Director: Coleman Francis
Writer: Coleman Francis
Stars: Coleman Francis, Tony Cardoza, Harold Saunders and John Carradine
Index: 2019 Centennials.
Sometimes it’s easy to think that cinema is all about the celebrities, because they’re who get the press, but they’re just the surface and there are a thousand others below for each one above. Case in point: Coleman Francis, who would have been a hundred years old today. He never made it to celebrity status, though though he did find cult fame posthumously courtesy of the television show Mystery Science Theater 3000, which lampooned each of the three films he wrote and directed, as well as a couple of others in which he merely appeared. Take a good look at his filmography, though, and you’ll see that he connected all over the cult movie map. He acted for W. Lee Wilder, brother of Billy, in Killers from Space; Ray Dennis Steckler, in Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters (playing two separate roles); and Russ Meyer, in both Motorpsycho and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He narrated Steckler’s The Thrill Killers, had a bit part in This Island Earth and appeared in two episodes of Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe. I’d like those credits!
Of course, most of those roles were so tiny as to be often uncredited. When he finally got a credit, for Stakeout on Dope Street, it was spelled wrong, and when he achieved a major role, it was in an exploitation film as inconsequential as 1959’s T-Bird Gang. What he will always be remembered for are the three features that he wrote and directed himself, features so bad that they underline once and for all how Ed Wood was not the worst filmmaker of all time. The first of these was The Beast of Yucca Flats, my go to choice for the worst film ever made. Certainly it has the weirdest stream of consciousness narration that I’ve ever heard, while Tor Johnson stumbles around the desert suffering from radiation burns and searching for a plot. That was 1961. Two years later, Francis made The Skydivers aka Fiend from Half Moon Bay, with a larger role for his producer, Tony Cardoza. Finally came Night Train to Mundo Fine aka Red Zone Cuba, shot in 1961 but not released until 1966 and the only one not to include his wife and kids in the cast.
As awful as it is, The Beast of Yucca Flats is explainable. Francis hadn’t directed before, so was learning the ropes as he went. He was unable to shoot with sound, so chose not to point his camera at people’s faces while they spoke. Tor Johnson was 58 years old and 390 bloated pounds; he couldn’t stand up without something to lean on, so his attempts to terrorise everyone around weren’t too believable. Night Train to Mundo Fine isn’t remotely as easy to explain away. Francis really should have learned something of the art of filmmaking by this point, but it seems to be confined to an attempt to actually overdub dialogue in post production so that we’re able to watch the mouths of people talking instead of their chests. He clearly thought he was ready to attempt an actual plot, but he wasn’t and so we stumble around for an hour and a half trying to figure out where we are, when we are and why we’re there in the first place. Occasionally, it starts to make sense but by that point, Francis just moves everyone on again to keep us in confusion.
What I should explain off the bat is that Night Train to Mundo Fine has nothing to do with a night train and we don’t ever take one to Mundo Fine. That is promising for a couple of minutes, because the movie begins at a railroad depot, with Jim Benton of the Gazette interviewing Mr. Wilson about the desperadoes who came through back in ’61. He’s John Carradine and he was the engineer on the train when they grabbed it, he says. Now, “grabbed it” turns out, over an hour later, to mean that they snuck on board and then off again a scene later. Nothing happens on the train and he didn’t even meet them, but it did provide an opportunity for Carradine to speak a couple of lines and, unbelievably, even sing the theme tune in which I learned that Mundo Fine has four syllables, because it ought to be Mundo Finé, namely Spanish for “the end of the world”. It’s a philosophical title, explaining the descent into oblivion of the lead character, Griffin, who’s already on the run with $5,000 on his head when the story begins.
Francis’s understanding of plot is to keep these three moving, but in tone and genre as much as location. They start out in a sort of John Steinbeck-esque depression era story, even though it’s 1961, because our heroes (well, we assume they’re our heroes) have no homes or jobs and have to eat at the side of the road and be interrupted by policemen on a daily basis. Eventually, they realise that someone’s hiring fighters to go invade Cuba, so they swap their car for a plane ride from Cherokee Jack to the training ground and suddenly our depression picture turns into a war movie. We’re not let in on any details here, which seems odd, such as where this base is, whether it’s populated by the army or just some sort of militia, and who these folk are who hire three probable ex-cons on the fly. All we know is that one training scene later, they’re in a boat heading for what we’re only later told is the Bay of Pigs, as an advance force tasked with taking out telephone wires and other means of communication.
So much of this is inexplicable. Why would the United States invade Cuba with an army of a dozen ex-cons, especially after only a single day’s training? Why is their base so full of birdsong that we can’t hear the dialogue over it? Why is a Texan cowgirl guarding the Cuban prison hut? Why do we care? At least some questions can be squared away with the same answer, namely that Francis is clearly incompetent and everyone in his cast and crew followed suit. That’s why the lighting is wildly inconsistent. That’s why the dialogue is sparse, unrealistic and delivered really really slowly. That’s why the music is hilariously overblown. And that’s why the opportunity to make a sociopolitical comment about the CIA’s attempt to invade Cuba and depose its Communist leader is ignored completely. Red Zone Cuba may make more sense as a title than Night Train to Mundo Fine, but it doesn’t take too long for our heroes to fly right back out of Cuba and end up at Cliff Weismeyer’s backwoods frog legs café somewhere in Arizona.
Why we’re even at Cliff Weismeyer’s, I have no idea. We know Griffin’s a bad guy already. We really don’t need the implication that he murders the proprietor just so that he can rape his blind daughter. There seems like no point for him to even be here, wherever here might happen to be. They fly there, they drive somewhere else and they eventually end up where we started, jumping on that night train that doesn’t go to Mundo Finé, only to jump off again at some junkyard and eventually, perhaps after making it over the Misty Mountains, through the Gap of Rohan and past Helm’s Deep to... wait, I’m in the wrong road movie. Eventually, they arrive at Ruby Chastain’s place, where we find that she’s just as terminally depressed as everyone else in this film, even though she strangely doesn’t ask the soldiers who were with her husband in Cuba where the heck her husband is now and how he’s doing. She just joins them on the next stage of their journey, up the mountain to see the mine. After all, she has three shovels and a geiger counter.
It’s easy to laugh at this film, and the others that Coleman Francis made, because it and they are mindbogglingly awful. Right now, none of them feature on the IMDb Bottom 100, but that’s only because there’s been a change in the number of votes needed to get there. The Skydivers, with an average rating of 2.8 after 4,556 votes, is currently the highest rated of the three, but that’s still lower than the 2.9 that Baby Geniuses currently rates as the 23rd worst feature of all time. Night Train to Mundo Fine’s 2.6 puts it alongside Battlefield Earth and Gigli in the high teens and The Beast of Yucca Flats, with a mere 2.4, would rank around the 10th place mark with Son of the Mask and From Justin to Kelly. But, in the early sixties, long before cheap and portable video cameras, Coleman Francis, an extra for a decade whose brightest moment was as a detective in Irvin Kershner’s debut feature (22 years before The Empire Strikes Back), still managed to shoot, edit and distribute three features. For that, and the MST3K joy that followed, we salute you!
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