Will be screening on June 24th at 3p.m. at Manhattan’s Dolby Screening Room, 1360 Avenue of the Americas. Tickets can be purchased online.
“The boy is impertinent!”
Ro-man is not quite an ape. And he’s not quite a man. He’s kind of a sentient alien who is smart enough to destroy civilization but not smart enough to be able to breathe Earth’s atmosphere sans his diving helmet. He’s a complicated Ro-man and no one understands him but his woman. Phil Tucker’s “Robot Monster” is a post apocalyptic survival film that conveniently evades all glimpses at the actual invasion and aforementioned apocalypse. The evil Ro-Man have invaded and destroyed Earth because—well—humans are bad. And to add insult to injury they monitor the remaining survivors in hopes of capturing and or destroying them.
They can never seem to make up their minds on that mission statement.
Now human have all but lost the war against the Ro-Man and all that’s left are the traditional nuclear family straight out of “Ozzie and Harriet.” There’s ma, and pa, and little sister Carla, and slimy big brother Johnny, and two horny teenagers. And there’s Ro-Man, a confusing villain that spends most of his time talking through a video screen and antagonizing the remaining humans left on Earth. All the while as he flexes his superior intellect and machinery, he never really does anything but wave his fists in anger, and makes empty threats at little Johnny. Inexplicably the Ro-mans calls them humans, with extra emphases on the man.
I don’t know if it’s meant to patronize their victims, or if they simply have a hard time with English like most foreigners. Because Englishing is hard. If you’ve ever heard stories about making movies with random props, and costumes used and re-used, “Robot Monster” is 101 in throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks. To Phil Tucker’s credit he really does make good use of his ape costume and diving helmet combo, giving off the illusion that there are more than one Ro-Man, even when it’s obvious he’s just re-using the same monster over and over. That’s kind of what sums up “Robot Monster,” which (on a $16,000 dollar budget) feels like a ten page screenplay stretched out to an hour long science fiction film.
You’d assume the movie would at least make better use of the Ro-Man costume by featuring a lot of rampaging, fights, and violent attacks, but surprisingly Ro-Man is pretty stationery for the most part. I mean he does at least kill little sister Carla, but she egged him on. The central plot revolves around a family of scientists living in and around caves and mines (for reasons…), and they’re trying to survive through the end of the world by outwitting Ro-Man. But he’s not monkeying around when it comes to keeping tabs on them filthy humans. The director places an unnecessary emphasis on the family interplay, even placing huge focus on hands, for reasons never quite explained.
He gives us at least three montages of young Alice and Roy flirting with one another while repairing their machines. Their erotic trysts are all focused solely on their five fingered forbidden dances. Ro-Man mainly has no real mission here, so the screenplay gives him one mid-way that’s typical of most monster movies. His purpose in the overall post-apocalyptic narrative feels like the writers forgot they had to feature a monster, so just tossed him a bone. In this case, like most monsters and beasts in the fifties, Ro-Man pits his focus on the teen daughter Alice (Claudia Barrett) for no other reason than that she’s attractive, and one of the few women in what is a post apocalyptic sausage fest. He’s an old fashioned ro-mantic, I guess.
What’s peculiar about “Robot Monster” is that the movie sets up the family building a machine that will allow them to fly to a launch pad and alert other humans, but then they pretty much abandon it mid-way, like a lot of the other plot points. Suddenly Ro-Man wants to be a human and feel because… well Alice is kind of hot. Honest to god, that’s the finale in a nutshell. And I mean, even if the family did defeat Ro-Man, the movie establishes there are other Ro-Men out there waiting in the wings, so what happens when they come knocking on the door for Alice, too? Are there no Ro-Women where the Ro-Man comes from? To add to the shit meeting wall formula, “Robot Monster” feeds us the convenient “It was all a dream! Or was it? It was. Or was it?”
I don’t care. In the end what we learn is that the Ro-Man are just like us. They want to take over the world, destroy their inferiors, and get some. It’s kind of poetic.