I try not to take a firm stand on issues like these, because I don't want to become one of those Comic Book Guy-style movie geeks who pronounce every film they see to be the "worst... movie... ever." But I will say this for "Manos": It does have a bumbling, almost charming naïveté about it. When you see the movie, it's clear that it became such an unwatchable mess because director Hal Warren was in way, way over his head and didn't have a clue what he was doing. With Red Zone Cuba, however, you get the feeling that everyone involved knew better, but just didn't care.
This makes it something much, much worse than an incompetently-made, idiotic B-movie that evokes reactions of unintentional hilarity. No, this is a movie that will make you angry, angrier than you've ever felt in a movie before. Angrier than when Kirk fell under a bridge in Generations, angrier than watching what Joel Schumacher did to Batman, angrier than how you felt during the endings of AI, The Game, Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, or Boxing Helena all put together.
Far be it for me to spoil a movie this early into a review, but Red Zone Cuba is a film that seriously gives Seinfeld a run for its money in the "being about nothing" department. In this movie, three drifters meet up and do nothing. Then they get recruited by the military, and nothing happens. The military sends them off to Cuba, and nothing happens there, either. Finally, after some more nothing happening, they head out to a mine where nothing happens some more, until one guy dies. Seriously, that's the whole movie.
Compounding the pain is how the "characters" are about as charming as my living room furniture. (And I live in a crack house.) The three main characters actually have negative personality. That is to say, as I watched this movie, personality was sucked out of me and I become a significantly less interesting person than I was before I saw it.
Any discussion of Red Zone Cuba would be remiss without a mention of its writer, director, and star, Coleman Francis, who's also singlehandedly responsible for two other cinematic abominations, Beast of Yucca Flats and Skydivers. Until the IMDb recently altered the formula used to calculate the list of its bottom 100 films, these three movies were all in the bottom fifteen. Probability dictates that every now and then, a totally clueless director like Hal Warren or Tony Malanowski might punch through and end up making one of the worst movies ever just by pure chance, but to make three of them clearly requires active hatred towards paying audiences.
And don't think his co-producer and co-star Tony Cardoza gets off the hook here, either. Not only did he co-produce all of Francis' films, but he also produced and had a cameo in Hellcats, a film that somehow is just as hellish to sit through. Watching these films makes it abundantly clear that both Francis and Cardoza had negative talent, and when they get together, incredibly, the whole is even less than the sum of its parts. In this regard, Red Zone Cuba is their masterpiece, because it might just be the one, true anti-movie.
Now, I usually don't mention stuff before the movie like FBI warnings or production credits (unless they happen to be printed on a sheet of paper), but in this case I have to mention that the words "An Anthony Cardoza Enterprise Release" hang on the screen for at least three minutes [!]. Personally, if I were even partially responsible for a piece of shit like this, my name would blink on and off the screen faster than the legal disclaimers at the end of a reality show. But maybe that's just me.
The movie itself starts with a car rolling into a dilapidated train station that looks like it's way, way on the outskirts of town, which is probably where Coleman Francis should have left this movie's screenplay and any notion of filming it. A young guy wearing a tie and a tweed jacket gets out of the car, and then we cut to John Carradine in a stereotypical conductor's outfit of an overalls and cap. Yes, that's right, this movie is blessing us with the sight of John Carradine dressed like a character from Thomas the Tank Engine
All this and more can be found here!
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