Excerpt from new piece on 1953's Robot Monster

Friday 2/6/26

This will also be in the book on horror films. Excellent stuff. No film writing like it.

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The best bad movies—which will sound like an oxymoron only to those who’ve never fallen for one—feel as though they are made out of love and had to be given to us by the people responsible for them the same as the person who is brave enough to love gives their heart to another in all its vulnerable nakedness. These bad movies have box loads of flaws, as we all do, but a purity of spirit, however naive. Their flaws may charm us like a lopsided smile of someone with whom we’re besotted. They win us over with their lack of guile and surfeit of winsomeness. And in this they become hard to loathe and easy to embrace.

Among the best of this kind of bad movie is Phil Tucker’s 1953 effort—a funny sort of word in this context—Robot Monster. It’s a film that sounds like someone’s idea of a joke, because there couldn’t actually be a movie about an alien who is a dead ringer for a man in an ape suit with a diving helmet on his head having landed on earth to basically hang out in a cave in the middle of nowhere and try and take over the earth by giving a single picnicking family a hard time with a ray of dubious efficacy.

Right? Wrong, simple human!

Said ray device runs on bubble power—those same bubbles you blew as a kid—and if this weren’t enough, our would-be conqueror—known as the vaunted Ro-Man—falls for one of these pulchritudinous earth daughters of Eve in King Kong/Creature from the Black Lagoon fashion, save that our boy can talk unlike that atavistic duo of unnatural amatory intent.

A lot of what Ro-Man has to say is to his micromanaging boss, the Great One (aka, Great Guidance, which you’d think you couldn’t have too much of), who would've have loved FaceTime. The Great One is a big-time cock-blocker, always demanding progress reports on how the takeover and/or annihilation of earth is going, until the Ro-Man finally declares, as though he had truly become human (or post-human, if you prefer), “I’ll call you back” in a fit of pique, aware that screens will end us all.

It nearly goes without saying that recycled footage featuring warring dinosaurs—for unexplained reasons—is interspersed throughout. To stumble upon and watch this movie in the middle of the night without having heard of it before is to question your sanity, or if you remain among the living, or whether you’ve managed to get higher than anyone did at the Monterey Pop Festival off of your still lukewarm cup of chamomile tea.

In other words, what glorious fun. The films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger feel like they were made by people who cared about us and wanted us to be well. And while Robot Monster is the qualitative antithesis of the likes of A Canterbury Tale and A Matter of Life and Death, the place from which it comes—its motivation—strikes us as oddly similar.