Weird Wednesdays: Robot Monster

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Robot Monster, a 1953 independent 3D sci-fi film released during the middle of Hollywood’s 3D Golden Age, is not a terrific film. In a script allegedly written in an hour, with a budget of somewhere between $16,000 and $50,000 and a shooting schedule of around two weeks, Robot Monster is an exceptionally slapdash movie for something that received a wide release in the 1950s. The story features shoddy props, an unimaginative view of the popular shooting location Bronson Canyon, and a crew of actors doing their best with whatever chemistry they can muster over the course of an hour runtime.  However, for reasons that extend beyond the film viewed in a vacuum, Robot Monster exudes a charm that is impossible to ignore. 

In the film, a scientist, his family, and his assistant are the last remaining people on Earth. Ro-Man, an alien life-form controlled by a leader known as The Great Guidance, slowly wipes away the remaining humans on the planet in an effort to depopulate and take over Earth. The scientist and his family have accidentally developed a resistance against his atomic weapons, using pre-war antibiotics, so Ro-Man is on a journey to murder them one-by-one.

Director Phil Tucker illustrates this journey with around four or five established locations and many transition shots of Ro-Man meandering his way from one human to another. Nearly every interaction between Ro-Man and a human results in the human screaming for their life and avoiding the clunky alien with the greatest of ease. Even brief moments of capture end with the victim wrestling away from the gorilla arms of Ro-Man’s costume. The film drags these sequences on and on, somehow finding the chance in its hour-long runtime to meander – including a romance subplot that features a “suggestive electronic soldering sequence” and an uncomfortable marriage scene – and quickly wraps it up with a number of swift off-camera deaths, punctuated gruesomely (for family entertainment) by the killing of the youngest daughter first. When Ro-Man finally wipes out the family, the dystopic story reveals itself to be a dream from the mind of the young boy in the film, fantasizing about his sci-fi obsessions. As the young boy leaves the final shot with his family, Ro-Man emerges from the darkness of the set and walks menacingly towards the camera. Was it a dream or a vision of things to come? By the time the movie ends, it doesn’t really matter.

The bones of the film don’t amount to much, but the plot and the cast were not the elements bringing folks to theaters for its $1,000,000+ box office. Robot Monster, and many films made around this time, was riding the wave of a dazzling new and accessible form of 3D projection technology that transforms the movie into something greater than the sum of its parts.

If 3D was ever used as just a gimmick to get butts into seats, one could definitely point to Robot Monster, but the 3D effect, even at such a small budget, does accentuate qualities in the film that would probably be seen as problems without it. The scenes at the secret cave lair of Ro-Man contain some of the film’s cheapest props and the alien’s most ridiculous acting moment, compensating for the Ro-Man costume’s lack of visible face. However, the 3D effect gives the alien and the props, especially the bubble machine that works so well that they list the builder in the production credits, a childlike imaginative quality. The film goes from being a cheap sci-fi project to a fun, self-aware independent romp, like a contemporary indie stretching every dollar of their budget. The 3D effect transforms the uninspired shots of Bronson Canyon’s hills, caves, and valleys into captivating deep portraits of California’s beautiful desert, leading the eye of the viewer into the frame and keeping them engaged in some of the slower set-ups. If the film had pacing issues, strange character interactions, or bland fight scenes, there were plenty of other elements that drew your attention back in.

The defense of a dull 50s film due to the presence of 3D technology might feel like a cop-out, but it was not the reason in the theater to accept this strange artifact in 3D film history. The invaluable presentation of Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday crew set a great tone for a Robot Monster. 3D Film Archives efforts to restore the film for contemporary 3D distribution made for a crystal clear visual experience. The program, presented by Laird Jimenez in a recreation of the iconic Ro-Man costume, also included the short that preceded theatrical screenings of Robot Monster during its original run, Stardust In Your Eyes, a 3D comedy act featuring Trustin Howard, using his stage name “Slick Slavin.” Slavin performs cheesy 3D-integrated gags, which includes a joke about a hypothetical divorced couple he was seeing in the audience, and sings a corny song while doing impressions of famous actors contributing a verse or two. 

This short presents an energy of goofiness and an over-the-top awareness of the 3D effect that isn’t in the feature that follows it at all. Thinking about the design of a feature presentation, especially in the era of accompanied shorts or topical newsreels, the tone that a filmmaker or a studio has control of when their film makes it to the theaters can vary screen-to-screen. Not only did the short precede Robot Monster at its theatrical screenings, it was produced by the same studio in-house. The combined efforts of Stardust In Your Eyes and Robot Monster create a variety show element that exists to showcase this new 3D technology in its two, mutually beneficial forms: to call attention to efforts by the performers onscreen through Slick Slavin’s antics and to enhance the visual details and the relationship between the actors, the production design, and the background in Robot Monster, a film that might need the help more than marketing would admit.

Robot Monster exists in non-3D forms and in non-short-accompanied programs. Both of these realities for the film force it to justify its existence on its own terms, which is as a forgettable sci-fi adventure with a small budget, a rushed production, and an unspectacular story. While cinema tends to be judged on what stands the test of time, efforts should be made for films like Robot Monster to be presented in the form that the studio and filmmakers intended. To see the movie without Slick Slavin singing “My Heart is Owned and Operated by You” while doing an impression of Humphrey Bogart and throwing napkins towards the camera might just be an incomplete cinematic experience.

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