Robot Monster (1953)

How Can Something So Bad Feel So Good?

This movie's tag as one of the worst ever made is worth paying attention to, but it's a bit misleading, too. As with those other worst movies - most notably Ed Wood's "Plan Nine" - such a grandiose insult tells you there must be something going on to make the thing worth talking about at all.

Yes, its monster, the Ro-Man, is put together from a bad ape costume and a deep sea diving helmet. Yes, it looks like it was shot on some empty hillside in the San Fernando Valley, its only set being the partial concrete foundation left over from some building removed years before. And yes, the inserted sequences of stop-motion clay dinosaurs and real lizards make for a baffling kind of narrative non-sequitur. But, despite how cheaply it's done, there's a certain . . . care . . . put into this movie's production.

First of all, its cast features George Nader. He didn't have much of a career yet, but he was easily as good as any of the era's other matinee idols. It also features Selena Royale, a perfectly respectable contract player who's probably best remembered for her role in the MGM musical, "The Harvey Girls." And the movie boasts a musical score by Elmer Bernstein who'd later receive Oscar nominations for his work on 11 movies, winning for "Thoroughly Modern Millie." Certainly it would have been easier to persuade lesser talents to sign on to the job, no matter how badly these needed the work.*

And then there's the story: not great by any measure, but it suggests a little more thought and effort than the project required. The Ro-Man has been sent to earth to hunt down our planet's last survivors after some sort of death ray has wiped out the rest of the population. There are the requisite references you'd expect from any Cold War monster movie: the Ro-Man's blind obedience to his planet's collective goals and his resistance to individual thought. But then he starts to fall for the movie's heroine and to second-guess the wisdom of his leader's orders. OK: it doesn't exactly give the story depth, but it does make the movie a little bit easier to watch.

There's lots of really good gratuitous sexual titillation, too. At one point, the Ro-Man rips the bodice off our heroine's dress and it comes dangerously close to making the movie feel more adult than was probably the original intent. But, best of all, George Nader spends most of the movie stripped to the waist (with no explanation for why he needs to lose his shirt, except that his torso is pretty amazing, even by today's standards). While this kind of exploitation isn't unusual in low-grade fodder for the drive-in crowd, here it feels oddly organic to the story; it's weird and cheap and somehow perfect. It's as if the man behind the movie (Producer-Director Phil Tucker) was teasing his own interests, rather than forcing into his feature something he expected only to wow his audience (like that weird dinosaur footage).

Robot Monster is never going to be remembered as a great movie. But there's something at its core that makes it worth remembering, all the same. It's a strange and wonderful example of how the right kind of bad work can create something (kind of) horribly good.



*Bernstein's career was still young. Royale's career had come to a screeching halt when she refused to appear before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. And Nader's career wasn't going anywhere at this point. Ironically, it was the commercial success of this movie that made Universal sit up and take notice of the man's gifts (before they allegedly sold him out to Confidential Magazine to protect their bigger investment in another gay property, Rock Hudson, who was more than willing to lie about his sexual orientation, a crime Nader apparently never committed). February 2, 2008

THIS ONE WILL HAVE YOU SCRATCHING YOUR HEAD!? FUNNY STUFF

This movie falls into the "so bad it's good" category. The filmmakers didn't even have the money for an entire Gorilla suit so.......lets use a deep sea diving helmet for it's head!? This is still a pretty funny watch. April 27, 2007

Saturday Matinee 1953

"Robot Monster" (1953) is certainly horrible when compared to a high budget SiFi film like "Forbidden Planet" (1956). The plot is silly and the special effects laughable. I almost turned it off the first time I watched it. I'm glad I didn't as this film is really an endearing bit of American nostalgia. It's a 1950s Saturday afternoon matinee film meant for kids. So just picture riding your bicycle down to your local cinema on a sunny summer afternoon. You and your friends plop down some quarters for tickets to Robot Monster, buy some popcorn, and make your way into the darken theater. A kid with an imagination can transform a campy actor in a monkey suit into Ro-Man the monster from outer space! Watched in this context the film is a blast. Director Phil Tucker really deserves more credit than he was given in his day. April 26, 2007

Bad Movies Don't Get Any Better Than This!

Phil Tucker's magnum opus, "Robot Monster", ranks among the best bad movies ever made.
The plot is incoherent, the acting ranges from bad to awful and the eponymous "Robot Monster" is a guy in a gorilla suit with a tin foil covered diving helmet who communicates with his home planet using a bubble machine.
Originally released in 3-D, this DVD uses a good 2-D print and the transfer is pretty good.
This is a "must have" for fans of bad movies. September 19, 2006

Ro-man Hollandaise -- Yummy!

Though some fans of "bad" cinema often put 1953's ROBOT MONSTER on the same tier with PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959), it honestly doesn't even come close to reaching the heights of inspired ineptitude attained by Ed Wood's magnum opus. Still, ROBOT MONSTER is an entertaining so-bad-it's-good flick in its own right.

The last six remaining humans on Earth resist attacks by Ro-man, an extraterrestrial who looks something like a gorilla wearing a cheap diving helmet. Receiving orders from his superior via 1950s consumer electronics that emit, of all things, soap bubbles, Ro-man's job is to clear out all intelligent life on Earth so that his "people" can come inhabit the planet themselves. Unfortunately for Ro-man, he finds it impossible to carry out his orders after he falls in love with an Earth girl, and it's all downhill for him from there.

This ludicrous tissue-thin plot is full of gaping holes, and the badly executed scene transitions and various stock-footage inserts of fighting reptiles and animated dinosaurs are humorously befuddling. But when it is revealed at the end of the film that all was simply the dream of a science-fiction-crazed young boy, the whole dish seems a little more palatable.

Some critics have read the film as an allegory of life in occupied Europe during World War II. Ro-man, it is claimed, represents a Nazi soldier simply carrying out the orders of his Hitler-like commander, and the surviving humans can be viewed as living an Anne Frank-like existence in their energy-encompassed hideout. But the obvious weaknesses of the plot, the glaringly technical mistakes, and the bargain-basement production values make it hard to believe that the filmmakers were astute enough to attempt allegorical storytelling. Any similarity to real situations or to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Believe it or not, the music for ROBOT MONSTER is actually pretty good (that is, "good" good, not "bad" good). It was composed by the late Elmer Bernstein, who went on to score cinematic greats like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960), TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962), GHOST BUSTERS (1984), and MY LEFT FOOT (1989), to name but a few. Perhaps it is the efforts of the talented Mr. Bernstein that prevents ROBOT MONSTER from reaching the same level of achievement as Wood's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE?

ROBOT MONSTER may not be the best "bad" film ever made, but for aficionados of the awful and connoisseurs of the crass, it's not to be missed.

While it's not in the original 3-D--yes, ROBOT MONSTER was filmed in old-school 3-D--the DVD from Image Entertainment offers the highest-quality consumer copy of the film to date, and the price that amazon charges for it is hard to beat. August 8, 2006

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