Robot Monster
by Phil Tucker
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Claudia Barrett, George Nader, Gregory Moffett, John Mylong, Selena RoyleDirector: Phil Tucker
Brand: Image Entertainment
Cinematographer: Jack Greenhalgh
Producer: Phil Tucker
Editor: Merrill G. White
Producer: Al Zimbalist
Producer: Alan Winston
Writer: Wyott Ordung
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 66 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-10-10
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Image Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Robot Monster
Movie Review: The Great One
Summary: 5 Stars
There's a moment in "Robot Monster" where every first-time viewer is kin: a lizard with a fin glued to its back jumps onto another lizard, in what is meant to represent the titanic struggle of two dinosaurs. Since this has nothing to do with anything that happened before, the novice can only watch in slack-jawed wonder, asking "What the...?"
"Robot Monster" is awash with stunning moment likes this, which may be why the trailer boasts it is "baffling." But there is the glimmer of a story.
Earth has been devastated by aliens using the calcinator death ray. The handful of survivors (and the planet's only hope) so far are immune to the ray, but are available through a viewscreen for regular taunting by the solitary Earthbound "Ro-Man" (his nom de guerre). He in turn is regularly berated by "the leader of all Ro-Men," the "Great One," sort of a psychotic nanny type who blurts his orders from across the void of space. We know it's space because of the dog food we see -- or are those asteroids?
We know they're aliens because they sport gorilla-suit bodies, and
diving helmets topped with antennae. They speak always while flailing their bulky simian arms, and in booming, stentorian threats, virtually every utterance a quotable gem. This lends a vaguely Shakespearian tone to the proceedings.
The Great One harps on the Earth Ro-Man to finish the job, while waving a violin bow. Ro-Man is willing to kill everyone in the protected compound, but something new and mysterious stirs in him when he views the professor's daughter, Al-Ice (as Ro-Man says it). This becomes one of the dramatic conflicts, and inspires the invader's touching, burbled soliloquy:
"Yes! To be like the Hu-Man! To laugh, to feel, to want. Why is this not in the Plan?...Where on the graph do 'must' and 'cannot' meet? I must, yet I cannot."
There's something compelling in all this; even my young, impressionable kids have enjoyed it several times. Every actor has something dazzlingly silly to say in all seriousness. How many movies offer a monster that entertains just by ambling up and down scrub-covered hills? "Robot Monster" is one film that will reward you just as much on the twentieth viewing as on the first.
Oh, and what about the lizards? All is revealed in the end.
Summary of Robot Monster
ROBOT MONSTER - DVD MoviePhil Tucker's Robot Monster has rightfully earned a place in the pantheon of bad movies over the years, and for good reason--it makes anything done by Ed Wood look like an Orson Welles masterpiece. Picture, if you will, a gorilla in a diving helmet (the Ro-Man) who wipes out all of the Earth's population except for one family (the Hu-Mans), whom he terrorizes through the rest of the film. From his headquarters in a Bronson Canyon cave, he communicates with his superiors via World War II surplus radio gear and a Lawrence Welk-style bubble machine, then shambles around the woods looking for his quarry. The plot of this post-holocaust sci-fi nonsense is hardly worth going into past that point, except to say that it's stupendously, staggeringly awful filmmaking. It's even more incredible when you consider that the writers and director undoubtedly believed that they were making a deep, serious, grave statement about the horrors of nuclear war... and wound up with several reels of celluloid flotsam. Any self-respecting fan of bad cinema who hasn't seen this notorious wreck of a movie isn't worth his or her salt. Poor Phil Tucker--when Robot Monster was released, it received such a thorough shellacking that he tried to commit suicide. Tucker failed, though, and went on to make the even less comprehensible Broadway Jungle and the marginally better Cape Canaveral Monsters. --Jerry Renshaw
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