Robot Monster

"You look like a pooped-out pinwheel!"

—Little Johnny

Robot Monster is an abysmally bad little 1950s garbage can flick with a guy (or a couple of 'em) wandering around in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet—with antenna, no less. He is called Ro-Man, and he says everything in a grand and haughty manner, urging humans to choose the path of an easy death (as opposed to a rollicking good time of a painful, awful one). There are only about six people he left on Earth, as Ro-Man has obliterated them all with his "Calcinator Ray," and five of them are hidden behind a fence that has little electrical sparks like a Tesla coil sideways.

One must admit that there is a rather surrealistic—though, as noted, laughably bad—aspect to Robot Monster. Though our putative alien invader—who, besides wearing a diving helmet and milling about at the mouth of a cave with a wooden table of spare radio parts and a bubble machine—we do have some scenes (stock footage ripped from better films), of giant finned reptiles doing Flash Gordon serial tabletop alien world battles, and some borrowed-from-somewhere stop-motion triceratops and other horned beasties going at it in Harryhausen wonderment. We have a video conference call of burned-out cities, and we have Ro-Man (or maybe his Commander) in a nifty series of shots beginning at nipple level. Dead on, and in that booming, echoey voice, Ro-Man points his alien ape fingers at the viewer, and lightning bolts flash forth. Apparently, Robot Monster was originally in 3D, the D perhaps standing for "Dud," because this movie is one in every dimension.

But let's back up.

The film starts out with little Johnny (Gregory Moffett) walking around in a space helmet almost more convincing than the one worn by Ro-Man. He marches to the opening of the Ro-Cave, where he meets the space pilots Jason and McCloud (who soon depart in a rocket ship on a fishing line with a sparkler in the back, only to have it detoured by the Ro—can I just call him Ro? Ro knows!—Calcinator on live Facetime conference call). Little Johnny then sees a huge blast of outer space fart fire and we discover he lives on an encampment with Dad the Professor (John Mylong), Mom (Selena Royle), Alice (Claudia Barrett), and Little Carla (Pamela Paulson), and later Roy (George Nader). These are all the Last Remaining Humans on Planet Earth. And none of 'em, even The Professor, seem the mental match for a gorilla in a diving helmet.

The Professor has developed a serum that protected his family from the Calcinator—too bad he didn't think to share with the rest of us. (To borrow a line from Krug Stillo, "Cripes, didn't they teach ya' nothing in reform school?") The encampment is surrounded by Tesla coil electrical cracklers, the rays of which prevent the Ro-Manster from seeing them. Later, they are joined by Carla, who does some Bettie Page 1953 Women in Bondage shots when the Ro-Man becomes Ro-Mantic. I know, I know.

Nothing about this picture is any good. Except, as noted by some reviewers, the 3D. On the other hand, it's immensely entertaining wonky mental fluff pulled from a bad comic book, and brought to YOU, the discerning cult movie enthusiast, by poor old producer/director Phil Tucker (RM was written by Wyott Ordung), a guy that didn't even get Johnny Depp to star in a biopic about him. (He did threaten to commit suicide at the Knickerbocker Hotel, according to Wikipedia, realizing that his "career in films was over," but we don't like pawing through the dirty laundry of an artist, an auteur. Even if he was, by technical standards, a failure. However you define that term.)

We'll leave you with just a little taste of the Ro-Man's interstellar wisdom:

I cannot — yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do "must" and "cannot" meet? Yet I must — but I cannot!

It's like something out of Shakespeare—if Shakespeare wrote shit Fifties monster flicks with giant fishbowl-headed outer space gorillas.

Robot Monster

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