No Good Very bad movies 4: The one that's worse than Plan 9

 

Title: Robot Monster

What Year?: 1953

Classification: Ripoff

Rating: Dear God WHY??!! (1/3)

 

If there’s one thing I’ve set out to prove with this feature, it’s that I do have a sense of what makes a really bad movie. Most of the time, I’m the one  defending infamous films from the mob, and I will admit there have been times when I have done this to be rhetorical or simply contrary (see Troll 2). The flipside is that when I have really come down hard on a film, I have really, really meant it. This time around, I offer a test case, a notorious film I have known about from my youth but only watched in full during the time I have been doing movie reviews. While I won’t pretend the outcome was ever in much doubt, I hope to show a little more of the thought process that goes into my reviews, including what I choose to review at all. Here is Robot Monster, the movie that literally put a diving helmet on a gorilla.

Our story begins with two children playing in a desert landscape where they shouldn’t be even if they were properly attended. There’s a boy obsessed with playing “space man”, a girl who wants to play house, and their big sister Alice, who in a more typical movie would be playing their mother. Along the way, they meet an archeologist and his handsome assistant, and a strange creature named Ro-Man who looks like an ape except for a helmet with a pair of TV aerials attached. The last character is the vanguard of an alien invasion, who handily destroys the vast majority of the human population with god-like powers that apparently include summoning stop-motion dinosaurs. Fortunately, it turns out the archeologist has the combined science-magic powers of Scotty, Tony Stark and Rick Sanchez, nullifying Ro-Man’s death rays with a serum. The mop-up becomes a stalemate as Ro-Man tries to draw out the survivors. But he’s an ape at heart, and he wants Alice for himself!

Robot Monster was the first film directed by low budget/ independent filmmaker Phil Tucker, from a script by the apparently accomplished (and real) Wyott Ordung. The film was reportedly shot for $16,000 over a period of 2 weeks. Among other cost-cutting measures, a robot called for in the script was portrayed by George Barrows in a gorilla suit with an improvised helmet added. Other effects were borrowed/ plagiarized from the movies One Million BC (see When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth) and The Lost Continent. Despite its low budget, the film mustered a reasonably high-profile cast, led by Claudia Barrett of White Heat as Alice and George Nader as Roy, with blacklisted actress Selena Royle as a matron identified only as “Mother”. Music for the film was provided by Elmer Bernstein (see… Heavy Metal?). On release, the film earned an estimated $1 million dollars, despite (if not because of) very poor reviews. The film was subsequently featured in The Golden Turkey Awards and Mystery Science Theater 3000, with the former listing it alongside Plan 9 From Outer Space as “worst movie ever made”. In later life, Nader became an author and LGBT activist. Barrett died in April 2021 at age 91.

For my experiences, I first heard of this one from the Medved brothers’ Golden Turkey Awards, which in hindsight really shouldn’t have been in the children’s/ YA section at the library. I genuinely loved the absurdity of Ro-Man, but never had an interest in watching the film. I finally got to it around the time I reviewed Plan 9. What stood out by comparison was the incomprehensible self-seriousness of the present film. With Ed Wood’s self-styled epic, you can at least believe that he knew it was “bad” and still forged ahead to make a decent point. Here, the production all but screams to be taken seriously, especially through the Bernstein score, without at any point justifying its pretensions. The ultimate outcome was that I simply couldn’t work with this one. Once I decided to come back for a rematch, I took the further step of two viewings, first of the MST3K presentation and then of the “straight” cut. At the end of it all, I still find myself wavering on how to rate this and what to say.

A common denominator with this kind of movie is that the things reviewers usually ridicule don’t matter to me either way. Front and center here is Ro-Man, who to me is at least conceptually sound. At a minimum, his movement is convincing, exactly where practical-effects creatures usually go wrong, and the infamous helmet would be acceptable in itself. On further consideration, I suspect this was a matter of being rushed more than cheap. If they had improvised something to go over the rest of the ape suit, or just put the helmet on a regular stuntman, it could have worked vastly better at little or no difference in cost (assuming the rig didn’t kill poor George Barrows). I find a lot more material to complain about in the characters and dialogue, especially the kids, who are insufferable enough that the most  built-up “tragic” moment is more like a welcome relief. I could also rant about the romance subplot, except that it has just enough spice to rise above run of the mill. The real meltdown to me is the utterly tedious exchanges between Ro-Man and the scientist, which devolve to the point of Ro-Man literally refusing an invitation to come kill them all when Alice diverts his attention.

The “other side” that is still easily underestimated is just how much talent was involved here, which is where I get less rather than more forgiving. The central exhibit is Bernstein’s score, which I could genuinely believe someone used blackmail to get. It’s obviously and vastly better than the movie deserves, but at a certain point, the mismatch becomes detrimental to all concerned. At the most intentionally or unintentionally preposterous moments of the movie, the music is at its most dramatic, which only adds to the overall absurdity. On this particular point, I can find a modicum of appreciation for the synthesizer scores of ‘70s sci fi, which at least fit their usual material (see Planet of Dinosaurs and Shape of Things to Come). The fundamental problem is that if the crew knew talent well enough to get Bernstein, they should also have been able to find somebody to put together a decent suit among other things. Indeed, I could take the high ground and say this could/ should have been good, except the story and dialogue are already so horrendous and pretentious that I doubt any amount of refinement could have saved it. A further association that comes to my mind are Conan the Destroyer and Deep Rising, two other movies that were outclassed by their own soundtracks, yet did in fact rise to the occasion, in no small part because they did not take themselves seriously. If they could pull through, so could this one, and it clearly didn’t.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and what I decided deserves attention is a setting more than a scene. I choose as an example a sequence just 6 minutes in, which starts with the boy discovering Ro-Man’s lair, complete with his communications equipment and the inexplicable bubble machine. He retreats as the villain lumbers into view, characteristically ponderous without any sense of clumsiness. He turns on the screen to communicate with the “Great Guidance”, another Ro-Man with a dark faceplate on the helmet. Ro-Man proceeds to recount his destruction of terrestrial civilization, at one point musing, “Their resistance patterns showed some intelligence.” What draws my attention is the viewscreen itself. I have long been fascinated with how often science fiction movies trying to represent “futuristic” settings use CRT monitors and other equipment that would be obsolete now and in some cases even at the time. Here, on the other hand, we have a prop that is as cheap and obviously cobbled together as anything else in the film, yet does in fact approximate the “flatscreen” technology in actual use almost 70 years later. The moral, sometimes the best way to portray “future” tech is not to show anything at all.

In closing, I come as usual to the rating, and this is where I am on new ground. When I considered this feature, I was tempted to set up a scale that somehow went lower than the ratings scales I had used before, particularly for the now-retired Space 1979 feature. What I quickly reminded myself of was that what I laid out there was and remained a summation of what I consider the worst of the worst. In practice, it has almost always boiled down to a simple question: “Do I actively hate this movie just for existing?” In those terms, I actually came very close to giving this one a pass, I’m sure in part because I don’t have the level of familiarity I did with quite a few of the ones I gave my lowest rating before. The deeper I looked into the movie and especially its history, however, the more I was satisfied that this truly deserved the lowest rating I could give. I’m still not going to join the mob and say this is the “worst” movie I’ve seen, let alone the worst ever made. (That ship sailed as soon as I watched Ingagi.) What it does represent is the kind of movie I find not even up to the “so bad it’s good” label. You can do worse, but for actual entertainment value, you can do better with worse. And now I am done.