{"id":40046,"date":"2023-06-12T13:08:18","date_gmt":"2023-06-12T17:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=40046"},"modified":"2023-06-12T13:08:18","modified_gmt":"2023-06-12T17:08:18","slug":"robot-monster-and-seventy-years-of-the-ro-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2023\/06\/12\/robot-monster-and-seventy-years-of-the-ro-man\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cRobot Monster\u201d and Seventy Years of the Ro-Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Will be screening on June 24th at 3p.m. at Manhattan\u2019s Dolby Screening Room, 1360 Avenue of the Americas. Tickets can be purchased online<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe boy is impertinent!\u201d<\/p>\n

Ro-man<\/em><\/strong> is not quite an ape. And he\u2019s not quite a man. He\u2019s kind of a sentient alien who is smart enough to destroy civilization but not smart enough to be able to breathe Earth\u2019s atmosphere sans his diving helmet. He\u2019s a complicated Ro-man<\/em><\/strong> and no one understands him but his woman. Phil Tucker\u2019s \u201cRobot Monster\u201d is a post apocalyptic survival film that conveniently evades all glimpses at the actual invasion and aforementioned apocalypse. The evil Ro-Man <\/em><\/strong>have invaded and destroyed Earth because\u2014well\u2014humans <\/em><\/strong>are bad. And to add insult to injury they monitor the remaining survivors in hopes of capturing and or destroying them.<\/p>\n

They can never seem to make up their minds on that mission statement.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Now human <\/em><\/strong>have all but lost the war against the Ro-Man<\/em><\/strong> and all that\u2019s left are the traditional nuclear family straight out of \u201cOzzie and Harriet.\u201d There\u2019s ma, and pa, and little sister Carla, and slimy big brother Johnny, and two horny teenagers. And there\u2019s Ro-Man<\/em><\/strong>, 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-man<\/em><\/strong>s calls them humans<\/em><\/strong>, with extra emphases on the man<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s meant to patronize their victims, or if they simply have a hard time with English like most foreigners. Because Englishing is hard. If you\u2019ve ever heard stories about making movies with random props, and costumes used and re-used, \u201cRobot Monster\u201d is 101 in throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks. To Phil Tucker\u2019s 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<\/em><\/strong>, even when it\u2019s obvious he\u2019s just re-using the same monster over and over. That\u2019s kind of what sums up \u201cRobot Monster,\u201d which (on a $16,000 dollar budget) feels like a ten page screenplay stretched out to an hour long science fiction film.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d assume the movie would at least make better use of the Ro-Man<\/em><\/strong> costume by featuring a lot of rampaging, fights, and violent attacks, but surprisingly Ro-Man <\/em><\/strong>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\u2026), and they\u2019re trying to survive through the end of the world by outwitting Ro-Man<\/em><\/strong>. But he\u2019s not monkeying around when it comes to keeping tabs on them filthy humans<\/em><\/strong>. The director places an unnecessary emphasis on the family interplay, even placing huge focus on hands, for reasons never quite explained.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>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 <\/em><\/strong>mainly has no real mission here, so the screenplay gives him one mid-way that\u2019s 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<\/em><\/strong> pits his focus on the teen daughter Alice (Claudia Barrett) for no other reason than that she\u2019s attractive, and one of the few women in what is a post apocalyptic sausage fest. He\u2019s an old fashioned ro-man<\/em><\/strong>tic, I guess.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s peculiar about \u201cRobot Monster\u201d 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<\/em><\/strong> wants to be a human<\/em><\/strong> and feel<\/em><\/strong> because\u2026 well Alice is kind of hot. Honest to god, that\u2019s the finale in a nutshell. And I mean, even if the family did<\/em><\/strong> defeat Ro-Man<\/em><\/strong>, the movie establishes there are other Ro-Men<\/em><\/strong> out there waiting in the wings, so what happens when they come knocking on the door for Alice, too? Are there no Ro-Women <\/em><\/strong>where the Ro-Man<\/em><\/strong> comes from? To add to the shit meeting wall formula, \u201cRobot Monster\u201d feeds us the convenient \u201cIt was all a dream! Or was it? It was. Or was<\/em><\/strong> it?\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t 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\u2019s kind of poetic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Will be screening on June 24th at 3p.m. at Manhattan\u2019s Dolby Screening Room, 1360 Avenue of the Americas. Tickets can be purchased online. \u201cThe boy is impertinent!\u201d Ro-man is not quite an ape. And he\u2019s not quite a man. He\u2019s kind of a sentient alien who is smart enough to destroy civilization but not smart […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[88,477,906,1087],"class_list":["post-40046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pcthugs","tag-aliens","tag-horror","tag-science-fiction","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40050,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40046\/revisions\/40050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}