After last weeks appalling movie choice, Reds & Blues, I was about ready to give up on this project altogether. So this week, I want to go back to my roots, and remind myself of why I even bothered to start this whole thing up in the first place; to watch some really dodgy old Sci Fi! Robot Monster, from 1953, unenviably finds itself of my list of movies thanks to it's legacy as potentially one of the worst movies ever made, and also scratches my itch for 1950's old Sci Fi movies so maybe it will rekindle my passion to watch some of the most awful movies ever produced, or maybe it will finally finish me off for good? Who knows?
Johnny (Gregory Moffett) wakes up to discover a man in a gorilla suit wearing a diving helmet with antennas... sorry, uh Ro-Man (George Barrows) has wiped out all life on Earth except for 8 people. Fleeing the cave where Ro-Man has made his home, Johnny re-connects with The Professor, George (John Mylong), his wife Martha (Selena Royle) and daughters Alice (Claudia Barrett), and Carla (Pamela Paulson) where Ro-Man threatens them with death via a viewscreen thing they have installed if he ever finds where they are hiding. Meanwhile Roy (George Nader) is apparently a big deal and still alive and after eavesdropping on Ro-Man getting a bollocking from The Great Guidance (also George Barrows) for not wiping out all the humans yet, he returns to Professors camp to reunite with the survivors. Roy reveals that thanks to a serum from the Professor, 8 of them have survived Ro-Man's death ray including Jason and McCloud (who are never seen) and they plan to re-wire the view screen to contact Jason and McCloud with hopes to evacuate Earth with them to the Space Platform. However after trying for 2 days that fails and Jason and McCloud take off without them only to be wiped out along with the Space Platform by the Great Guidance... after a brief exchange with Ro-Man, Ro-Man agrees to meet Alice at 'the ruins' but Roy and George are dead set against the idea and in the resulting squabble Johnny runs away. Going to see Ro-Man, big mouth Johnny tells him everything about the serum and it's protective properties before flapping and running away. Alice and Roy go to look for Johnny, but he makes his way back to the compound before they find him, and for some reason Alice and Roy decide to get cosy in a field instead... they then go back to the compound and ask the Professor to marry them... ?! But Ro-Man decides that's enough of that shit and after going for a walk with the Newlyweds, Carla is caught by Ro-Man and sort of bearhugged to death. Later; Roy and Alice are getting very cosy in the bushes when Ro-Man shows up and in the resulting fight Roy I think falls off the edge of cliff? Ro-Man kidnaps Alice and takes her back to his cave, after falling in love with her and is unable to kill her. Johnny, the Professor and Martha hatch a plan to rescue Alice by using Johnny as bait to lure out Ro-Man, meanwhile despite being threatened to finish the job by the Great Guidance, Ro-Man is still not able to kill Alice. When Johnny and the others arrive at the cave, Ro-man attacks Johnny but unable to get the job done, the Great Guidance kills Ro-Man and then summons "Prehistoric Reptiles" to take over the planet before seemingly destroying Earth by ripping it apart, but then suddenly; Johnny wakes up and everything was just a fever dream caused by him banging his head... or... was it...
WOW. This was shit. I had a feeling 5 minutes in that something wasn't right. Johnny went to sleep then all of a sudden wakes up and there has been a post-apocalyptic nuclear war that has wiped out all of mankind all in the space of him taking a nap in a field? But OH NO it was all just a dream! I hate that bullshit 'get-out-jail-free' approach to finishing a movie. I know it's the 50's and it probably wasn't as big a cliché back then as it is now but it's such a bad way of doing things. Like, great, wow. Why should I care about the last 60 minutes you put us through then?
Yeah so this was really not very good at all. These movies live and die on your lead monster being really convincing and impressive enough to be genuinely scary (if only by 50's standards) and I felt that Ro-Man really wasn't. I sort of get what they were going for with the gorilla suit and the helmet; Ro-Man being some kind of evolved form of human life with super strength e.t.c. but... it just looked really silly. To put it in comparison; the Phantom from Phantom from Space looked silly yes but at the end when he took his suit off, he genuinely looked unsettling. I know that was 20 something odd years later but they at least put some effort in to make it look different. Here your main monster was just a man in 2 different costumes slapped together lolloping about like a weird drunk bloke?
The acting was pretty ropey really, and nobody really stood out to me as doing a decent job. John Brown as the voice of Ro-Man and the Great Guidance just sounded really wooden and robotic and not the least bit threatening. All of the main cast were very vanilla and generic. Even the Professor with what I thought was a fake German accent, until I discovered he was native Austrian, was pretty unconvincing and at times unintentionally amusing. Especially with his attempts at grandiose speeches to Ro-Man.
The special effects were mostly pretty poor and the parts with the rocket and the Space Platform were downright amateur. There was a lot of colour inversion going on to demonstrate when Ro-Man was using the death ray, and they really liked that one scene of rubber dinosaurs rolling around that it took up almost as much screen time as Carla - one of the surviving humans did! It had it's spots that were actually quite impressive; near the end when the Great Guidance is destroying stuff, that looked alright, if not a bit messy, but aside from that, it was all very cheap and very budget, even by 1950's standards and destroyed any attempt to make the film genuine.
And then finally the plot. I have no idea why anyone thought it was a good idea to shoehorn in a Roy and Alice romance. It made no fucking sense. Went nowhere. Was a completely un-necessary curveball and did nothing to develop the storyline. I was a bit like "uhh... wow this is really happening..." as I watched it unfold on film, and in a few short minutes Roy dies anyway?! Aside from that major fucking death blow, the whole 'but it was only a dream' climax also killed the movie. Just keep it credible. Have the balls to do a film where mankind gets wiped out and nobody survives. You don't have to do a 'get out of jail' finish! Maybe it's a 50's attitude thing?
I can now fully understand why, or how, Robot Monster earns it's spot on the coveted "Worst Movies ever" list because heavens above, it fell at almost every conceivable hurdle: unconvincing monster, wooden vanilla acting, awful amateur special effects and an absolute nonsense plot. But I would be lying if I said I didn't at least enjoy it a little bit, because I did, but it was for all the wrong reasons. I was mildly bemused at the marriage stuff and I genuinely followed the plot with a bit of interest. At least it had a plot unlike that movie I watched last week. And it might have been a totally trash 1950's Sci-Fi that rightly belongs on a list of the worst movies ever made but it did remind me that I can actually enjoy this project, and not... endure it... like I was doing last week, and for that; it can have a star. 1 out of 5.
