Ghouls (were they shot the same weekend?). However, he is really the only person in the film who gives any semblance of a performance, as anyone else's chances to emote are instead replaced by gratuitous, impersonal cutaways.

But given all the narrative psychobabble about people caught up in the wheels of progress, about the good doctor being reduced to a savage beast, perhaps this film is less some cheapjack exploitation film than a disturbing exploration of dehumanization. Not only is the doctor reduced to something less than human, but also all the other "characters" are caught in the wheels of progress. Perhaps all of mankind is nothing but a machine--acting out the most basic of actions, without compassion, without pity.

What better way to communicate this message than to rob the film of anything that would emphasize emotion: performances, gestures, faces, voices? Few works are as uncompromisingly impersonal as this one. In art cinema, only Bresson matches Francis' cold world filled with automaton people. In the world of Grade Z movies, this bleak study and its threadbare representative imagery even surpasses Doris Wishman in a crappy mood.

Plus, Beast Of Yucca Flats has a troubling message about the way humans treat one another. Not only is Javorski reduced to savagery by a manmade device, but one also kills him.

There is no standard climax (as in a 1934 Universal horror movie) where the beast is felled by someone who has to morally wrestle with oneself to stop the monster because of the great human being it once was.. and may still exist. Instead, the beast is hunted down like an animal by another unfeeling animal...mankind, from above in a helicopter (a recurring motif in all of Francis' films as a director).

After such a revisionist debut as a filmmaker, what could anyone do for a follow-up but something more mainstream, digestible... better? The Skydivers is a straightforward tale of jealousy and betrayal taken to unfortunate degrees. Harry and Beth (Kevin Casey) are a married couple who run a skydiving school. He is running around with Suzy (Marcia Knight), a graduate of the Yvette Vickers School of The Other Woman. She, on the other hand is also fooling around with Frankie (Titus Mode- an alumnus of Ray Dennis Steckler pictures), whom Harry recently fired. Harry dumps Suzy and she metes out her revenge with grave consequences for the skydiving business.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, or an embittered bit player making a movie about the basest forms of humanity. While watching this film, especially right after Beast Of Yucca Flats, one is actually surprised by the competence of the direction... in relative terms. Never mind that there are long melodramatic scenes that don't go anywhere, that the skydiving footage features people who bear no resemblance to the principal cast, that the scenes in the air feature canned "studio-echo" voices, that segments are padded with overlong footage of Francis' bizarro extras, or that there are continuity errors galore. It's much more digestible--that is, it isn't such an uncompromising subversion of cinematic technique.

Taken in light with his other two pictures, however, The Skydivers is another of Francis' sour depictions of the awful things human s do. Everyone in this film is betraying someone for another who ends up doing them wrong anyway. As usual, this film is shot in grimy low contrast, washed-out grays, which, in hindsight, properly enhance the seedy human behavior. Once again the film climaxes with Francis' favorite operative, the helicopter chasing down the villain. At the fade-out, the message is clear-- Francis is creating an oeuvre in which bad behavior begets more of the same, and it just continues.

The final film in Coleman Francis' trilogy is his tour de force. In Red Zone Cuba (originally entitled Night Train To Mundo Fine), the maverick writer-director also takes a principal role. Where Beast Of Yucca Flats spared nothing in form, The Skydivers was uncompromising in theme, Red Zone Cuba is challenging in its structure. Because the plot is constantly being frustrated, the film is then forcing us to study the irrationality of human nature. Right from the start, the storyline is going spastic.

John Carradine is an engineer in a desolate train depot, who is interviewed by a reporter about some criminals who hopped his train four years earlier, in 1961. As with Beast Of Yucca Flats, Francis bewilders us with an opening scene. After this brief introduction, and the opening credits (over which Carradine sings the title song, sounding a lot like Vaughn Monroe), we are back into the past.

Francis plays Griffin, an escaped convict on the lam who meets two ex-cons, Landis and Cook. Rather than make a fast buck by turning him in, they decide to accompany Griffin in the inane idea of joining a ragamuffin group of mercenaries who are going to storm Cuba and overthrow Castro. The operation of course backfires and our original trio is incarcerated in a prison that looks like an outdoor hot dog stand. They escape, and then plot to prospect at the mountain that their leader Chastain had said is loaded.

Somehow they end up at a roadside diner, kill the owner and make off with his car, ditch it and get on the train. A Ha! Finally, we get to see the locomotive that warranted so much attention that it was mentioned in the prologue to the movie! And what happens on the train? Absolutely nothing! After about ten seconds of screen time, they get off of the train!!

Griffin then hocks Landis' ring to buy another car. They met Chastain's wife at his home, and then plan to take the mountain. But somehow the climax is doubled by the inexplicable arrival of Chastain, the law on their heels, and this being Francis-esque, are hunted down by authorities in helicopters. Whew!

Let's go back to the opening. As we see, Carradine's character buys absolutely nothing. We never see this old engineer again, even in the actual train sequence, such as it is. The opening scenes of Francis' films operate on a figurative level. They are indications that some property of filmmaking is to be subverted. In other swords, once we learn hat the "night train" is a nothing role, we understand the syntax of this haywire "plot".

With very little difficulty, the Cuba subplot could actually have been written out of the film completely. It only exists as a set piece for the trio to acquire information about this mountain that they intend to plunder. Given that, the filmmakers could have saved a lot of dough on grainy day-for-night combat sequences, and they could have eschewed the shaggy actor who appears as Castro (certainly alumnus of the They Saved Hitler's Brain Union of Celebrity Look-alikes). Therefore, the whole messy story exists as an excuse to examine the deplorable behavior of these characters.

The only true motivation in this story is killing for greed. This is the sole operative in the cruel world that Francis portrays. Once again, we are given a film with an unending string of depravity. The vignettes are actually secondary to this motivation. Like Cassavetes, Francis purposely up-ends the story and forces us to study the unpredictability of the characters; thus, they are as inconsistent as real people. This film is a lot like life: a series of unrelated events nonetheless strung together. This unsparing depiction of the inhuman condition and human irrationality is how Francis completed his odyssey as a filmmaker.

It should be said that visionaries do not act alone. They also have inseparable companions who are on hand to aid them in realizing their visions. In the films of Coleman Francis, Anthony Cardoza is an important ingredient. Not only did he produce all three of Francis' pieces, he also acted in prominent roles in the last two. He saw it fit to literally immerse himself in his director's unique morality plays.

In The Skydivers, he plays Harry, whose infidelity meets a stern retribution. In Red Zone Cuba, he plays one of the ex-cons who travel with Griffin in an impressionistic journey of plunder. This casting could be a budgetary decision (or a necessity because no-one wanted to work for Coleman Francis). Yet, perhaps the two filmmakers were so close to the project that they decided to play two of these horrible human beings as the absolute filth they envisioned them to be.

Within those short years, Francis carved out a demanding trio of films, which are a perfectly crass revenge against all in Tinseltown who shunned him, and a liberating counterpoint for anyone who came to the drive-in to see some standard B movie melodrama. However, in the twilight of Coleman Francis' life, his efforts as a filmmaker were forgotten. Once again, he was making a meager living in small roles in movies from B to Z, as his alcoholism was taking a greater toll on his health.

He was a fixture in the films of Russ Meyer and Ray Dennis Steckler. In Motor Psycho, Meyer gave him a prominent role as Haji's husband (right!) who could be a lecherous cousin of Bert Remsen's character in Nashville. It is a well-known story in the annals of Grade Z-dom that Steckler had just wrapped Body Fever, but when he saw Francis in the gutter, he suddenly created a scene that showcased the hungry actor, and this off-the-cuff add-in actually would add weight to the plot!

In an interview, Steckler had lamented that Hollywood had given Francis the cold shoulder because of his alcohol problem. It is sadly ironic that one of his last (and tiny) roles was in Meyer's Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls…as a drunk.

Thanks to the Mystery Science Theatre crowd, Francis is better known today as a director. And despite the foreground heckling of the animated silhouettes, it is also because of this MST3K treatment that Francis' films are arguably better known today than ever before.

Finally, after decades of neglect, even after Francis lies buried, his uncompromising trio of films is back in the public eye. They are a durable portrait of a justifiably bitter man-- one who was ignored by the system, and retaliated by creating work which challenged our conditioned responses to cinema, and which gave us stark, bleak portraits of inhumanity.

Thanks, Greg!  Yes, Coleman Francis was certainly given the shaft by the Hollywood system, but he certainly ensured that his misery would have company--the poor folks who have to sit and watch his unbelievably tepid and boring flicks.  Somewhere, ol' Coleman must be getting some satisfaction from that.

Article copyright © Greg Woods

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