IMDB Bottom 100: No.s 96 & 95 - Oasis of the Zombies and The Beast of Yucca Flats

Number 96: Oasis of Zombies (1982)

Horror movies. They feature quite heavily in worst movie lists and often with good reason.

They are cheap, easy to produce and don’t require a great amount of effort put into them. They are chiefly used by studios as ‘tent-pole’ movies which they can use the profits to make their major productions.

Even by horror movie standards, Oasis of the Zombies is cheap. OotZ is a Spanish horror movie that plods along at a slow pace, so slow in fact I’m reminded of comedy series Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place in which title character Marenghi explains they used slow motion as much as possible as they found all their episodes were running under time.

The camera is jerky throughout, so a tripod must have been out of the films budget. Plus I think they were only given one camera to work with anyway and it had to be back in the shop by 12.

Then there’s the awful incidental music on an organ that plays throughout coupled with often odd choice of angles and watching this film becomes a nausea inducing experience.

Oh, and there is some of the worst over-acting since Cristiano Ronaldo's last match on display.

The story does what it says on the tin, there’s an oasis and there’s zombies. The story goes that the German’s were transporting gold across a North African desert during World War II, they got attacked by the Allies and now the gold is lost in the desert. 40 years later, a group of teenagers decide to go out looking for it, only now it’s guarded by zombies for…reasons. They get attacked, they turn into zombies but one of the kids survives because these are only night zombies so when dawn comes they all disappear.

And that’s it really. Just a dull zombie movie.

There is one amusing line though, when one of the kids shouts, ‘Make some Molotov cocktails! Just like in school.’ Because we all remember that chemistry lesson don’t we?

Number 95: Beast of Yucca Flats (1961)

Ah, Tor Johnson. If you know about the history of bad movies then you probably know about Tor Johnson, as he was a regular feature in the films of Ed Wood, who is often referred to as ‘the Worst Director of All Time.’ (I think director of this film Coleman Francis, gives him a run for his money though)

Tor Johnson was a former wrestler in his native Sweden and stood 6’7”, weighed 390lbs but was by all accounts a real teddy bear of a man. Late in his career he was often typecast as brainless monsters due to his impressive size and Beast of Yucca Flats is no different.

On the plus side, at only 54 minutes Beast of Yucca Flats is short. How they packed so little into that time I’ll never know.

Johnson is a defecting Russian scientist who gets involved in an atomic accident (Yucca Flats is a region of Nevada that was used for nuclear testing) and is transformed into a monster who stalks the flats killing all he comes across apart from pretty women. Because he may be a monster but he’s still a man.

The story is told via a narrator, with very little spoken dialogue, who litters his narration with phrases such as ‘the wheels of progress’, ‘man’s humanity to man’, ‘scales of justice’. All of which have nothing to do with what is happening on the screen.

Two cops go out hunting for the beast and after eventually killing him, the beast’s dead body is gnawed on by a rabbit. Ok. Then.

Sure Beast of Yucca Flats is boring with bad acting, a rubbish story and bad direction but hey, 54 minutes!

(these are from the list of IMDB Bottom 100 as it was on 31^st August 2015)