MonsterHunter

This movie was completed several years after star Tor Johnson’s efforts in Ed Wood’s notorious Plan Nine From Outer Space. I thought that like most actors he would use that time to hone his craft and become something more than a lumbering tub of lard that got by on his good looks. I was also heartened by the fact that the movie only ran 54 minutes. This was a good sign in my mind as I recalled that another legendary ugly guy, Rondo Hatton, starred in several movies that couldn’t quite break that magical one-hour barrier. So I assumed that this effort by Tor would be right at home with my copy of Rondo’s The Brute Man.

Little did I know that even though this movie was released in 1961, the results looked like something that Thomas Alva Edison would’ve rejected as being too amateurish to show the public back in the early 1900s. Keep in mind Edison’s movies consisted of a person kissing another person and a dog running up the ladder. See, the only professional thing about this film is the packaging of the DVD. Wade Williams has his nifty little logo on the front, there’s a full color, fiery image of a mushroom cloud in the background with a distraught Tor Johnson looking on in the foreground. You also have the title which made me think I was going to be watching a movie about a giant Gila monster or scorpion, not some fat guy running around in the desert sweating like a stuck pig.

One of the main problems this movie suffers from (aside from the non acting, the plot holes bigger than Tor’s backside, and the chimp-like direction) is that there’s virtually no spoken dialogue in the movie. Most of the action is described by a nasal toned narrator who also happens to be the director of this mess, Coleman Francis. Supposedly, the audio track for this movie was accidentally erased so the director had to go back and narrate the story himself. I like to think that this proves somewhere up in the heavens there is a vengeful god, who punishes us for our sins and delights in tormenting man. For if there was a god up there who actually looked out for us, not only would the audio track have been “accidentally” erased, but the film negatives would have also been “accidentally” left out in the Yucca Flats sun for about three weeks.

Coleman’s narrative skills are as subpar as his directing skills. He talks at inappropriate times, repeats himself, and worst of all, says a lot of stuff that is supposed to sound important, but comes off like he was just thinking this stuff up as he went along. He keeps saying stuff like “so and so is caught up in the wheels of progress” and “so and so is caught up in the wheels of justice.” The nadir of this whole thing had to be when the movie was trying to rip off North By Northwest’s crop duster scene and as this guy is running on the ground while being shot at from a plane, Coleman breaks off with this stunning observation, “a man runs, he is shot at.” Ugh, that was even worse then when he said that people go on vacation to the north, south, east, and west. Thanks for the insight!

Tor plays a really fat guy (he must have at least a sixty inch waist!) named Joseph Javorsky. J.J. is some type of nuclear scientist from the Soviet Union that has all this secret information about the Soviets and their secret moon landing or something. If these papers really revealed that the commies had beat us to the moon, why would they keep it a secret? Wouldn’t they want the world to know that they were first?

J.J. has all this top secret crap in his briefcase and for some reason he is flown out to the Yucca Flats Atomic Testing Grounds by U.S. military personnel. Even though they have come to this high security (there’s a barbed wire fence with a sign saying “Keep Out” shown later in the movie) facility for who knows what reason, two Russian agents have also managed to show up at the strip, by driving their car up to it.

A shootout occurs and it involves guys standing behind their car and around the corner of an airplane hangar and pointing their guns at people while horribly dubbed gunshots (I’ll bet it was Coleman making the gunshot noises, himself!) reverberate unconvincingly across the screen. The only way I ever knew if anyone had gotten hit was because they suddenly fell down and there was no other obvious reason why they would suddenly drop to the ground, unless it was out of sheer embarrassment.

At one point during this gun battle, someone gives Tor the briefcase and he lumbers off into the desert in an effort to get away. That’s pretty sound strategy for you. Give the football (that’s what those of us in the black ops biz call important briefcases) to the 600 pound dude and have him run away with it into the blazing desert sun. Oh, and did I mention that this is on the Yucca Flats Atomic Testing Grounds? Guess what they happen to be testing the very same day that they also decide to have an open house for Russian defectors? An atomic bomb!

So Tor is ambling across the desert with his precious briefcase, when all of sudden an atomic bomb gets dropped on Tor’s bald head. At this point I realize that what we have here is an Incredible Hulk situation. Guy gets caught in atomic blast. Guy gets turned into monster. Guy gets own television series and has to change name from Bruce to David because Bruce sounds too “gay.”

Tor survives the blast, but has been transformed into a hideous beast! Oh wait, that’s just Tor with some dried toilet paper pasted to his head. Tor has now become an honest to gosh rampaging monster on the loose! He kills a guy changing his tire, then he chokes out his wife and drags her up to his shiny new secret hideout cave that he just leased and spends a good deal of time chewing on her hair!

Meanwhile, the local yokel law enforcement team of Joe and Jim get on the case. Somehow or other they track down the cave that Tor has hidden the woman in. I guess it’s a really small desert. Coleman also babbles on about how tough it is to get up to that cave and that one misstep is likely to result in something really unpleasant happening to Jim and Joe. Kind of makes you wonder how an 800 pound guy carrying a woman made it up there.

They develop what has to be the dumbest plan you’re ever likely to see in one of these monster movies. Jim is going to go up in an airplane and parachute out over some plateau once he finds the monster. Then he’s going to “shoot first and ask questions later.” Meanwhile this vacationing couple gets a flat tire (doesn’t anyone get their tires checked before driving off into the desert?) and their two kids run off to play with a cactus or something, so the old man goes off to find them, while the homely wife is left at the side of the road with the rest of the trash.

Up in the air plane, Jim sees the guy running around looking for his kids and immediately starts shooting at him. What follows is one of the longest scenes where a guy is running and getting shot at from an airplane you’re ever likely to see. Several times I thought he was hit, but this dude just kept running. Finally, after firing about fifty rounds at this guy, Jim parachutes out and gets picked up by Joe. That’s pretty close to mission accomplished, I’d say!

Tor and the kids hook up and eventually the kids escape his cave and then Jim and Joe show up to shoot Tor, but Tor gets up and throws Joe down and then trips and falls and lands on top of Jim. Tor gets shot some more times, then we see a brief instance where Tor’s shirt comes partway up exposing about an acre of his gut and the viewer shudders in horror for the only time during the entire movie. Things end as a little bunny shows up and harasses Tor as he dies!

This movie is nowhere near as good as this review probably makes it sound. Everyone involved in this film stunk the joint up like a Tor Johnson left out in the desert sun. It wasn’t fun to watch at all, you simply cringed at how unprofessional everything was. The story wasn’t even loopy enough to remember (fat guy gets nuked, kills people - maybe it wasn’t so hard to remember after all). But don’t let the “fat guy gets nuked, kills people” plot trick you into thinking that this is worth your time. They don’t really exploit the idea in a very good way. The only time they use the gimmick in a slightly amusing way was when Tor fell down on Jim. I’ve never seen that in a movie before. The Beast of Yucky Fats will leave you feeling like Tor sat on your face and farted.

© 2008 MonsterHunter