Review: Robot Monster (1953)

I must confess that I'm not sure how to review Robot Monster. The strong temptation is to rip director/producer Phil Tucker at least one new orifice, if not several, for producing a cinematic atrocity so lame, so awful, so flat-out goofy that even Ed Wood at his worst couldn't have made it. But I feel like I'm kicking a lame puppy when it's down. After all, legend has it that Tucker was so upset by the universally savage reviews for Robot Monster that he attempted suicide. Rather than doing himself in, though, Tucker could have put his destructive urges to much more productive use by tracking down and burning every single copy of Robot Monster.

But if he had done that, though, we, the cinema-loving public, would have been denied the sheer amazement that washes over each individual viewer the first time they see Robot Monster. The first time I saw the entire movie was when it initially aired on "Mystery Science Theater 3000," and even with the help of Joel and the 'Bots, I was left in my seat, muttering the same words over and over again: "My dear God."

The plot is pretty weak tea--a young, seriously annoying boy is out on an excursion in some very rocky valley with his family when he wakes up to find the world destroyed by alien invaders, with only his mom, dad, two sisters (one older, one younger), a hunky scientist who perpetually argues with the older sister (just have sex already, dammit!) and a couple other guys left alive. But the thing that launches Robot Monster into the stratosphere of astonishingly bad (and, hence, highly entertaining) movies is the title creature himself, possibly the cheapest, most half-assed creation in film history. Ro-Man, the being powerful enough to wipe out life on Earth is a guy in a gorilla suit wearing what looks like a Styrofoam diving helmet with TV antennas sticking out of it. And he lives in a cave. And he has a bubble machine.

My. Dear. God.

Nearly every frame of Robot Monster suffers from similar budget restraints: the sets (there really are none); the bizarre use of stock footage of dinosaurs (wrestling lizards lifted from the original One Million Years BC and stop-motion monsters from some other prehistoric epic); more stock footage of rockets combined with the least expensive spaceship models you've ever seen (literally a rocket model on a stick move around by somebody's hand); and Ro-Man's electronic communications equipment (war surplus stuff propped up on a rickety wooden table).

As if this weren't all bizarre enough, Ro-Man, intent on destroying what little life remains on Earth, falls in love or lust or something with the oldest daughter, Alice. While talking to the family over a video view screen and, of course, threatening to kill them, Ro-Man becomes confused: he doesn't know why, but he must speak with the girl named "A-lice." (You don't know why, Ro-Man? It's called a hard-on. Get a porno mag, some hand lotion and a roll of toilet paper and deal with it, furball.) Because of his love for "A-lice," Ro-Man doesn't want to destroy her, though he has no such qualms about knocking off the other survivors. Ro-Man's feelings for "A-lice" tick off his supreme commander (who looks exactly like Ro-Man--couldn't be the same actor, could it?), and Ro-Man dies for true love.

The movie ends with the little boy waking up to find that it was all a dream...or was it? We should be so lucky.

There's a temptation to write this whole thing off as a cleaver ploy by Tucker to portray what a child's dream of the end of the world would be like-sure, it would have to have spacemen and dinosaurs and death rays and young lovers and fistfights. But that would mean crediting Tucker with a sense of humor and whimsy this movie just doesn't show--not intentionally, anyway. It's all played dead serious, and that makes it all the more laughable. Throw in the fact that Robot Monster was originally released in 3-D (so that the bubbles looked like they were floating RIGHT AT YOU!!!) and that it features a musical score by future Oscar winner Elmer Bernstein, and you've got one volatile cocktail of weird, lousy film making.