Thread by @Foone

Anyone ever notice that one of the eight people injured in the second Demon Core criticality incident is listed only as having "probably died"?

It's equally possibly there's a slightly radioactive 98-year old prowling the wastelands of New Mexico...
Unable to die...
Still mad at Louis Slotin

Here's a picture of the missing nonagenarian from the Manhattan project records.

Flag on the moon... How'd it get there?

Drop a screwdriver. Things happen. A scientist becomes a beast.

Physicists from the city. Not yet caught by the whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.

The Beast of Yucca Flats is an amazing... I almost hesitate to call it a movie. It's almost an anti-movie.

It's a 1961 B-Movie by the late great Coleman Francis, of Red Zone Cuba and Skydivers fame.
It's a pretty simple story, in theory, about a scientist who gets irradiated by a nuclear explosion, who then turns into a mindless murdering monster, and is then hunted down.

The thing is, the film was recorded without sound. This wasn't that uncommon around the time for cheaper movies, but usually they just dubbed them over to make it look normal. Not so The Beast of Yucca Flats

Because sound sync of dubbed dialogue requires spending a lot of work in the editing booth (and this film is barely edited in the first place), Coleman Francis instead shot the film so that every line of dialogue takes place off screen

Same goes for things like guns firing: always off screen, so they don't have to sync the audio.

And therefore the few lines the film does have between characters are people facing away from the camera or slightly off the side or obscured by something.

There isn't a lot of dialogue, because this would obviously get old fast. Coleman Francis tried to fix this by including lots of monologue.

So the narrator is randomly popping every 5 minutes to... Say things.
It feels like they're trying to be a profound bit of commentary but they're so short and random it just comes off as madness.

And most of the time they're over scenes of a Swedish wrestler wandering through the desert. It very much fits the feeling of slowly going insane from thirst and heat stroke.

"Nothing bothers some people, not even flying saucers."

Anyway, it was (along with the other films in the Coleman Francis trilogy), shown on MST3K, as episode 621.
It's definitely worth watching.