The Skydivers

Wow! Was this movie _action packed_ or what! You've got skydiving, mate swapping, skydiving, meaningful glances, skydiving, intrigue, skydiving, coffee (or broad hints thereof leading to an exciting scene where coffee actually is consumed), skydiving, sexual tension, skydiving, painful deaths, skydiving, curious onlookers, skydiving, a cool jazz guitarist playing his Rickenbacker archtop with Mel Bay-like aplomb, skydiving, butt shaking, and (of course) skydiving!

Among the cast of hundreds of thousands,the truly lovely Kevin Casey is a standout as Beth (she just gets prettier every day, doesn't she?).

After suffering through "Red Zone Cuba", I approached this Coleman Francis ouevre with some trepidation, but found myself genuinely entertained. Don't let my seemingly flippant tone fool you. I really did like this movie.

Very easily one of the most bungling and unskilled attempts at film making in history. Sound synch is solved by showing other people listening as one person speaks, or just doesn't synch at all. The plot is a real head-scratcher, leaving one wondering who this was supposed to be about, what was the point, who was the beatnik with a chicken under his arm? Everyone appears to be reading directly from cue cards, voices droning on and on, no emphasis or vocal-inflection for these people posing as actors. Skydiving scenes are just stock footage intercut with close-ups of the actors hanging in a soundstage. Coleman Francis has a knack for throwing something new at you, but in a good way. To think that he actually wasted paper on this is dumbfounding in itself. However, the entire film is so badly done, it's quite funny. Any version is funny and worth the watch just to see such a bad movie can actually be made, but I suggest the MST3K version, as it is absolutely priceless.

Never before in the annals of cinematic history has there risen a film so intensely stupid that it makes Jeff Foxworthy's "You Might Be A Redneck" monologues look staid and deeply philosophical.

This film stars a thin, joyless, gray man who runs a skydiving school with his large-haired, joyless, gray wife who, it seems, might be cheating on him. It's just as well, because I think he may have also been cheating on her. Really, I don't remember. I just finished watching it, and I cannot remember a single thing about it, other than the fact that a lot of it was gray.

A gray friend of the man is recently released from prison or something, and he comes to work at the school as the gray man's airplane mechanic. A romance of some kind may or may not have sparked between the gray friend and the gray man's gray wife - although my memory of it is a bit hazy - and gray woman and gray friend hatch a plot to kill the gray man (or something like that).

Stuff happens, including reels and reels of stock footage showing people jumping out of planes (gray), as well as a huge dance party inexplicably taking place on the tarmac where the gray man parks his gray plane, complete with various other gray people and music performed by, I would assume, gray musicians. (They were never shown.) The movie ends when somebody dies, but not before Coleman Francis, the evil demon behind this film, as well as the abysmal "Red Zone Cuba", makes his standard bland appearance, looking for all the world like an angry Curly Howard from the Three Stooges, and probably thinking himself pretty clever because of this ridiculous Hitchcockian tribute to himself.

As the title of this review states, I want to hit this movie, over and over again, to quell the feeling that Coleman Francis and his minions have consumed my soul, and I am left a dark, bitter husk of a man.

But maybe that's just me.

Little could directors like Coleman Francis, Roger Corman, and Hal Warren imagine that their catastrophic pieces of celluloid excrement would, one day, bring so much joy to future generations. With the help of Mike, Joel, and a couple of robots, of course. Make no mistake, "Skydivers", along with "Plan 9 From Outer Space", "Manos, the Hands of Fate", etc... represents film-making at its lowest level. Lousy directing, flimsy storyline, complete lack of character development, crappy lighting, botched sound, laughable continuity, and, what might be the worst acting I've ever seen all make for a uniquely surreal experience.

While on the subject of acting, I, and other reviewers, are not kidding when we say that every actor seems to be reading from cue cards. After enduring "Skydivers", I immediately watched another MST3K masterpiece, "Sidehackers". As bad as "Sidehackers" was, Ross Hagen (Rommel, "I read your book, you magnificent S.O.B.!") was Laurence Olivier compared to Anthony Cardoza. So, in its raw form, I would highly recommend avoiding this hack job at all costs. However, if you're a fan of MST3K, this is actually one of the best episodes I've seen.

When I was a kid I used to watch the the parachuters do their thing from the back yard of my grandma's house in Lake Elsinore. I often thought that I would make a movie about skydivers. Who wouldn't want to see footage of skydivers floating gracefully through the air over and over again. It turns out that Coleman Francis beat me to it. I mean this is the definitive skydiver movie. No other movie gets into the heart and soul of what it means to be a skydiver. The triumph, the tragedy, the love triangles, the wild parties. My heart was pounding when Beth's plane had engine trouble while she was taxiing down the runway. Would she be able to simply not take off? Pure drama! Then there is the sinister plot of the acid in the parachute! This movie is a must see for all skydivers who own a small airport and are cheating on their wives. Only the drunken haze of Francis' vision could bring us all of this. Coleman Francis' bio says he died of heart disease. Why am I not surprised?