Robot Monster

Ro-Man from “Robot Monster”

I’ve seen a lot of B-movies thanks to the show Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Many of them were monster movies.  They are the biggest staple of the genre.  All the movie needs is its title monster and the plot comes built right in as the monster roams around and terrorizes people until it finally gets destroyed.  Out of the dozens upon dozens of B-movie monsters I’ve seen, the Robot Monster form a movie of the same name is one of the few that stands out from the pack.  Mainly for being so… stupid. 

It’s the character design that does it.  The Robot Monster is a guy in a giant gorilla suit wearing a diver’s helmet.  This is supposed to be scary. 

The whole movie is terrible.  It goes so far into sheer cobbled-together ridiculousness that it transcends to that enlightened B-movie state where it is entertaining again.  It’s still torture to watch at the same time.  In an odd twist of fate, I’ve seen this movie several times, through the MST3K satire lens as well as the uncut original.  It was shown completely unironically in a class I took on comics-wiring.  My teacher even passed out 3D glasses so we could appreciate the special effects of the Billion Bubble Machine.

“Robot Monster” is a black-and-white flick from the 50’s about a boy who somehow gets transported to an alternate apocalyptic Earth.  This may or may not have been the work of that bubble machine.  The early details of the plot are vague to the point of nonexistence.  The boy and his family are the last survivors on Earth after humanity is destroyed by the Ro-Men or Robot Monsters, a race of aliens with advanced weapons.  The way my teacher explained it, the movie was made to feed off the Cold War paranoia that we could be wiped out by nuclear weapons at any time.  That’s still not enough to make the gorilla suits threatening to a modern audience. 

A single Ro-Man is sent down to Earth to deal with the family, while they are trying to hatch an escape to a moon base.  Ro-Man lumbers around for a while until, in a shocking, never-before-seen plot twist, catches sight of the daughter and falls in love with her.  He decides to kidnap her instead of kill her, and this throws him into an immense conflict of character.  Being a robot, he’s not supposed to have any form of emotion or individuality.  If he disobeys his orders, the other Ro-Men will destroy him for being irrational and thinking like a human.  Ro-man now thinks his race is flawed and wishes they were free to laugh and feel like the humans they destroyed.  He doesn’t know how to deal with the clash between his Ro-Man nature and his newfound emotions.  He tries to sum it up in the stilted, halting lines:

“I cannot…yet I must.  How do you calculate that?  At what point on the graph do ‘must’ and ‘cannot’ meet?  Yet I must… but I cannot.”

Brilliant scriptwriting.

That’s about as far as the plot gets.  It fizzles out as the ruler of the Ro-Man decides to skip all this conflict and kill everybody.   Dinosaurs show up for no reason and the whole thing turns out to be a dream from that boy, which brings the movie to a quick end without resolving anything. 

Even though the movie feels like a drain of precious hours of life that could have been spent doing something else, but it has its memorable quirks.  The Ro-Man suit is silly, but it is unique, which is something compared to the long line of creatively bankrupt monster designs that use rubber suits, unconvincing makeup or recycled stock footage form nature programs.  It adds a dose of campy fun to a mundane sci-fi plot because it is played completely seriously.  The movie never seems to realize that the gorilla suit undercuts any semblance of dignity or depth of emotion.  If it can’t be good, it can at least be weird an entertaining.  “Robot Monster” was memorable enough for my teacher to show it to his class after seeing it decades ago as a kid.