Product Details

• Actors: George Nader, Gregory Moffett, Claudia Barrett, Selena Royle, John Mylong
• Directors: Phil Tucker
• Writers: Wyott Ordung
• Producers: Phil Tucker, Al Zimbalist, Alan Winston
• Format: Black & White, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Rhino / Wea
• VHS Release Date: September 8, 1993
• Run Time: 66 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (77 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302157315
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #288,147 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Phil Tucker's Robot Monster has rightfully earned a place in the pantheon of bad movies over the years, and for good reason--it makes anything done by Ed Wood look like an Orson Welles masterpiece. Picture, if you will, a gorilla in a diving helmet (the Ro-Man) who wipes out all of the Earth's population except for one family (the Hu-Mans), whom he terrorizes through the rest of the film. From his headquarters in a Bronson Canyon cave, he communicates with his superiors via World War II surplus radio gear and a Lawrence Welk-style bubble machine, then shambles around the woods looking for his quarry. The plot of this post-holocaust sci-fi nonsense is hardly worth going into past that point, except to say that it's stupendously, staggeringly awful filmmaking. It's even more incredible when you consider that the writers and director undoubtedly believed that they were making a deep, serious, grave statement about the horrors of nuclear war... and wound up with several reels of celluloid flotsam. Any self-respecting fan of bad cinema who hasn't seen this notorious wreck of a movie isn't worth his or her salt. Poor Phil Tucker--when Robot Monster was released, it received such a thorough shellacking that he tried to commit suicide. Tucker failed, though, and went on to make the even less comprehensible Broadway Jungle and the marginally better Cape Canaveral Monsters. --Jerry Renshaw

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ro-man Hollandaise -- Yummy!, August 8, 2006

By 

Michael R Gates (Nampa, ID United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Robot Monster (DVD)

Though some fans of "bad" cinema often put 1953's ROBOT MONSTER on the same tier with PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959), it honestly doesn't even come close to reaching the heights of inspired ineptitude attained by Ed Wood's magnum opus. Still, ROBOT MONSTER is an entertaining so-bad-it's-good flick in its own right.

The last six remaining humans on Earth resist attacks by Ro-man, an extraterrestrial who looks something like a gorilla wearing a cheap diving helmet. Receiving orders from his superior via 1950s consumer electronics that emit, of all things, soap bubbles, Ro-man's job is to clear out all intelligent life on Earth so that his "people" can come inhabit the planet themselves. Unfortunately for Ro-man, he finds it impossible to carry out his orders after he falls in love with an Earth girl, and it's all downhill for him from there.

This ludicrous tissue-thin plot is full of gaping holes, and the badly executed scene transitions and various stock-footage inserts of fighting reptiles and animated dinosaurs are humorously befuddling. But when it is revealed at the end of the film that all was simply the dream of a science-fiction-crazed young boy, the whole dish seems a little more palatable.

Some critics have read the film as an allegory of life in occupied Europe during World War II. Ro-man, it is claimed, represents a Nazi soldier simply carrying out the orders of his Hitler-like commander, and the surviving humans can be viewed as living an Anne Frank-like existence in their energy-encompassed hideout. But the obvious weaknesses of the plot, the glaringly technical mistakes, and the bargain-basement production values make it hard to believe that the filmmakers were astute enough to attempt allegorical storytelling. Any similarity to real situations or to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Believe it or not, the music for ROBOT MONSTER is actually pretty good (that is, "good" good, not "bad" good). It was composed by the late Elmer Bernstein, who went on to score cinematic greats like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960), TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962), GHOST BUSTERS (1984), and MY LEFT FOOT (1989), to name but a few. Perhaps it is the efforts of the talented Mr. Bernstein that prevents ROBOT MONSTER from reaching the same level of achievement as Wood's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE?

ROBOT MONSTER may not be the best "bad" film ever made, but for aficionados of the awful and connoisseurs of the crass, it's not to be missed.

While it's not in the original 3-D--yes, ROBOT MONSTER was filmed in old-school 3-D--the DVD from Image Entertainment offers the highest-quality consumer copy of the film to date, and the price that amazon charges for it is hard to beat.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This could be the best of the worst!, August 16, 2000

By 

Steven J. Hoffman (Takoma Park, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Robot Monster [VHS] (VHS Tape)

I must agree with those who say this could be the BEST "worst movie ever made." I have seen nearly every Ed Wood movie and although his "Plan 9 From Outer Space" has a special place in the heart of any fan of bad sci-fi movies, "Robot Monster" certainly gives it a run for the money. (Ed Wood had nothing to do with "Robot Monster" but it's similar to his type of movies.) This movie is so gloriously bad and yet entertaining on many levels. I love the stock footage of fighting lizards, interjected for no apparent reason. The tender moments like the impromptu wedding scene. The bubbles that float up around Ro-Man's junky-looking equipment. The fact that the heroine manages to get tied up in rope TWICE, once by her friends & family and later by the monster. The terminology (like the "calcinator death ray"). The pointless scenes showing the Ro-Man schlepping up and those barren hills and plains. Dialogue that is so stilted, it would make Ed Wood proud. I could go on and on. What could you possibly be doing in your life that is so important you can't spend the 62 minutes it takes to watch this incredible paean to human incompetence?

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Great One, March 6, 2005

By 

David Goldhammer "dgoldhammer" (This Island Earth) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Robot Monster (DVD)

There's a moment in "Robot Monster" where every first-time viewer is kin: a lizard with a fin glued to its back jumps onto another lizard, in what is meant to represent the titanic struggle of two dinosaurs. Since this has nothing to do with anything that happened before, the novice can only watch in slack-jawed wonder, asking "What the...?"
"Robot Monster" is awash with stunning moment likes this, which may be why the trailer boasts it is "baffling." But there is the glimmer of a story.
Earth has been devastated by aliens using the calcinator death ray. The handful of survivors (and the planet's only hope) so far are immune to the ray, but are available through a viewscreen for regular taunting by the solitary Earthbound "Ro-Man" (his nom de guerre). He in turn is regularly berated by "the leader of all Ro-Men," the "Great One," sort of a psychotic nanny type who blurts his orders from across the void of space. We know it's space because of the dog food we see -- or are those asteroids?
We know they're aliens because they sport gorilla-suit bodies, and
diving helmets topped with antennae. They speak always while flailing their bulky simian arms, and in booming, stentorian threats, virtually every utterance a quotable gem. This lends a vaguely Shakespearian tone to the proceedings.
The Great One harps on the Earth Ro-Man to finish the job, while waving a violin bow. Ro-Man is willing to kill everyone in the protected compound, but something new and mysterious stirs in him when he views the professor's daughter, Al-Ice (as Ro-Man says it). This becomes one of the dramatic conflicts, and inspires the invader's touching, burbled soliloquy:
"Yes! To be like the Hu-Man! To laugh, to feel, to want. Why is this not in the Plan?...Where on the graph do 'must' and 'cannot' meet? I must, yet I cannot."
There's something compelling in all this; even my young, impressionable kids have enjoyed it several times. Every actor has something dazzlingly silly to say in all seriousness. How many movies offer a monster that entertains just by ambling up and down scrub-covered hills? "Robot Monster" is one film that will reward you just as much on the twentieth viewing as on the first.
Oh, and what about the lizards? All is revealed in the end.