When you think about the worst movies ever made, what films usually come to mind? Plan 9 From Outer Space? Manos: Hands of Fate? Titanic? All good choices, but no bad movie list can be complete without 1953's delightfully inept Robot Monster. This is quintessential bad, dear reader, maybe the worst in the bunch. Hell, director Phil Tucker attempted suicide after critics panned Robot Monster (not really...he actually attempted suicide because he was clinically depressed). What makes Robot Monster so wonderfully, gloriously, transcendently bad, you ask? Let's start with the film's villain, Ro-Man.
He is ostensibly the "robot monster" promised in the title, but as you can see while he does appear monsterous he is, in fact, nothing more than a gorilla with a diving helmet for a head. The movie's exciting poster features a sinister skull-face lurking beneath the helmet's glass, but in the actual movie Ro-man's face resembles nothing more than a featureless mannequin head. There is nothing robot-ish about Ro-Man. There's also nothing remotely scary about him. I mean, c'mon, his communication device runs on bubbles. Bubbles! It is called the Billion Bubble Machine in the credits. That's right. The Billion Bubble Machine gets a credit.Other reasons Robot Monster is a complete cinematic failure: non-sensical use of stock footage from old dinosaur movies; entire film is set in a rock quarry and the desolate, uninteresting environs; ear-piercing sound effects; seizure inducing strobe effects; cheesy 3-D tomfoolery; antagonist is a gorilla wearing a space helmet!!!
"Err-or! Err-or! Err-or!"
Our story begins at a charming afternoon picnic in a rock quarry. Johnny and his chubby sister Carla are playing amongst the sharp debris, dank caves, and steep cliffs when they come across two men--Roy and The Professor--who claim to be archaeologists. Whatever they are, Johnny doesn't hesitate to hop onto The Professor's lap. After a few minutes of lap-sitting and a simplistic explanation of what archaeologists do, Mother (apparently she isn't important enough for an actual name) and Alice (Johnny and Carla's older sister) retrieve the youngsters and everyone takes a nap on the cold, hard ground of the abandoned rock quarry. Now that's good sleepin'!
Johnny can't stop thinking about The Professor's lap though (heck, the boy needs a male role model in his life--he laments his dead father just before nap time) and while his family sleeps he heads back to cave where he first met The Professor and his handsome sidekick. As Johnny approaches the cave, he is struck by lightning (I think?). He collapses and two lizards engage in mortal combat. No, really. A baby alligator with a fan taped to its back and some other reptile are thrown onto a poorly constructed set, which I guess has been created to make them appear huge and menacing, where they proceed to, as the kids used to and celebri-chef Bobby Flay currently says, "throw down." It is the kind of scene no longer possible in this Let's Be Respectful of Animals' Feelings world we live in today. Thanks, PETA!
Anyway, the lizards brawl (as do some triceratopses--???) and we are suddenly thrust into the distant future (I guess?) in which The Professor is now father to Johnny, Carla, and Alice, Roy is still the handsome sidekick, and they are the last living people on Earth. Where is everybody else? Well, they've all been killed in an alien invasion. The invaders? Well, it's actually just the one invader, Ro-man, and he, um, actually, uh, lives on the other side of the rock quarry. WHA??? Yes, Ro-man has single-handedly eradicated every human being on Earth, yet his leader, The Grand Guidance, is incensed that five people still remain. Really? As far as I'm concerned, Ro-man did a pretty good job. I mean, he killed everyone on the planet and burned every city to the ground by himself. What did you do, Grand Guidance? Oh yeah. You sat at your view screen like a turd grumbling orders, belittling Ro-Man and blowing bubbles. Jerk!
The Professor and his family are impervious to Ro-Man's Calcinator death ray, which as far as I can tell emanates from Ro-Man's body, having been injected with a serum that makes it impossible for them to get sick, so Ro-Man decides he will have to murder them with his bare hands. Only problem is he's fallen in love with Alice who unbeknowst to him has married Roy in a ceremony officiated by her father, The Professor. After the wedding, Roy and Alice head off into the wild for their honeymoon, even though up to this point The Professor has forbidden anyone to leave the electrified bunker they call home. Carla follows and is strangled to death by Ro-Man. Then Ro-Man punches Roy in the face a few times and runs off with Alice. Roy dies (???), but not before he tells The Professor, Mother, and Johnny what Ro-Man has done. Johnny comes up with a foolproof plan to save his older sister, Ro-Man attempts to rape Alice, and The Grand Guidance, who has grown sick and tired of Ro-Man's ineptitude, shoots lightning out of his fingers, killing Ro-Man, Johnny, and everybody else. The lizards fight some more. The triceratopses get into it again. The earth splits open and crumbles...
(Being the dutiful host that I am, I must now warn you, readers, that the section following the photograph of Ro-Man and Alice engaged in an interplanetary slap fight contains spoilers galore. Read on if you'd like to know what happens in Robot Monster's thrilling final act or stop here, watch the film for yourself, and return for my expert [and, let's face it, hilarious!] analysis.)
Then Johnny wakes up. That's right...it's all been a dream. A horrible, poorly written dream. The Professor, Roy, and Johnny's family find him, woozy and bleeding, on the ground outside of a cave. He babbles something about looking out for Ro-Man, everyone laughs, and Johnny slips into a coma. Nah. I'm kidding. Johnny's fine. Ro-Man does lumber out of the cave though...three times! I thought there was something wrong with my copy of the film (oh yeah, I own this bitch!), but I think now that Phil Tucker was simply giving his audience one last spooky 3-D effect before sending them home to lament the hour and half they'd just wasted.
So Robot Monster is nothing more than the nightmare of a little boy who has been struck by lightning and left for dead in an abandoned rock quarry. OK, I'll buy it, but let's take a closer look at this dream, shall we?
In the opening scenes of Robot Monster, we are struck over the head repeatedly with the fact that Johnny has a wild imagination and enough creativity to power a largish Mid-Western city for nearly three days (that's pretty good if you've read the same studies on children's creativity as a renewable energy source that I have), yet the best extraterrestrial invader he can dream up is a gorilla in a space helmet. I am aware of the fact that we cannot control our dreams (though I did have a friend in high school who swore to having at least three lucid dreams in which he was the master of his own fantastical dream fate), but I could do better than a gorilla in a space helmet with half of my brain removed.
And why does Johnny's dream include a mushy love story? What nine year old boy has a dream that includes a romantic subplot for his older sister? Again, dreams are completely random. In reality, the dream's love story would've been between Johnny and Alice or Johnny and Roy or, worse yet, Johnny and Mother. That's what happens in dreams: uncomfortable shit. Not in Robot Monster though. Johnny not only dreams about his sister finding true love with The Professor's handsome sidekick, but he also dreams them up a sex scene (albeit one that occurs after a fade to black).
The dream angle gives the lizard and tricertops fights and Carla's murder a weird kind of logic, but for the most part the movie doesn't work. And that's why Robot Monster is so damn memorable! It's a mess, but a wonderful one. Robot Monster deserves its place among the worst films of all time and Ro-Man will live on forever as Earth's lamest visitor from outer space.
