tek's rating: I can't even.

The Beast of Yucca Flats (not rated)
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Caution: spoilers.

This came out in 1961, but I only saw it in 2019, as part of a set of bad movies. First, there's an opening scene of a woman getting out of the shower. She's wrapped in a towel, and you can see a brief flash of a breast. The internet informs me that there's a slightly longer version of this scene, with more nudity, but that's not the version I've seen. Which is fine. Mainly I just wanted to say that this scene makes no sense, either way. The woman goes to sit on her bed, still wrapped in her towel, which I'm totally sure people who are home alone do all the time. What I'm less sure of is that anyone other than this particular woman are usually wearing shoes when they get out of the shower. Anyway, the "beast" of the title then strangles her to death. How he got in her house without her hearing or seeing anything until he was right in front of her, I'm not sure. What's weirder is that this scene does not fit anywhere into the timeline of the rest of the film.

After that, we see the main part of the movie, in which a Russian scientist named Javorsky defects to the U.S. with top secret information about a moon landing, or something. He's supposed to meet with some government or military officials, or something, but somehow there's a pair of KGB agents waiting there to kill him. There's a car chase, and eventually both cars stop at some random spot. During both the chase and after the stop, the movie has the most ridiculous shootout ever. Javorsky then goes on the run with his briefcase full of secrets, but suddenly there's a nuclear bomb detonated nearby, because of course the meeting was supposed to take place on a bomb testing site. And of course no one thought to not drop a bomb on the day the defector was coming for a meeting. Anyway, the radiation turns Javorsky into a mindless monster who only wants to kill. He soon kills a man who had stopped his car while on vacation and was looking in the trunk, I guess. Then the beast strangles the man's wife, who was still sitting in the car. He strangles her from the back seat, and of course she didn't see or hear him getting into the car. It's not clear if he killed her or not, but he pulls her out of the car and drags her up a mountain or whatever, and leaves her in a cave.

Before long, some random motorist sees the stopped car on the highway, with a dead man lying on the ground behind it, so he drives into town and tells a cop about it. The cop goes to check it out, then goes back to town to get his partner, and they both go out looking for the beast. Meanwhile, another vacationing family, a man and wife and their two sons, stop briefly at some other point on the road to change a tire, I guess. And the boys wander off into the wilderness, so their father goes looking for them. At this time, one of the cops, who is a former paratrooper, is up in a plane looking for the killer, planning to literally "shoot first and ask questions later." So he starts shooting at the guy who's just out looking for his kids. Somehow the guy survives, gets back to his car, and leaves his wife stranded in the middle of nowhere in case the kids come back. Because he wants to go get help.

Sigh. Anyway... eventually the beast starts chasing the kids. And later the cops manage to find and kill him before he can kill the kids. And then there's a jackrabbit, for some reason. The end.

This whole story... it's really, really bad. I have not even told you all the things that make no sense. But the worst (or best, depending on your POV) thing about the movie is the narration. Like, take a look at any site that reviews this movie. They will give you an idea of what the narration is like, because it is so easy to mock. OMG, it's just the worst narration I think I've ever heard, and the movie is almost all narration, with very little dialogue. I just wanted it to stop. I kept begging the narrator to stop talking. But of course he didn't. Until, mercifully, the movie was finally over. (It's slightly less than an hour long, but it felt longer.)


B-movies index

The Best of the Worst

Disc 1: Manos: The Hands of Fate * Track of the Moon Beast * The Beast of Yucca Flats * Eegah
Disc 2: The Ape Man * The Amazing Transparent Man * The Atomic Brain * Dementia 13
Disc 3: Unknown World * The Terror * Mesa of Lost Women * The Incredible Petrified World