Spoiler Alert: There will be no spoiler alerts here. We’re talking about a movie that came out in 1953. You’ve had almost 70 years to see the thing. If you feel strongly about not having anything given away, go watch Robot Monster (for free) on YouTube and then come back. It’ll take you a little over an hour, and you’ll be better for the experience, even if you don’t feel like it at the time.
Over the years, Robot Monster has become a cult film, which usually means that people like the irony of liking something more than they actually like the thing itself. Whatever affection people express for the film usually falls neatly into the winking, cheese-embracing, so-bad-it’s-good category. That’s the only way to explain the 36 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a stratospheric score for a film routinely placed on this or that list of Worst Ever.
If you know vintage sci-fi – or Hollywood history in general – you know the story of director Phil Tucker’s suicide attempt, popularly attributed to the film’s poor reception but more likely linked to depression and the fact he hadn’t been paid for making the thing. (The studio could hardly plead poverty on the project: Robot Monster grossed $1 million during its original run, on a budget of $16,000. Not a bad return on investment, that.)
The film didn’t kill Tucker in his mid-20s, though, and it didn’t kill his career. He kept working in Hollywood, made it onto some big projects, and now there’s an independent filmmaking award named after him. A fellow could do a lot worse than that in an industry that eats its own.
That’s his redemption arc, in a nutshell. There has been none for Robot Monster, Tucker’s first and most famous/infamous/notorious outing as a director. It remains a cult film, beloved for its real or perceived flaws. This is – as the bluesmen say – a shame and a sin, because far from being simply an unintentional hoot like, say, The Room, Tucker’s film is a wonderful, surreal little work and deserves to be recognized as such.
Look, I’m not alone in this. Stephen King has called Robot Monster “art of a high nature,” and it was John Carpenter’s favorite childhood movie, and of course now I’m committing the logical fallacy of appeal to authority. Still, you can’t argue that those two don’t know a thing or two about writing and filmmaking.
If you’ve seen Robot Monster and don’t agree with their assessment, or mine, that’s fine – for now. It took me a while to come around, too..
I’ve seen it on the big screen, in 3-D. I own the DVD (because I’m right on the border between the Baby Boom and Generation X, and we still own DVDs.). So, yes, I’ve watched all 62 minutes of black and white glory more than a dozen times, and it still took me at least three viewings before the epiphany hit me.
This film’s greatness isn’t achieved despite its no-budget special effects, or in spite of the Swiss-cheese plot and whacked-out dialogue of Wyott Ordung’s script:
Ro-Man (yes, really, that’s what he’s called in the movie): And now I will kill you.
Johnny: You look like a pooped-out pinwheel.
Robot Monster is brilliant precisely because of how all of these screw-loose ends tie up at the Big Reveal, which we’ll get to in a bit.
(In truth, by the way, the Ro-Man’looks nothing like a pooped-out pinwheel, whatever that might be. He looks like a man in a homemade gorilla suit, wearing a diving helmet with TV rabbit ears attached, because – well, that’s all the budget would allow. The poster showed a skeletal face under the diving helmet, but when have monster-movie posters ever made promises they could keep?)
The costume alone was enough to consign Robot Monster to the cinematic cheese drawer in most people’s minds. If that weren’t enough, there were the props set up in his cave lair.
First, there was a sort of radio-bubble machine hybrid, which served some unknown but apparently crucial function in the Ro-man’s plot to take over the world. Across the way, there was a dresser (with its mirror taped over), repurposed as a device by which the Ro-Man communicated with the “Great Guidance,” the Bigger Bad played (and separately voiced) by the same two fellows who portrayed the Ro-Man. Yep, helmet and gorilla suit and dramatic gestures and all.
The Great Guidance would appear from time to time, gesticulate stiffly and order Ro-Man to wipe out the planet’s few remaining Hu-Mans (no, really), all of whom were conveniently located nearby in southern California’s Bronson Canyon. (If you’re tasked with taking out the only people somehow immune to your death ray because of Dad’s homebrewed inoculation, it does help to have them all within walking and strangling distance.)
Meanwhile, the bubble machine kept cranking out the soap-spheres from its perch atop a wooden table straight out of Grandma’s parlor. (It probably had a drawer full of paper clips, breath mints, rubber bands and double-sided Scotch tape, but the world will never know for sure.)
Clearly, if a financial corner could be cut, Tucker sliced that sucker off and plunged forward. After all, he had to drop more than four grand on the 3-D technology. Didn’t leave a lot of room for props, costumes or coherence.
(The 3-D looks surprisingly good, by the way. If you ever get a chance to see Robot Monster as it originally came out, take it).
So far, aside from the 3-D, the testimony of King and Carpenter, and a surprisingly good score from Elmer Bernstein (forced into slumming it at a time when he was graylisted for leftist political leanings), I acknowledge the shakiness of my argument for misunderstood greatness.
I get it; it looks as though I’m building a case for the antithesis to my thesis that Robot Monster, the B-as-in-BAD-est of the B movies, doesn’t deserve the ironic, condescendingly affectionate pats on the head it’s been getting for nearly 70 years. Bear with me a little longer. I need to dig the hole just a bit deeper first.
Let’s cover a few other points that look idiotic upon initial viewing, but end up underlining the film’s oddball brilliance.
The Ro-Man’s human hostage, a woman with whom he has fallen in love (against his programmed instincts and to the Great Guidance’s arm-waving annoyance), is seen loosely almost sort of tied up on the floor of his cave while unconscious – but in a subsequent shot, she is fully and securely trussed.
A scene set in outer space clearly shows a hand and arm steering the “rocket ship.”
Stock footage from Hal Roach’s One Million BC presents a fight between lizards dressed up like dinosaurs, during a sequence where Ro-Man somehow manages to wipe out all but eight members of the human race.
(That last part is bad, by the way, outside of plot and SFX considerations. Roach’s “special effects” would rightly be punishable as animal abuse these days, with at least one lizard badly injured during the making of his film. Clearly, the times were different then. Not an excuse, merely an observation.)
So, why doesn’t Robot Monster objectively – albeit appealingly – suck?
As said, there are no spoiler alerts here, so as we flash forward to the end, the big reveal is that the whole thing took place in little Johnny’s head after he got clobbered by a rock. Years before Bobby Ewing came out of that shower, even more years before the lights came up to show Bob and Emily Hartley in bed, It Was All a Dream (TM).
Now, the hilariously stilted dialogue makes sense. Ditto the entirely unspecial effects, right down to the last bubble, the final strip of adhesive across the mirror.
Of course victims tie themselves up. Of course giant hands manipulate spaceships. Of course a clumsy, flailing, murderous alien gorilla in a diving helmet is going to say things like this:
I will recalculate. Your deaths will be indescribable.
That’s the kind of stuff that happens in dreams. Dreams are weird. They have to be, because who could tolerate 16 waking hours of real life and then another 8 of the same mundane crap, the same economic and social and geopolitical uncertainty, when you’re supposed to be going on dinosaur-riding adventures with your seventh-grade math teacher?
The weirdness of the dream world is often the only thing that makes sense any more – and remember, Robot Monster was made and released early on in the Cold War, with reports of flying saucers also coming in on a fairly regular basis. Kids pick up their parents’ anxieties, take them to bed and then spend big chunks of the night trying to fight them off.
Even the inclusion of the One Million BC lizard fight (along with stock footage from The Lost Continent and Mission to Mars) makes perfect sense – in a meta sense – in this light, because a kid Johnny’s age would have watched and remembered all of these B movies at one Saturday matinee or another.
Also, if weird food makes you have weirder dreams, Johnny likely would have had that in spades. His movie mom had the look of someone who would inflict an Eisenhower-era culinary atrocity like hot dogs and canned peas in aspic on the poor kid, all because she saw it in Good Housekeeping. After a lunch like that and a knock on the head, who could blame him for dreaming up the Great Guidance, a proto-Zoom meeting on a taped-up mirror and the end of almost all humanity?
Speaking of, yes, I know the Great Guidance does appear at the very end of the film, looking extra-ominous and advancing toward the audience in one last hurrah of doomy 3-D. That doesn’t invalidate the dream premise. If anything, it says to the audience, Hey, maybe you dreamed all of this up too: the movie, the short before it, even the little brat kicking your seat for the last 28 minutes! Ha, not really, but wouldn’t that be some crazy stuff if you did?
I don’t know if Ordung consciously thought about any of this when he was writing the script. I doubt Tucker had one Aha! moment after another during the four days he was given to make Robot Monster. More than likely, they were trying to crank out an Invaders from Mars rehash, on a shoestring, in time to make a quick buck for the studio.
Here’s the thing about art, though: It has a way of making its own way. Sometimes, it comes into the world entirely independent of the will, skill and vision of its creators. Whether or not Tucker, Ordung and the cast and crew intended to make something so weirdly terrific that people only saw the weirdness, they did it. They caught an Atomic Age invasion nightmare, put it on film and sent the reels out into a world that had no idea what it was watching at the time – and still doesn’t.
And it’s time people quit pointing and laughing at Robot Monster.
Okay, you can laugh at the “pooped-out pinwheel” line. That’s more than fair.
Steve Brisendine is a writer, poet, occasional artist and recovering journalist living and working in Mission, Kansas. His work has appeared in The Alien Buddha's House of Horrors, Connecticut River Review, Aji Magazine and other online and print publications. He is also the author of two poetry collections from Spartan Press: The Words We Do Not Have (2021) and the upcoming Salt Holds No Secrets But This (2022).