The Robot Monster
Let's take this one from the top, shall we?I can tell from the opening credits that this review's going to take a while. We see the words "The Robot Monster" appear over what look to be newspaper headlines or comic strip covers that have phrases like, "Another World", "Space Cadet", "Fear", and "Strange Suspense Story". Each time there's a name change, the screen shakes a bit, as if there's a camera man holding the camera, filming the comic strip covers for as long as they thought they would need for the credits and the names tend to disjoint the film. End of opening credits.
A boy in a space helmet walks up to his sister and zaps her with his fake ray gun. The sound guy didn't cue up the ray gun sound
effects too well because you hear the thing whir even after the boy's had the gun pointed at the ground for a few seconds. Then comes my
favorite dialog of the whole movie. I love the girl's response.Girl: Am I dead?
Boy: You're disintegrated.
Girl: Good, does that mean we can play house now?
They start walking around and stumble upon two archaeologists. The boy aims his gun at one of the men and says he must die. The other sleeping archaeologist confuses the prepubescent voice with that of his colleague and asks, Did you say something? The first archaeologist explains what's going on and the boy's appetite for destruction is crushed when he gets tricked into being from a peaceful planet. Peace having been established, the girl whines about playing house again. The boy shuts her down and takes charge of the situation by asking a bunch of nosey questions to the archaeologists. They explain what archaeologists do, interpret drawings they find in an attempt to explain past cultures. The girl takes a look at the drawing and asks a question that's as random as it is foreshadowing, Is he a spaceman robot? Wow. What a conclusion she's drawn! Mom comes by yelling for Johnny and Laura. They find them in the cave with two strangers. But hey, it's the 50's, it's not like Michael Jackson's in there with them. Johnny turns into Chuck Woolery when he introduces his mother and sister, My mother and sister, bet you'd like her. Sister reminds Johnny that the kids were going to take a nap after they ate lunch so they leave the cave.
The family gets back to
their picni- what the frick? This isn't a picnic site. This looks like the Mars pictures taken by the Rover. There are basketball-sized rocks
everywhere, small patches of grass, and in the opening shot the kid was walking down this dirt path with dust flying everywhere. And I thought
they were going to take a nap, why have they started eating? Fade out, whew!When it fades back in we see the family sleeping (how they found a flat, rockless spot is beyond me). Johnny looks like he's either praying on his knees or burning ants with a magnifying glass. There's no way he fell asleep in that position. A-ha, he's not asleep. He was only feigning sleep. So how long was he in that position anyways? He makes his way back to the cave. His shadow changes position as he turns the corner into the cave.
A pretty
big lightning storm somehow knocks Johnny over and it might be a meteor or spaceship that falls from the sky. Or maybe it was a giant lizard
because the next shot is of a giant lizard flying in on an alligator with a sail on its back in some prehistoric looking desert. The two go at
it as someone off camera twirls the alligator's tail to make them spin around on top of each other. At the same time the lizard is battling the
alligator, two stop-animation triceratopses are also fighting. They show the two triceratopses for about a second then cut back to the lizards.
The alligator rolls the lizard off of a cliff, there's a giant explosion of something and the scene ends. Why did they show this? What does it
mean? Have the lizards come to earth? Are we traveling through time? Is this part of the plot? I have absolutely no idea what just happened or
why this is even in the movie. Even after completing the movie, it remains a mystery. [I have since discovered that this was extra footage
from another film from this director. Not surprising.]Little Johnny's knocked out on the cave floor. What appear to be slow moving bees actually turn out to be bubbles being shot out from some crap looking piece of equipment at the mouth of the cave (the makers of the bubble machine are actually included in the credits). Johnny grabs one of the archaeologists' brushes and begins to play archeologist. Some lights flash from within the cave and Johnny makes a motion that looks like he's zipping up his zipper and hides around the corner. Robot Monster ominously emerges from the cave in a cloud of bubbles. Wait a second. So I'm supposed to believe that a man in a gorilla suit with a helmet is a robot monster? First of all, isn't a monster more of a living thing rather than a robot? It seems like even if you saw a really big ugly robot you would still call it a robot and not a monster. Second of all, this doesn't look like either a monster or a robot. It looks, like I said, like a gorilla wearing a helmet. Holy crap, you mean we're only seven minutes into this thing? I'm going to have to break this one down by the minute.
| 7:24 | Robot Monster turns on a monitor that I guess arrived when he arrived (along with the bubble blowing machine at the entrance of the cave), watches a few gripping seconds of meteors dangling on strings then talks to his boss, "His Guidance". Ro-Man XJ2 (this is Robot Monster's name) tells his boss that the force of gravity is stronger on the Earth than they had calculated, .7652 to be exact. However, this isn't quite as exact as it seems. What units are we talking about here? Meters per second? Feet per second? 9.8065 - .7652 = 9.0413 m/s2; 32.174 - .7652 = 31.4088 ft/s2 How big of a difference could this make? But actually, Ro-Man says, Gravitational pull is stronger than reported, .7652 higher than our planet. Maybe he means .7652 times stronger than reported. I won't do the math for that one. And if the gravitational pull were stronger, wouldn't that have brought him to our planet sooner? And didn't his ship have some sort of propulsion method? Wouldn't that have determined his speed, and not our gravity? They probably could've come up with a better excuse. Pay close attention to the conversation between Ro-Man and his "Guidance". The story gets pretty complica- I mean, confusing. Before landing on Earth, Ro-Man used his decalcinator to destroy some Earth cities. This started a hydrogen bomb war between nations who thought the attacks were coming from each other. Ro-Man announced his arrival so that they would stop killing each other to give the rest of his species some way to entertain themselves when they arrived. However, the hu-mans tried to fight Ro-Man. Big mistake. Ro-Man wiped out everyone in the world except for eight people. Let's see, there's Johnny, Laura, Mom, Sister, and two archeologists. That's six. Who are the other two? Ro-Man apparently has some sort of device that checks for humans by square feet. He says he can't detect anyone. How about that kid standing outside of your cave? Or the family that's asleep fifty yards away from you? His Guidance explains, sort of. He says that Ro-Man's energizer has an error of 16 millionths, whereas the Guidance's computator is exact. Or in other words, for every 16 million people accounted for, 1 is undetected. Now, I did a little google search and found that the world's population in 1950 was roughly 2.5 billion people. That would mean that with an error of 16 millionths, there would actually be 156 people left over. Ro-Man is given the order to find the eight people and destroy them. Johnny runs home. |
| 10:40 | Johnny comes home and gets verbally assaulted by his mommy. One problem here is the timeline. Weren't his mom and sister at a picnic sleeping just a few minutes ago? Johnny is told, Didn't we tell you? Never, never, never to go outside of those wires without our permission. Not only does Marta severely stumble over the word "outside", but weren't they all outside of those wires if they were all on the picnic? What are they giving Johnny a hard time for? Then Papa jumps in and says, You know the terrible things that have happened when Ro-Man landed on Earth. How would Johnny have learned all this? He was hanging out at Ro-Man�s joint when all this was happening. The wires in question are Papa's invention that keep Ro-Man's beam from detecting all those that are encompassed within its perimeter. Papa says that if you were to utter a word outside of the wires, then Ro-Man would be able to detect you. So, apparently Ro-Man's detector is a noise detector and the wires keep sound inside the perimeter. How the heck did he invent this thing? And when? In the 3 minutes that have passed since Ro-Man came to earth? And in those three minutes there was a giant war? This is awful. How would he have known how to make these wires? Very frustrating this movie is. We also learn from Daddy that the entire world has tried to kill Ro-Man. When? Did they shoot missiles at him? Wouldn't that have killed Johnny, too, since he's been hanging out spying on Ro-Man? And maybe they could have showed some of the Ro-Man vs. the World footage instead of the Alligator vs. the Lizard footage. Maybe that was symbolic, but that would be giving the movie too much credit. |
| 19:01 |  Dad (the professor, and
number seven of the group) and family are awakened by a noise. He whips out his gun. Marta questions if the weapon will do anything to Ro-Man, to
which the professor gives a very morbid-for-this-movie answer, It's not for him, it's for us. Meaning that because of Ro-Man's promise to
give them a death "[that] will be indescribable", the professor's just going to kill the family before Ro-Man can get his hands on them. Creepy.
It might be helpful to tell you that the professor also has a view screen exactly like Ro-Man's. When he built this, and how it can communicate
with Ro-Man's view screen is anybody's guess. Turns out that the noise was Roy, Alice's husband, and person number eight. Roy explains that the
professor has created a serum that is an antibiotic able of curing all diseases, and since the professor experimented on his family members (as
any loving father/ethical scientist would do), Ro-Man's death ray had no effect on them (this also includes two people named Jason and McCloud,
who are apparently two random people that dad tested his serum on, they never explain why, I don't even understand why they were even mentioned at
all in this movie). So, Ro-Man's death ray is nothing more than a germ spreader? Some death ray. |
| 22:45 |  Ro-man pops up on the view
screen and tells the family he knows about Jason and McCloud because they took off on the spaceship towards the space platform. Ro-Man shows them
some pretty sweet footage of a model spaceship being spun on a string. Ro-Man destroys the space platform with either a missile or a cosmic blast,
they don't make it too clear which one blew up the spaceship because you see the missile headed toward the spaceship but then Ro-Man summons the
cosmic blast. Whatever. Then Ro-Man delivers a sweet line, And now of the two billion, there are six. Calculate your chances. Negative.
Negative. Negative. It's actually quite hauntingly effective. But what are negative chances? Their chances are so low that they've actually
gone into the negative zone. |
| 27:32 | I walk out onto my apartment balcony and contemplate jumping head first. |
| 29:15 | Ro-Man and the hu-mans do a bit of negotiating to try to settle this thing civilly. Ro-man asks Alice, Do you know the area of the fork of the two dry rivers? There is a ruin there. I will meet you in an hour. Hold on a second. I thought Ro-Man had no idea where these people were. Now all of a sudden he's meeting up with them? Alice agrees to meet him but her family doesn't want her to so they tie her up. Johnny bravely escapes to meet Ro-Man. |
| 33:06 | Johnny meets up with Ro-Man. Turns out that the negative flashing all through out this movie is Ro-Man's decalcinator death ray. Bit of a consistency problem since you see the negative flashing previous but is never explained to be the death ray. My guess is that they just didn't want to think of another sweet special effect. Johnny runs home after letting it slip that they've all drunken the serum that won't allow the death ray to work on them. |
| 37:58 |  Now come the weirdest parts
of the movie. Alice and Roy have gone out to look for Johnny. They're sitting in the bushes and all of a sudden they start pantomiming to each
other. Their hand motions and facial expressions are hilarious. Whoever's playing Alice actually does quite a convincing job of pretending that
she knows whatever the heck it is that Roy's trying to say when he starts pointing at the sun. At the end of the pantomiming session they kiss. I
guess they fell in love. I would recommend this movie to anyone solely for this scene (I wouldn't recommend it for any other reason, I'm still
contemplating jumping off my balcony). |
| 38:42 | It's always good to watch these movies with friends every once in a while. They always have good insights like, why is Ro-Man walking everywhere he goes? Doesn't he have a ship or some sort of a scooter, like a Rascal? And why is he walking with his arms in the air? Would it have looked too human to walk with his arms at his side? Anyways. Ro-Man makes it back to his cave, which I swear is Bronson Caves, where such sci-fi classics as Teenagers from Outer Space were filmed. I'll have to check the credits later (wasn't in the credits but I verified it online). |
| 39:40 | Roy comes back home with Alice in her arms. Dad asks where they've been. Mom says, Now really father, isn't it obvious? Isn't what obvious? Just because Roy's carrying her around it means that they're in love and want to get married? Obviously. Why didn't I see it? |
| 40:47 | Ro-Man tells the Great Guidance about the serum which he has a hunch is similar to their formula XZA. For some reason whenever Ro-Man talks to the Guidance there's a glow around the view screen, but not when Ro-Man talks to the family. The counterpart to the serum is to be prepared and used against them to kill them. The Great Guidance wants Ro-Man to hurry so he says, The planet earth has half revolved. You have but a short time to achieve our goal. Time out here. I understand that the Ro-Men have been on earth for two days, but what is their time of reference here? Half revolved? From when? From midnight? That would put them at high noon. It must be as of 7 in the morning that it's half revolved, and now the sun's about to go down. Interesting. |
| 44:07 |  Roy and Alice get married by Alice's
dad, who's assumed pastoral responsibilities. Nothing wrong with that. Johnny looks at the camera for a second and now what's this? Roy and Alice
are going on a honeymoon? Have they already forgotten about Ro-Man and the menacing music that follows him? I guess they're so in love that they
feel nothing can harm them. Apparently, everyone feels that way because they just walk out into the desert. It would make a little more sense if
they planned on not making any noise so as not to be detected by Ro-Man's noise detector. But since this is their honeymoon night out in the
desert, I'm guessing it won't be a quiet night. My hopes for a silent honeymoon are dashed when Laura comes running behind them yelling at them to
stop and take the flowers she's picked for them. She runs up to them from the left, gives them the flowers, is told to run home, and takes off to
the right. Shouldn't she have turned around and gone back to the left? She runs into Ro-Man and Ro-Man strangles the "girl-child". 'Bout time he
got his hands dirty. |
| 48:41 | Roy and Alice are making out in the dirt when Ro-Man busts in on the scene. Ro-Man strangles Roy as Alice gives him several blows to the back with the bottom of her fists. Ro-Man (who's been developing a little crush on Alice) picks up Alice and takes her back to the cave of love. |
| 50:42 | Alice decides to flirt with Ro-Man a little bit. Maybe to make him vulnerable for a few seconds. She asks, How is it you're so strong, Ro-Man? He explains that he has a device that reenergizes his strength every so often. It's called his energizer. Hold up. I thought the energizer was what Ro-Man used to detect life on earth. He also tells Alice what planet he's from. Ready for this? He's from the planet Ro-Man. Are you kidding me? The only difference between his name and the planet's name is that the planet's name is accented on the "Man" syllable. How lame. Just ten minutes left. I hope I can make it through this. |
| 51:22 |  Mom, dad, and Johnny are
grieving at the grave of Laura. Wait, they buried her already? Like, three minutes have gone by since she was strangled by Ro-Man. Anyways, Roy
comes running, tells them that Ro-Man has Alice, then falls over dead. So if you get strangled you won't die but after running a little ways, you
will die? Is that how being strangled works? It seems like if he didn't die when he was strangled, he wouldn't have died at all. |
| 52:03 | Continuity problem here. All of a sudden dad is grabbing Johnny's arm and the other two have changed their sitting positions quite significantly. |
| 52:35 |  Ro-Man becomes quite the sexual
predator with Alice and asks her, Suppose I was a hu-man, would you treat me like a man? Then he grabs her arms and makes her feel his
chest. She tries to distract him but he just tears her dress, ties her up, and knocks her out. The family comes on the view screen and Ro-Man
yells at them for interrupting his womanizing. The family has a plan to lure Ro-Man out to meet the boy while mom and dad rescue Alice. They give
Johnny a gat to kill Ro-Man. |
| 54:35 | The Great Guidance comes on the view screen waving a glow stick and asks why Ro-Man extension XJ2 sucks at his job. Ro-Man shows he's developed a little compassion in him. The Guidance doesn't like that and threatens him to make him complete his task. The Guidance signs off and Ro-Man starts to talk to himself, I cannot, but I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do must and cannot meet? Yet I must, but I cannot. |
| 57:00 | Five minutes to go. |
| 58:00 | Ro-Man meets up with Johnny while mom and dad find Alice and destroy Ro-Man's strength energizer. But what's this? Johnny's thrown the gun into the dirt. Why? You may ask. Does it really matter anymore why anyone does anything in this movie? |
| 58:04 |  You wish to he a hu-man?
Good, you can die a hu-man. The Guidance extends his arm and shoots lightning out of his fingers. Giant balls of light and explosions are seen
in the sky and Ro-Man falls over dead after killing Johnny (though you can see him breathing). Looks like mom, dad, and Alice are going to have an
awkward time repopulating the earth. Oh well, you do what you gotta do I guess. |
| 58:34 |  The Guidance takes over
Ro-Man's duties and releases a butt load of cosmic tube rays on our planet. What does a tube ray do? Why, it brings prehistoric animals to life to
devour any remaining life. Aren't there just three left? Can't he just drop a bomb on them or something? Anyways. Now we see some more footage of
dinosaurs fighting and running around. Somewhere during all this, the Guidance releases cyclotronic vibrations to smash the planet earth out of
the universe. Big explosions. The earth is still there, however, and we see the famous Giant Alligator vs. Giant Lizard fight scene again. More
lightning out of the fingers. More explosions. We get the point. Why didn't they just do this in the first place? |
| 1:00:05 | Wait a second, the archeologists are back. And one's carrying Johnny in his arms. Johnny must have fallen somewhere and now- Oh No! You
mean this was all a dream? A stupid dream? My goodness, what a laaaaaaaaaaaaame movie. Alice finishes the dialogue after Johnny warns them about
Ro-Man, Really, Johnny, you're overdoing the spaceman act. There simply aren't such things. Or are there? The family walks away and the
camera closes in on the cave. 48 seconds left. Ro-Man's theme comes in and out comes Ro-Man, arms outstretched, looking for blood and walking
towards the camera. Wait, here he comes again. What? This is exactly what they just showed. Ro-Man walking towards the camera again. Can I get a
third time? Yes, a third time. This is unbelievable. Why do they keep showing Ro-Man walking out of the cave? Longest 48 seconds of my life.
Longest hour of my life, for that matter. |
The review for this movie took me about a week and a half to finish simply because it was so hard to watch. However, I do feel that I need to make a few post viewing remarks because I also developed an unsettling and quirky closeness to it. It's probably because Johnny stole the show from the adult characters. He's pouty and stupid, and that together with Ro-Man's emotional realizations gives the movie a very innocent feel. What I like about the movie was the music, especially Ro-Man's theme. As over the top for Ro-Man as it may have been, it was still some good music. Elmer Bernstein was the composer. He has an incredible resume of about 150 movies since 1951. Looking at all the famous movies he's done (Ghostbusters, The Three Amigos, Cape Fear), I'm guessing that he's probably pretty famous in the soundtrack world so I'll stop talking about him.
The plot was awful. The end of the movie reveals to us that Ro-Man never even needed to go to earth in the first place. This, because of the many different types of weapons available to planet Ro-Man. The decalcinator death ray didn't work but who cares, the Guidance has a ray that brings prehistoric reptiles to life to kill everyone. As if that weren't enough, the Guidance also unleashes cyclotronic vibrations to destroy the earth. So why did this whole movie happen? I guess to show us that even Ro-Men have emotions.
I also think that they did a good job at making us feel sorry for Ro-Man at the end. Even though he was responsible for the death of all but three people on the earth (and would've killed two of the remaining three), he started to listen to his emotions and began to have compassion on Alice. This made me feel sorry for him when his energizer was weakened at the end and he was killed by the Guidance's death ray.
An interesting note is that nearly every time Ro-Man goes over to his bubble machine he lifts up his TV antennae and moves them to the machine next to it. However, you never see him put them back in the original spot.
Here's a brief summary of the advanced technology used in this movie:
Decalcinator Death Ray: A ray used by Ro-Man which flickers between a real color image and a negative image. It kills everyone who is touched by it unless they've had a bit of the professor's serum.
Automatic Billion Bubble Machine: Use is unknown but it sure is cool seeing all those bubbles float around.
View Screen: A device brought to earth by Ro-Man to communicate with the Guidance. The professor also has one somehow.
Energizer: Ro-Man's human detecting device (accurate to the 16 millionth) and also Ro-Man's strength energizer.
Computator: The Great Guidance's human detecting device, more precise than Ro-Man's energizer.
Noise Detector: Possibly the same thing as Ro-Man's human detector but is never explained if it really is.
Cosmic Tube Rays: Lightning bolts that shoot out of the Guidance's fingers causing explosions in the sky and prehistoric reptiles to devour life on earth.
Cyclotronic Vibrations: Vibrations summoned by the Guidance that can smash the earth out of the universe.
Pantomiming: A skill mastered by Roy and Alice used to confuse viewers and make them wonder why they're watching this movie.
I was about to type a concluding paragraph, but I think you know how I feel about this movie. Instead I'll just type up my favorite quote.
Best quote:
The Guidance to Ro-Man: You sound like a hu-man, not a ro-man. Can you not verify a fact?
Afterthought:
It's been a few months since I wrote this review and I'm so disappointed in myself in how critical I am of this wonderful movie. Ever since I saw it I've done nothing but praise it to my friends and family. I even went to Bronson Cave during part of a road trip with my buddies and reenacted a scene from this movie. This has come to be my favorite b-movie of all time! But I won't rewrite the review, it took too long and I still like it.
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