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
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: Pan & Scan, 1.33:1
Running Time: 62 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-10-10
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Image Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Robot Monster
Movie Review: How Can Something So Bad Feel So Good?
Summary: 3 Stars
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).
Summary of Robot Monster
Incredible! Unbelievable! Told the untamed way! Ro-Man, a sex-starved robot monster (dressed in gorilla suit and diving helmet), has destroyed all of humanity with the exception of a small band of survivors. It's up to these last brave souls to re-populate the human race and to destroy the mighty Ro-Man and his commander, The Great Guidance. A Golden Turkey Award winner!Phil 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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