"Director Coleman Francis uses edits like blunt instruments. He uses blunt instruments like blunt instruments. His major themes are death, hatefulness, death, pain, and death. He looks like Curly Howard possessed by demons from Hell. He tried to pass off Lake Mead as the Caribbean Sea. His films have the moral compass of David Berkowitz. He hurts us and I want him to know it, except if he's still alive, because there's the small chance that he's still strong enough to crush my windpipe with his bare hands."note
—Kevin Murphy, The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide
"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, The Beast of Yucca Flats and The Skydivers. (...) 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."
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."—Albert Walker, The Agony Booth's recap of Red Zone Cuba
"But one who leaves his biggest, greasiest fingerprints all over this season is a man named Coleman Francis. Francis is such a shockingly bad filmmaker that it actually borders on being art. If it wasn't completely obvious that he is completely incompetent in all aspects of filmmaking, you would think that he was one of the greatest geniuses of experimental films in history. You probably think I'm joking here, but I'm not. What you have on display in his three films is someone who is challenging the ways of cinema in ways that some of the most visionary and inspired filmmakers would, except that, rather than this being because of a bold new conception of how to shoot or edit films, of imaginative storytelling techniques and groundbreaking concepts in terms of structure... Coleman Francis makes films this way because he's simply too stupid to make them correctly!"
—Chuck Sonnenburg, SF Debris's A Look at MST3K Season 6
