THE 3RD HALL OF INFAMY: Infamy Rises Again

Also, I'll rewatch it tomorrow. I'm looking forward to the new format.

__________________
IMDb
Letterboxd

I don't see why not. But we shall see.

Yes, keep us on our toes! The delicious uncertainty only adds to the misery!

I know. I was just bringing it up after replying to youre comment.

I love Robot Monster, and look forward to watching it again. It's one of those movies I can watch over, and over, and over, and never get sick of it. 66 minutes of pure, unfiltered, madness.

__________________

__________________
Captain's Log
My Collection

I did rewatch it last night though, just to clarify.

I just started it. It's kind of cute. But Elmer Bernstein? That's weird.

Robot Monster (1953, Phil Tucker) ‐

Not my idea for "worst film ever" territory as I'd put it firmly in the B‐movie pile, but I did find it more joyless than I remembered. While Ro‐Man is the clear standout, the human characters are utterly bland by comparison. Even with my expectations lowered, they had little to no personality, were stuck in Ro‐Man's shadow, and frequently got in the way of what I liked about the film. The wedding sequence, for instance, felt particularly forced and came out of nowhere. Not sure why that was included. Ro‐Man (as well as the stop motion/disaster photography in the opening and ending) is where this film shines though. Yes, he's more cute than scary, but those are the film's B‐movie charms. Watching his actor struggle to move around in the suit while traversing the cliffs is amusing to watch, especially with the idea that he has to chase the human characters down. Fortunately for him, everyone either stands still instead of running away or trips and falls after a few steps. While his schtick began to overstay its welcome, particularly with the walking shots, Ro‐Man's arc in the final act saved the day since the film finally capitalized on the potential of his cuteness. They could've done more with it had they stretched the ending out further, but it still made for a pleasing slice of humanity which the rest of the film lacked. Also, while the twist ending doesn't fix the absurd plot points/character decisions, it at least mitigates my criticisms to a degree by providing a justification for them. Overall, while I liked this a bit less throughout this rewatch, I still wouldn't call it bad. You just need to approach it with the right expectations.

My ranking of the B‐movies I've seen in the Hall of Infamies:

1) Trog
2) Manos: The Hands of Fate
3) Robot Monster
4) Krampus: The Christmas Devil (does this count as a B‐movie?)

As an aside, I don't think I've ever seen a MST3K episode.

(hopefully, Stu doesn't read this post)

Too late!

I might check out the Robot Monster episode tonight though!

If you want to get into MST3K, here are eight episodes that will get you hooked. They're all on YouTube, but The Final Sacrifice is not always on there. The rumor is that since the director is a "serious filmmaker" now, he is ashamed of it and gets it pulled whenever someone uploads it.

Joel Hodgson era:
Cave Dwellers
Fugitive Alien
Pod People
Manos: The Hands of Fate

Mike Nelson era:
Escape 2000
The Final Sacrifice
Girl in Gold Boots
Space Mutiny

Hopefully, none of you picked any of these for this thread. That would be awkward!

Me neither. I don't need someone to explain the movie while I'm watching or tell me when and what I should be laughing at.

__________________

Whether you need those things or not, it's worth watching because the riffs are hilarious. The show elevated riffing to an art form. There's also all the impersonations and host segments (sketches occurring during breaks where they parody or dissect scenes from the movie they're watching) that are also hilarious. In other words, the show is not so much an assistant telling you when and how to react. It's more about using movies as vehicles to generate comedy.

They make jokes. They don’t just point and laugh. Try it. You will like it.

Robot Monster - 2 gorilla suits out of 5

*BZZZZZZT*

Sorry, I'm not sure where that came from. Anyways, Robot Monster is by no means a good movie. The Ro-Men make little sense - they can decimate the Earth's population, but struggle to take down a shirtless meathead - clips of dinosaurs, ahem...lizards and costumed baby alligators interrupt the plot for little purpose, it's edited in a way that makes generating any kind of tension impossible and the ending makes everything that happened before seem totally inconsequential. The movie also has the audacity to venture into bad taste. Even so, maybe except for that last thing, I wouldn't change anything about it. When I am in the mood for bad '50s sci-fi, it checks all the boxes.

Robot Monster demonstrates that a glorious failure tends to be more interesting and satisfying to watch than a mild success. To be fair, the movie is not totally without merit. It proves that Elmer Bernstein was a damn good film composer. Also, whether intentional or not, it leaves you with a valuable message: obsessions with sci-fi and space travel will pay off in unexpected ways. Oh, and just one more thing: when you're getting married, shouldn't you be required to wear a shirt?

Spoilers:

A race of robots from a distant planet arrive suddenly on Earth and wipe out the entire human population, but their deadly "Calcinator death rays" fail to eliminate 8 people who have been made immune after ingesting a trial drug, and have set up a protective shield around their house, which unfortunately only consists of a few walls and no roof. I don't know why, but for some reason these robots have bodies that make them look like they're wearing gorilla costumes. Why were they designed like that? Are they really robots? And why do dinosaurs suddenly appear from nowhere and start fighting each other when the robots attack? What possible reason could there be for that? And why do the robot's heads look so crummy? I mean, those front-facing visors on their helmets have been crudely made, with jagged, uneven circular cutting that's not exactly a mark of superior manufacturing processes. And why does their equipment blow bubbles? Is that some kind of super-advanced by-product, like exhaust waste? Watching Robot Monster forces the human mind to ask question after question after question as the kooky movie advances. If the boss robot is transmitting his broadcast from a real seat of power, why does the sheet behind him look like it's just been taken out of a box, un-ironed and creased? How can a robot suddenly develop a yearning for physical intimacy? Why does he aimlessly walk around so often?

We get it once we've seen the whole movie. Kind of. But all the same, you can't really excuse the cheapness, stilted dialogue, phallic imagery, gorilla costume, nonsensical ideas and generally silly proposition this film wants us to take seriously at first. There are a few stock images of destroyed cities that actually are effective, and the score (from Elmer Bernstein!) surprises by being pretty damn good for a 1950s sci-fi movie, but all of that is undone as soon as we're watching lizards with dinosaur features pasted to them fighting each other (footage from the film One Million B.C.), along with the general idea that when running from danger, women are so incapable that men have to pick them up like suitcases and carry them here and there. That's not when guys are remarking that girls are so bossy they should be milked every morning. Was that a common saying in the 1950s, or a Robot Monster invention? I like to think that it's the latter. But I must admit that as bad as all of this makes this movie, it's also an extraordinarily fun time watching it. Ro-Man (George Barrows) shakes his fist, philosophises, lusts after Alice (Claudia Barrett) and talks to The Great Guidance (George Barrows) on a TV monitor, all while trying to physically eliminate the final 8 - an ironically hard task, even though the first few billion were so easy.

I first read about Robot Monster as a teenager, fresh into books all about the "Worst Movies Ever Made", and eagerly anticipating a time when I could get my hands on the likes of Plan 9 From Outer Space and this classic. There was no internet back then, and no DVDs - but unfortunately neither were there any stores that sold copies of these movies on VHS, or video stores that rented them. They were too esoteric. I had to wait until the DVD era, when Robot Monster appeared on a compilation - and when I finally had it I watched it numerous times. These days we can pretty much have access to any of these movies as soon as we find out about them, but back then I'd read and read, and had to wait until I'd finally get my hands on them. It added to the experience a little, because you'd have much more time to develop an imaginary image that could be compared to the real thing once seen. It still gets me that the actors who appear in these films achieve immortality via the sheer random way they'd happen to feature in what we could loosely call a "classic" in the sense that they were famous for all the wrong reasons. Is that better than fading into obscurity? I guess it depends on how you look at it.

Yes, Robot Monster is a classic now, at least in the sense that it has a kind of cult following, or at least an audience that continues to grow - because who can resist the urge to see whether it truly is one of the worst films ever made? I think that there are a few aspects that helps it avoid that moniker, but there's certainly much about it that's suspect and downright awful. The performances are mostly sub-par, costumes shoddy, effects terrible, set decoration deplorable and general narrative dopey and silly. What takes the cake is the design of Ro-Man himself - one of the worst creature designs ever put together in the history of film, if not the worst. But every time I watch Ro-Man shake his fist at nobody in particular, or lumber around in the Bronson Canyon, Los Angeles, in the heat (which must have been quite challenging for George Barrows), I feel a certain affection for it. With Shakespearean lines like "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!" it shoots for the moon, but ends up on the Canyon floor wandering around blindly, shaking a fist and generally going nowhere in particular.