Seriously, can we agree? Coleman is THE worst director in history!

These days the nod usually goes to Ed Wood, Jr., but Wood's pictures are at least hilarious in their ineptness, and full of high-spirits. Coleman Francis's pictures, on the other hand, are full only of Death -- and I don't mean just subject matter (though there's plenty of that, Lord knows)--no, a creepy, numb affectlessness permeates every frame, so intense in its non-intensity that it approaches either Zen...or insanity. I vote insanity. Terror. Death!

Francis may be the only director who ever made authentic zombie movies.

Just listen to some mush-mouthed character asking a guard for water in the escape scene from Night Train to Mundo Fine: "Guard. Water. Guard. Water. Sick man. Water. Guard."

Zero energy, zero inflection, zero sense of urgency, nothing, nothing but the idiot mouthing of meaningless words over and over into darkness and the void.

The cinematography always matches the mood exactly, a grainy, one-note symphony of twilit gray shot on stock that seems somehow manufactured from the watery sludge at the bottom of a 1956 Studebaker drip pan. Maybe all this is a kind of greatness, but it's a kind of greatness I want nothing to do with.

Thanks(?) to Mystery Science Theater, I've seen all three of C. F.'s movies, and there is only one scene I recall with anything like fondness: a brief sequence of a girl doing the Twist at a party in "The Skydivers". It doesn't hurt that she's got huge breasts, of course, but what really makes her stand out (no pun intended...I guess...) like a strobe light in a midnight cavern is she actually seems to be enjoying herself, telling us that life, at least in tiny snippets, might possibly, sometime, somewhere be worth living!

I defy anyone to find another moment in this or any other Francis film about which the same can be said.