I haven't seen that many classic bad movies, but Robot Monster is one of my personal favorites. It is simply hilarious to watch. The gorilla costume and diving helmet are so entertaining that one could enjoy the movie with the sound off. With the sound on, though, you get to appreciate the "acting." In all fairness, the music in this movie is actually pretty good, which contrasts from every other aspect of the movie. The stock footage that appears every so often is an unexpected treat. The mind-blowing plot twist at the end really finishes the movie with a bang. I hope that anyone who enjoys bad movies checks this one out...you will be rewarded. "If I were a HU-man, would she treat me like a HU-man?"
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wordnerd21827 May 2005
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It's an old theme, and one particularly pertinent to the cold war. Aliens conquer the earth, and earthlings are too small minded to put aside their grievances, so all is lost. However, in the case of Robot Monster, the aliens are big guys in ape suits and old-school scuba gear (odd concept of a robot, IMO), and all the action in the film appears to be either stock warfare footage or scraps of bad sci-fi films found on the cutting room floor, spliced in with some pathetic burning miniature rocket ships, and all not even loosely tied into the "plot".
George Nader, who helped Frankie Avalon ruin the masterpiece of garbage cinema "Million Eyes of Sumuru", is the star, but the only people who act in this film are Claudia Barrett and John Brown (the Ro-Man), and even so, they're not very good at it. As a man well aware of his limits, Nader doesn't usually bother with acting. Like most of the cast members of Robot Monster, he simply recites his lines and adds a smile, a chuckle, or a gesture here and there.
It gets worse. I am a professional archaeologist, and though I appreciate the credit this film gives my profession, I sincerely doubt that any archaeologist will ever develop a serum that makes humans immune to every possible form of disease. Furthermore, I have ethical concerns about the fact that he tests it on HIS ENTIRE FAMILY, even if doing so allowed them to be the only survivors of the alien holocaust brought about by Ro-man! I guess this makes Robot Monster a pioneering cyberpunk film since the entire plot takes place after the destruction of most of earth's life. Most of the plot is incoherent, utterly ridiculous and unexplained.
You continue to watch because, despite the mediocre cinematography, worse than mediocre directing and script, you want to see just how much worse it can get. In that sense, this film is no disappointment. It gives Manos a run for its money, but in the end does no harm, and its a lot more fun, so I gave it a two (the extra star is for being harmless). This is an amazingly goofy and silly film, comparable in its absurdity to Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Go for it if you're into that kind of thing, or if you harbor a secret desire to see George Nader get married without a shirt in a ceremony performed by a German archaeologist. -
hung_fao_tweeze1 January 2005The first time I saw this, in the '60s, I managed to catch clips off of a late night Creature Feature that cut the crap out of the movie to insert commercials. Thus it made little sense. However, the images that I did see never left me and I have been haunted with the desire to see it again in its entirety. Over the years I managed to catch even more clips but never the entire movie. Nevertheless I was still intrigued by a certain something. Finally I just flat out bought the DVD.
I watched it twice in a row and discovered that this is really quite a little gem. When you finally realize what is going on (which I certainly won't tell you) it makes perfect sense in a 1953 flavor. The important thing to remember is that it is from a child's limited experience and point of view. Once that is realized it becomes great fun.
Perhaps the best part is Elmer Bernstein's score. It kind of does for this movie what Max Stein did for 'King Kong'. The mood is set. Things become a bit surreal and eerie. You become unbalanced. This is good because upon first viewing it throws you a curve and suddenly you aren't in Kansas anymore. How did this happen? It isn't explained until the end, but all at once we have stock footage of dinosaurs fighting(both actual lizards and stop-motion animated models) and a large armadillo walking through the scene. Why? It makes no sense....at first. It is certainly a bit upsetting to your reality though.
Then we discover that the entire word's population is gone with the exception of a handful of people because of Ro-man and ensemble taking over the world. As you know Ro-man is a guy in a gorilla suit sans gorilla head which is replaced by a goofy space helmet. He has a bubble machine (for some reason) and a communication device at the entrance of this cave. His mission is to kill off the rest of the remaining humans. Piece o cake? Nope. Crafty humans have accidentally figured a way to cloak their exact location.
The acting is not good but I have the strangest feeling it was completely on purpose to unbalance the viewer. The same holds true for much of the logic. But in the end that is OK when you discover what has really happened. As soon as that is revealed you will groan and wonder what you missed that might have explained this earlier in the film. No, you didn't miss anything. The movie leads you where it wants you to go and reveals nothing until it wants you to know. Then, if you're dedicated, you will watch it again and perhaps enjoy it much more like I did. I also discovered that while it is logically lame it is never flat out stupid. There really is a method to the filmmaker's madness here.
This movie is cheesy and cheap - it probably wouldn't have worked any other way. Because of Bernstein's music and some of the work by the sound department this movie can even raise your sense of unease. This is good! It doesn't try to scare the Hell out of you but tries to convey a story - which is somewhat interesting from a 1953 point of view.
Bottomline: I personally like this movie and will see it again. I think David Lynch should try a remake. It has some of the same qualities as some of his films for developing a sense of the surreal.
I give it a 4. -
Infofreak23 April 2004If you could pick one single movie which fueled the bad sf/horror movie cult popularized by The Golden Turkey Awards and 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' then 'Robot Monster' would be it. Ed Wood's 'Plan Nine From Outer Space' is probably better known to mainstream audiences, especially since Tim Burton's fantastic Wood biopic, but 'Robot Monster' is just as good/bad, and the image of a lumbering goon in an over-sized gorilla suit with a diving helmet and antenna has become an iconic symbol of z-grade sci fi. Even people who don't know Ro-Man's name recognize his likeness and giggle. 'Robot Monster' isn't as inept technically as Wood's worst movies (especially his astonishing 'Glen Or Glenda'), but the script is as dumb as they get, the actors are wooden at best, and the not-so-special effects are laughable. What really makes this movie legendary is the "robot monster" himself, Ro-Man (George Barrows). You can help smirking every time you look at him, and when he pontificates on life and love the movie enters a new dimension of trash par excellence. And just dig that bubble machine and the unexpected (and totally irrelevant) use of stock dinosaur footage! Plus a score from (can you believe it?) Elmer Bernstein. 'Robot Monster' is a movie I never tire of watching. I still get a big kick out of it every time I see it. To say that it is absolutely essential viewing for anybody interested in cult movies is the understatement of the century! 'Robot Monster' is after all the movie that gave the world the term "psychotronic". Long live Ro-Man and all who smirk at his awesome calcinator death ray!
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muertos25 January 2005Robot Monster is the Citizen Kane of abysmal 1950s science fiction. It has everything modern viewers have come to expect from movies of this genre: a laughable plot line, completely improbable situations, ludicrous acting, unbelievably awful special effects, cheapjack production values, gaffes galore, and examples of how to fail miserably at every major aspect of motion picture production. For good measure it also sports easily the most ridiculous "monster" in the history of film! The plot is so thin that it can't even be stretched comfortably over the film's 66-minute running time without generous padding. A family, headed by the requisite German-accented scientist and including a "hot" chick, a "manly" guy, and two cutesy-poo kids wander through the desert after Earth has been annihilated by a guy in a gorilla suit wearing a plastic diving helmet. That's basically it, except for some nonsensical pap about an immunity serum. When the guy in the monkey suit is far and away the best actor in the picture, you've got a MAJOR problem--but compared to John Mylong as "The Professor," Ro-Man is Laurence Olivier. You could drive a semi through the plot holes. The dialogue clangers pile up like horseshoes on George H.W. Bush's lawn. You feel embarrassed for director Phil Tucker, and almost ashamed to laugh at this movie when you learn that the bad reviews of the film drove him to attempt suicide. The experience of watching this film, even with its abnormally short running time, is so excruciating that it feels like you've wasted five hours of your life. It's so bad that after a while you begin to marvel at its very badness, and ultimately you come away awe-stricken.
I call it a masterpiece because under normal circumstances only a talented and determined genius could make a film that sinks as low and violates so many rules of film-making, storytelling and suspension of disbelief as this one does. It takes real talent to make Ed Wood look like Stanley Kubrick, but Phil Tucker pulled it off. For that alone he deserves a place in film history. -
ROBOT MONSTER is often heralded as the worst movie ever made, although I've seen plenty that are more boring than this zero-budget effort, which is enthusiastic if nothing else. The nutshell plot of the film sees a family struggling to survive in the aftermath of an apocalypse, where they're menaced by the titular alien.
The film features an anything-goes, shot-in-your-own-backyard feel which makes it hard to take seriously. I'm a huge fan of '50s sci-fi, but this has more in common with the dodgy offerings of Ed Wood than a real film. The acting is sub-par, the script even worse, and the attempts to enliven things by shoving in stock footage are simply helpless.
Things aren't quite so bad as all that, though. ROBOT MONSTER is a film that it's easy to laugh at, which counts for a lot, and Ro-Man is quite an entertaining menace...at least, he's highly amusing, whether it be his bizarre look or the way he talks in that portentous voice. As a movie, it's also very short, which makes things easier to take. Watch it as an unintentional comedy and you might even find yourself enjoying it. -
theowinthrop7 January 2006I hesitate to give this a "1" for awful, but it is - by all memories of all the bad films I ever saw - the worst I ever saw.
The Medved Brothers, back in the 1980s, listed "Robot Monster" among the 50 worst films of all time. It deserves that accolade. With dialog (serious dialog) like "I am not a human...I am a Ro - Man." said by an actor in a gorilla suit (George Barrows, the actor in the gorilla suit, actually played a gorilla in another film in a few years - it must have been one of his so-called talents), this is the nadir (I almost said Nader, for the star of the film) of bad movie making. It is poverty-row movie making.
I notice the name of Ed Wood mentioned in some of the reviews here. Wood never did a good film, but there was (I believe) a man in Wood who really felt he had some type of cinematic vision. It was not a trained one - it was quite inept. But if you look at what Wood is attempting to do in some of his films in the 1950s (tackle cross-dressing in "Glen Or Glenda", for example) one can vaguely sympathize with his having some concepts but no talent to really put them across. I think that is why Wood has somehow become a negative Hollywood legend.
That can't be said for Phil Tucker. He never seems to have gotten the bug of making just monster movies. When Wood planned "Plan Nine From Outer Space", he did intend to comment about the danger of our arms race (it comes out ludicrously in the film, but it is there). Tucker could not do that. He just could push together the typical hack like conventions to muddle through. So he has the heroine "vamp" the "Robot Monster" no matter how idiotic it looks. I have never seen Tucker's "Cape Canaveral Monster", which was his last film, but I suspect it is just a slightly smoother version of the bilge he put together here.
I do have one suspicion that makes me think this film was just a poverty row quickie without rhyme or reason (not like Wood's type of schlock which he actually agonized over at home and when filming). I noticed while looking through the credits the backgrounds and fates of the different players. The only one who went anywhere in the 1950s was George Nader, who actually may have done a good performance in one film ("Away All Boats"), but whose career petered out due to his getting involved in a homosexual scandal. He ended doing television in Germany. This film actually was his first real "lead" role. Barrows never had as "important" a role in a film as "Robot Monster". Selena Royle had done some important films in the 1940s but she was blacklisted (possibly unfairly). She did make a successful second career in Mexico (which I am glad about). John Brown was also a victim of the blacklist. Few know of it today (despite the decades of reruns of the old Burns and Allen television show) but he was on the show for a few months in 1950, replacing Hal March as the neighbor Harry Morgan. Brown, who had a distinguished career in radio comedy shows like "The Life Of Riley", was replaced by producer George Burns when his sponsor pointed out that Brown was suspected of communist sympathies. He would be replaced by Fred Clark. It is the shows with Clark and later Larry Keating that we have seen to this day. Brown kept working when he could. He died in 1957. Claudia Barrett's career died out in the 1960s. As for the two child performers, Gregory Moffett acted until about 1956, and Pamela Paulson never made another film in her life. John Mylong usually played bit-parts in films, frequently (during World War II) as Nazis (he's in "The Hitler Gang"). He does play Eddie Duchin's (Tyrone Power's) father in "The Eddie Duchin Story".
In short this cast is strictly from hunger in terms of name recognition. All, that is, except the future acting "success" Nader, and the past success Royle, and this is a rung up for the former and a last chance for the latter. When Tucker cast this picture he grabbed people who were desperate to be in anything that offered them a chance to have a speaking part of any type, no matter how silly. Now compare this with Woods - he uses Bela Lugosi again and again, because he recognizes that Lugosi has name recognition with the public, and some degree of talent left as well (though drug addiction made the latter even weaker than it was). He also uses some character actors like Lyle Talbot who have been around for awhile (the Medveds don't think highly of Talbot, as he seems somewhat humorless - actually at about the same time he worked for Wood, Talbot appeared as himself in a comic series of rivalry confrontations with Bob Cummings on the latter's successful television series "Love That Bob!"). Wood also used local television stars like Vampira and Cresswell the mentalist, and Tor Johnson the Swedish wrestler in his films. In short Wood looks like he made an effort to choose his cast with something approaching thought (for effect, for what he thought was talent). The results might have been laughable, but it showed a type of care. Tucker didn't show that. So for all the cheesiness of Wood's works, we can admire the attempt. We can't with Tucker.
The most memorable moment of this movie? The booming voice deciding to unleash prehistoric monsters on the planet (we see some kind of lizard roaming a small set - it's supposed to be a tyrannosaur?). I think it was memorable because it came about two minutes before the film ended. It still came two minutes too late. -
bsmith55528 September 2004"Robot Monster" has got to be one of the all time turkeys. It was apparently filmed in 3-D and it appears that that was where most of the meager budget went. The "monster" of the title is is the now legendary someone in a gorilla suit wearing what appears to be a diving helmet.
The story involves the monster being sent to earth from God knows where, to eliminate the remaining humans in advance of the ultimate take over of earth by the Robot Monsters. You see, the Robot Monsters have destroyed civilization except for a family of five people (and one boy friend), who are immune to detection by the monsters due some kind of cure all anti-biotic.
The family includes the father (John Mylong), the mother (Selena Royle), a scientist daughter Alice (Claudia Barrett), her boy friend Roy (George Nader) and two younger kids, a boy Johnny (Gregory Moffat) and a girl Carla (Pamela Paulson).
We're supposed to believe that the monster and his chief "The Great One" (no not Jackie Gleason) control the entire world from an isolated cave with incredibly cheap looking "scientific" instruments. And then there's those flashbacks to dinosaurs and lizards made to look like dinosaurs. The same sequences (from stock footage no doubt) are repeated a couple of times. I guess if you saw this film in 3-D it might hold some bit of interest. But in 2-D nothing.
George Nader actually survived this turkey and went on to bigger and better things at Universal as a contract player.
Absolutely awful and well deserving of the dreaded "1". -
Tresix22 June 1999The only people who truly think that PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE is the worst film ever made have obviously not seen THIS turkey. It makes PLAN 9 look like a Lucas/Spielberg/Cameron collaboration. From the idea of using a gorilla costume for a robot suit (I give director Phil Tucker an A for chutzpah!), to the "special effects" to the across the board bad acting, ROBOT MONSTER is just plain bad. My favorite scene is when we can see the hand holding the sparkling "orbitting space station" as it throws the exploding space ship at the camera (this is 3-D after all). > I actually got to see this on a big screen on a triple bill of this, PLAN 9 and ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES (which I think is an actual GOOD movie). Needless to say, RM was the highlight ("lowlight"?) of the evening. Tucker speaks of a film he made called SPACE JOCKEY that even HE thinks is "a piece of s--t". So far, this film seems to be lost. Has anyone seen it, and is Phil correct in his assessment?
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PR-715 March 1999Is a question my spouse and I debate periodically, but it's hard to determine what criteria to use when movies are this bad.
Some things not to miss: (1) the Monster fails to tie up the heroine, but five minutes later she's tied up (maybe she's got a WAY WEIRD domination fetish!!), (2) the hand motions of the Leader don't match his words (they filmed with no dialogue, so both the words and actions are meaningless), (3) the movie was re-released with a different title (could you imagine going on a date with the promise "Surely this movie 'Monster from Mars' HAS to be better than 'Robot Monster' was!") -
Mike-76429 February 2004A young boy wakes up to find that the entire human population has been destroyed by the Ro-mans (actually its a guy in a gorilla suit and space helmet, so use some imagination here), save himself and his family. They decide to take it upon themselves to destroy the Ro-man sent to destroy him and save whatever is left of the Earth. This is a movie where its so bad that its good (yeah, I know... I know) The dialog is cheesy, acting terrible, direction dreadful, but when you look at it from the campy aspects, its hilarious, and yes Carla, Alice is going on a date with the Ro-man. Watching this one in 3-D didn't exactly enhance this. Rating- 2.
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giantdevilfish25 December 2003Think about it for a second. Let's say that director Phil Tucker had went with a generic style killer robot as the title character. Do you think this movie would even be remembered, let alone have a cult following? Of course not! It's the gorilla in the diving helmet that makes this movie unique. It's what makes this movie stand out. It's what makes this movie infamous. Ro-Man was popular enough to have resin kits based on him, and he was remembered well enough to be given a cameo in Looney Tunes:Back In Action. What does that tell you? If it was a generic robot that was used, would he have model kits based on him? Would he have a cameo in a movie made in the new millennium? NO! That's why Ro-Man rocks! As for the movie, there is just something surreal about, a gorilla in a diving helmet (whose voice sounds like an old radio serial narrator) stalking 2 kids and four adults out in the desert, freaky X-Ray effects that flash on the screen every few moments, an eerie musical score, and a bubble machine (whose bubble effects were kind of fun if you can catch the original 3D print of this movie). Yeah the acting was horrible. Yeah the romance scenes between George Nader and Claudia Barrett were wince inducing, and yeah, the stock footage lizard dinosaurs from One Million B.C seems out of place. But when all is said and done this movie still stands the test of time as a blast from the past!
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Is this a cheesy movie? Of course it is. But is it bad? I have to say... NO.
Just for a moment, try to lose yourself in the reality the film creates.
Suspend your belief for a moment. Disregard the non-existent production values (which, after all, are merely a vehicle to deliver the story), the bubbles, the TV antenna, the wooden radio, and really consider the idea of a terrible invader that has destroyed everyone on the planet except for the last few people, struggling futilely to survive against an undefeatable foe (and don't laugh, remember, we are suspending the idea that a slowly lumbering man in a gorilla suit with a fake diving helmet could not possibly be scary). I find the bleakness, the isolation, the desperation, the futility of an unwinnable fight to be deeply affecting.
Now if you throw into the mix that everything is as would be imagined by a young child, a child whose imagination has been fueled by the huge spread of comic books that bookend the movie, you can realize this film is not the laughable failure everyone makes it out to be. Well, I guess it is, but there's at least, in part, a legitimate reason for it. The horrible plot holes and cheesy acting all fall into place. The unbelievable yet somehow Freudian almost-romance of Alice and Ro-Man.
Even the "Neener-neener-neener" melody from the very beginning and very ending of Elmer Bernstein's surprisingly powerful, mood-setting score fits perfectly into a story set inside the mind of an eight-year-old.
Let's face it, most so-called-good SF movies have the same kind of overly-narrow tunnel vision where an enormous story is microscoped down to focus unrealistically on a very few number of characters. Most big-name SF movies don't have any fewer scientific or technical absurdities. I don't know about you, but to me, a lot of big budget "block-buster" SF/action films these days don't have any better acting, or plot. Take "The Core", which in my opinion is effectively an inferior remake of the silly yet fascinating "Unknown World". And let's be honest, the awkward romantic scenes in this movie were nowhere near as bad as the laboured, wooden and completely unbelievable romance "Star Wars Episode II". Ro-Man's sililoquy about the conflict of duty and desire would stand side by side with many of the best quotes from "Star Trek".
It's easy to shoot this obscure little film down for its lack of any real sets and props which were probably dug out of someone's garage, the (mostly) bad acting and silly plot, but I'd watch this movie a dozen times before sitting through one of the many high-budget, low-brow, effects-driven stink-burgers that are inevitably disgorged from Hollywood every summer, despite them having had 50 years to supposedly know better. Is this movie really any worse than the aforementioned "The Core"? "Spawn"? "Event Horizon"? "Independence Day"?, "Armageddon"? How are any of these any better, minus, perhaps, the special effects? My conclusion is that they really aren't.
Is it really fair to criticize the cheap "twist" at the end that it was all a dream? This same plot device that has since fueled countless comic books and TV shows, and more amazingly, a whole season of "Dallas" or in the case of "St. Elsewhere" and "Newhart" an entire TV show. Doesn't that really make you want to go back and reconsider what you have seen in a new light?
In comparison, I think Robot Monster comes across more like a episode of Twilight Zone... if you really look at the world the movie tries to create, you can't help but think at least a little. All I could think about after those other movies was how bad they were.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe my vision and taste has been warped by being a long-time junkie of Mystery Science Theater 3000, whose skewering of awful movies (including this one) has given me a taste for inept, preachy and/or shoddily-produced cinema, a taste that has further encouraged by the easy availability of bargain-bin collections of old B-movies that are coming out as fast as they can laser images of scratched and dusty cellulose onto Taiwanese silvered-plastic.
Or maybe this movie somehow transcends its absurd cheapness, its wince-inducing stereotypes, its heavy-handed and forced drama, to give us a brief peek into the deep-seated hopes, desires and fears that might have inhabited the fragile psyche of a child growing up in Cold War America.
OK, it's probably me. -
Coffee_in_the_Clink18 February 2020The above quotation makes about as much sense as the rest of the film does. "Robot Monster" is deserving of it's reputation as one of the worst films ever made, but it is so poorly made that it does elicit many laughs throughout, which is what saved me from lumping it with a one-star rating. The translucent plot sees a lone alien living in a cave out in the desert after his race have all but eradicated the human race on Earth, save for a handful of survivors, who all happen to live in this area aswell. Of course they do. The alien is ordered by his superior to track down and exterminate the rest of them, and so the rest of the film pits this gorilla in a deep-sea helmet chasing around after some very irritating people. Cue, Benny Hill tune.
As irritating child actors go, that kid who plays Little Johnny is certainly up there with the worst of them. Running in at a merciful 64 minutes, "Robot Monster" does feel longer, and how about the dialogue? Here is another fine example: "You're so bossy you ought to be milked before you come home at night." I felt sorry for the actor in that gorilla suit. He looks like he is ready to collapse in the heat as he tries to run around. It's absolutely insane. What makes it all the funnier is you can tell that the director and cast were enthusiastic and believed they were making something good. And as for the bubble machine? Words fail me. It's one of the worst. But I did get a few good laugh out of it. And I have seen greater travesties - try "The Beast of Yucca Flats". It makes this deranged film look like "Citizen Kane". -
SexySexySexyMama29 May 2004*spoilers*
okay, i knew the whole story behind the movie, that it was one of the worst movies ever made, and all that. However, i was unprepared for the complete lack of logic or story or the inserts of dinosaurs or any of the myriad of surreal touches added to this movie. I was smacking my head, holding my sides, laughing my ass off, I was having a great time.
but, But, BUT....then they reveal that it is all a little boy's dream.
And while i laughed uproariously at it when i saw that scene, later i thought about it and thought about it, and oh my god, I'm sorry, this movie is the most BRILLIANT depiction of a dream ever captured on film. The surreality, the familiarity and then the veering off into bizzareness, it was truly astonishing. And its a LITTLE BOY'S DREAM, so really, anything goes.
And the REALLY scary thing is, the filmmakers might have actually known what they were doing, since they stuck in the whole "it was just a dream" line, which COMPLETELY JUSTIFIES EVERYTHING we just saw.
I know, its scary. But think about it. We went crazy for David Lynch's Mullholland Drive. Is that any less surreal?
I. LOVED. THIS. MOVIE. On so many levels. Hilarious as a bad b-movie, and then startlingly thought-provoking.
See it, for god's sake, see it. -
sol-kay6 October 2003Little Johnny chases a ball into a cave and when he comes out finds that the world has come to an end in this legendary bad movie of the 1950's.
A bunch of gorillas from outer space wearing deep-sea divers helmets with TV antennas have done in the human race with their "Death Ray" but somehow missed Johnny and his friends and family who are somewhere in the south-western desert of the United States.
Ro-Man is sent by his supreme leader "The Great One" to finish the job but the U-Men as Ro-Man and "The Great One" calls them are too smart and elusive for him to catch and terminate. Also Ro-Man has taken a very strong liking to one of the U-Men, the buxom and beautiful Claudia Barret and wants to keep her alive and all to himself.
Ro-Man comes up with a proposition for the U-Men to show themselves, and if they do he will provide for them a U-Main death, whatever the heck that means. Stay tuned for further story.
Unbelievably bad special effects with stock footage from "One Million Years B.C." added in with acting and dialog so awful that it wouldn't pass mustard in a grade school play makes "Robot Monster" one of the classic bad movies of all times. Which is why it's re-discovered by younger generations of bad movie lovers to watch with fun and enjoyment over the years. Like the classic Walt Disney films are re-discovered by children from generation to generation.
And yes, there's a twist ending in the movie "Robot Monster" that will really shock and surprise you. You'll have to see the movie for yourself to find out what it is. -
Robot Monster is not a good movie, in fact it is absolutely awful and one of the worst of its genre in my view. That said, I do get a novelty value out of it. The sets and costumes are cheap, the editing and photography more so and the special effects are atrocious. The dialogue at best is laughable and if I amputated part of myself for every time I howled with either contempt or unintentional laughter there would nothing left of me, the story is lame and predictable with plot lines that you can drive a (very big) delivery truck through. The direction is okay, and Elmer Bernstein's music is by far the best asset of the movie, but the stock characters(the professor) and terrible acting(including Ro-Man) also help to bring Robot Monster down. In conclusion, has novelty value but it is a mess of a movie. 1/10 Bethany Cox
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Robot Monster starts as the entire human race has been wiped out by Ro-Man (George Barrows), an Ape like alien creature that came to Earth with the intention of using his deadly calcinator ray weapon to wipe out mankind before we become too intelligent & attack them first. Unfortunately for Ro-Man a scientist (John Mylong) managed to create an antidote to the death ray & managed to immunise his family & a few other's, Ro-Man's lead the Great Guidance confirms to Ro-Man that he has failed in his mission & that there are still eight humans alive. Ro-Man is devastated but promises to find & kill the remaining humans, luckily for Ro-Man they only live a few hundred feet away in what looks like a backyard & insist on confronting Ro-Man & try to make him see reason & spare the human race from extinction. Ro-Man becomes strangely attracted to Alice (Claudia Barrett) & starts to question himself & his mission. Perhaps there is hope for the human race as Ro-Man decides he wants to become a human being himself...
Produced & directed by Phil Tucker this film has achieved legendary status as one of the worst films of all time, sure on a technical & conceptual level Robot Monster is as bad as they come but I found it impossible to hate & had good fun watching it although your tolerance for unintentionally hilarious, badly made amateurish sci-fi will ultimately decide how much pleasure you gain from the disaster that is Robot Monster. The first thing to say is that I have no idea why it's called Robot Monster, I mean Ro-Man the alien looks like a hairy fat Gorilla with a diving helmet on, there are no robots featured. The second thing to say is that Robot Monster is one of the most enjoyably bad films I have ever seen, everything about it is just plain awful yet it has a certain innocent charm & a definite entertainment value of sorts. The dialogue is priceless, some of Ro-Man's speeches are hilarious with the 'I cannot, yet I must' one an absolute cracker. The human dialogue is also bad, the script is really badly written with speech that sounds so awkward & strange it's hard not to laugh. Conceptually Robot Monster is awful too, it makes no sense with Ro-Man seemingly having wiped out the entire human race on his own yet he can't find & kill eight survivors despite them showing themselves several times, a fearsome death ray that turns out to be a bubble blowing machine on a table & Ro-Man's sudden apathy towards the remaining human's come from nowhere. The twist ending is annoying & lazy in it's 'it was all a dream' sort of way while the film as a whole has to be seen to be believed. At a mere 61 minutes long at least it's short, it moves along at a a good pace even if none of it makes any sense & I personally found it very entertaining for all the wrong reasons.
Originally shot in 3-D I doubt the process was utilised that much or to great effect, released on home video in various forms from the 2-D version to the 3-D one, from an edited cut that adds more dinosaur footage to a computer colourised version. Robot Monster is as cheap as they come, there are no interior sets or scenes set indoors, the entire film was shot in & around Bronson Canyon in Los Angeles over four days. The camera never really moves & Ro-Man looks very silly with his Gorilla body & diving helmet with TV antenna attached head. There's ample opportunity to see it as well as Tucker isn't afraid of showing him on screen. The direction is awful with glaring continuity & technical mistakes from clothes that change between scenes to special effects of rockets in space where you can see someone's hand holding it.
With a supposed budget of about $16,000 this was shot as quickly & cheaply as possible & has a amateurish charm that I enjoyed & found hard to dislike. The dinosaur footage was edited from One Million B.C. (1940) & The Lost Continent (1941) as was the earthquake scenes. The acting is atrociously bad with the entire cast playing it dead seriously which makes it even camper & funnier.
Robot Monster is the stuff of legends, the winner of so many bad film accolades you would think it would be impossible to like it but I did & I enjoyed all of it's 61 minutes. One of the most entertaining films I've seen in a while although make sure you know what to expect before you watch it & just enjoy it for what it is. -
planktonrules13 February 2006I love PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE and so I was hoping I would also love ROBOT MONSTER because it has a reputation for being one of the cheesiest and silliest sci-fi movies ever made. My expectations were high--so high that I was really disappointed by the movie itself. Yes, it was indeed bad BUT it was not the "so inept it was funny" bad, but more the "I gotta turn this thing off because I can feel my brain dissolving" bad. The IDEA behind ROBOT MONSTER is great--some guy wearing a gorilla suit and a diving helmet terrorizing the last inhabitants of Earth (and trying to grab some nookie along the way). The problem is after a short time, it just got REALLY REALLY REALLY boring. And, even laughing at the stupidity of the film gets old--and you just want it to end.
So my final verdict--bad, but not "funny" bad--just bad. -
bkoganbing26 July 2008Having also seen Plan 9 From Outer Space in the past couple of days and writing a review of it, I'm in a better position to compare it to Robot Monster. The only question I have is, will its director Phil Tucker ever get a movie made about him?
In terms of special effects it makes Ed Wood's masterpiece look like it had a Cecil B. DeMille budget. In fact there aren't really any special effects to speak of. Some stock footage of some dinosaurs from One Million, BC and some electronic equipment that may have been borrowed from Universal that might have been in storage from its Frankenstein films.
But the makeup for the Robot Monster, called Ro-Man? You've got to hand it to Tucker. They put an actor named George Barrows in a gorilla suit and instead of a head, used a foggy diving bell, the better probably to hide poor Barrows who must have been cringing with embarrassment and was grateful no one had to see him. He was the lucky member of the cast.
Ro-Man was sent to Earth to destroy mankind and he's succeeded all right in destroying all, but six members of humanity, scientist John Mylong and his family and Mylong's assistant George Nader. He spends the rest of the film trying to get rid of them which would seem easy enough, but he can't quite close the deal.
Especially when he gets a look at Claudia Barrett playing the older daughter. He's fascinated with her, especially with her breasts. Obviously Ro-Man women must be flat-chested where he comes from, he's never seen a rack before. Poor monster, just needed a trip to Hooters.
What's really sad is that this was the only work that blacklisted Selena Royle could get after she refused to go before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Take a good look at her career credits and that she was brought down to this is a real tragedy.
Robot Monster has one of the funniest of creatures coming out of Fifties science fiction and that's saying something because the Fifties churned out some real winners. Still I have a special place for the gorilla bubble-head from space. -
Hitchcoc14 April 2006This is certainly an amusing film. Of course, I had heard so much about it. I watched a few minutes with my son a couple years ago. I just remember endless scenes of the alien in the gorilla suit wandering through a rocky canyon, looking for people he wants to destroy. He never seems to get anywhere and the fact that he catches any of them is due to their clumsiness and carelessness than anything else. The whole thing starts with a picnic with a table cloth spread over a bunch of rocky debris. We find out, after the boy is hit on the head, that the world has been annihilated by the people of Ro-Man. We have this collection of people, thrown together. A scientist, who has developed a serum that has saved them from the fate of the other earthlings. We have a sensual young thing with a women's lib attitude. A manly man who eventually begins a relationship with the woman who initially abhors him. Then a boy and a girl, a couple of sappy fifties kids who don't listen to anyone. Despite the dangers, people come and go, putting themselves in Ro-Man's path. He lives in a cave with a bubble machine and a TV antenna. He is in contact with his superior who chastises and taunts him throughout the movie. He, of course, falls in love with the young woman, who is now out in the rocks, having an affair and eventually becoming married to the buff young man. Eventually the young girl goes out and gets herself killed. The script is pointless, but like so many aliens, it is the desire to mate with an earth woman that gets the gorilla/space man in the end. It was beauty that killed the beast. Oh, wait. that was another gorilla.
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This is considered along with PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE one of the worst movies of all time, and it's known for being one of the strangest sci-fi movies ever made. Everything in this movie is bad. The sets are very cheap, the alien costume (that is just a guy in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet on his head) is just ridicolous to look at, the acting (including by George Nader in his first known movie) is laughably bad and the soundtrack, despite is from the great Elmer Bernstein, is almost always repetitive. The best thing (and the only one that I liked) is that there are lots of stock footage too, taken from the following movies: ONE MILLION B.C., LOST CONTINENT, FLIGHT TO MARS and INVASION USA (the 1952 one, not to be confused with the 1985 Chuck Norris one). In substance this is one of those bad movies that you should watch at least once in your life for getting a kick out of it.
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savitareng14 June 2006As a commercial diver, I'm so tired of hearing that the monsters head was a "diving helmet". Stop saying that!
If you look carefully it was a helmet used by the moon men (not Commando Codys) in the Republic Serial, Radar Men from the Moon (1952)
see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045064/
It was modified by adding the antennas, and now belongs to super collector Bob Burns and can be seen in his basement collection.
see: http://bobburns.mycottage.com/album/basement1.htm
It never was a diving helmet, just a left over prop from the republic serials a year or two before. -
chris_gaskin12323 February 2005Some say Robot Monster is one of the worst films to be made. It is certainly bad, but enjoyable.
Ro-Man has been sent to Earth to destroy the last six people and spends most of the movie attempting to do this. He plans to take over the Earth with, amongst other things, dinosaurs. He also has a bubble machine with him. He falls in love with a woman in the group of survivors which complicates things and he doesn't succeed with his plans in the end. All this turns out be the boy, who is one of the survivors, dreaming.
Ro-Man is played by a man in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet over his head. The dinosaurs and enlarged lizards we see are stock footage from The Lost Continent (1951) and the usual stock footage from One Million BC (1940). We also see some stock rocket footage from Flight To Mars (1951).
The score is by the late Elmer Bernstein (The Magnificent Severn) and is quite good. Most of the cast are unknowns, apart from George Nader.
Robot Monster is essential viewing, especially for bad movie and sci-fi fans like myself. So bad it's good.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5. -
jonathan-57727 March 2009Hey, it's actually kind of liberal, which is noteworthy in this era of unrelenting sci-fi red baiting. There's an anti-war message up front, and the humanism gets laid on so thick towards the end that even Ro-Man gets in on the fun...although in his furry hands it's just an excuse to cop a feel. In any other context the homage to King Kong would be obvious, but it's really hard to concentrate on all that given the antennaed deep-sea diving helmet, the hyperactive bubble machine, and the Platonic dialogue with the Great One (no, not Wayne Gretzky) in the Two-Way Space Dresser on the other side of the cave. The MOUTH of the cave, of course - if they went any deeper they would have had to rent some lights. The Hu-man sequences don't stint on fun: John Mylong can't stop whacking brick walls with his fist, and watch the actors trying to keep a straight face during the love-scene mime routine. But nothing beats Ro-Man's final soliloquy on the Must-Cannot gap, not to mention the endless shots of him mincing around the canyon in an apparent constant effort to just keep his balance.