{"id":25726,"date":"2024-09-03T09:00:13","date_gmt":"2024-09-03T16:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/?p=25726"},"modified":"2024-08-27T14:53:54","modified_gmt":"2024-08-27T21:53:54","slug":"lydias-film-critique-robot-monster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2024\/09\/03\/lydias-film-critique-robot-monster\/","title":{"rendered":"Lydia\u2019s Film Critique<\/em>: Robot Monster<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

If two words effectively attract swarms of schlock-hungry audiences, they are \u201crobot\u201d and \u201cmonster.\u201d Plastered in large red text across an illustrated poster, Robot Monster<\/i> (1953) was a lucrative success, bringing in $1 million USD at the box office. It isn\u2019t hard to imagine why\u2014the picture was filmed in elegant 3D, and with a title like that, amusement is almost guaranteed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On its very surface, the film is an abysmal B-movie classic with several gaping plot holes and novelty up the yin-yang. Its abundance of poorly executed gimmicks and the Automatic Billion Bubble Machine (accredited to N.A. Fisher Chemical Products, Inc.) is only skin deep. Below what many naively consider a staple in garbage cinema is possibly an abstract research into the mind of an eight-year-old boy overly consumed by fiction.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As the film opens, credits roll over a spread of comic-book covers. A menacing score composed by Oscar-winner Elmer Bernstein dissolves into a ditsy, childish tune as school-aged boy Johnny (Gregory Moffett) approaches over the hill, dressed in spacesuit getup. Bubbles float from out of his toy gun toward the audience\u2019s anaglyph glasses.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As the child and his young sister Carla (Pamela Paulson) stroll through the rocky Bronson Canyon terrain, they find two clean-cut archaeologists busy at work. After a short ramble about spacemen and robots, the children are whisked away by their mother (Selena Royle) and older sister Alice (Claudia Barrett) for a routine nap.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When Johnny wakes, powerful lightning bolts strike, and up above a bright flashing light grows enormous before consuming the screen completely. A quick cut jumps immediately to a seemingly unrelated sequence of battling prehistoric reptiles.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to mistake this scene as incoherent nonsense, but upon closer examination, it\u2019s clear that director Phil Tucker is just getting started.<\/p>\n

What Johnny and the audience solemnly learn is that he is among the last of six humans on Earth: himself, his two sisters, his mother, and the aforesaid archaeologists. What has happened to the rest of mankind can be attributed to Ro-Man, a portly half-gorilla, half-diver alien. He putters around his territory in a slow-moving form on account of his rotund body. Very little of him is threatening but his words are mostly clear: \u201cNow I must kill you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through the rim of Ro-Man\u2019s diving helmet, a concealed face is covered in gauze\u2014his only visible expression: a shake of the fist.<\/p>\n

After a few deaths and a brief affair between a love-starved Ro-Man and a reluctant Alice, the film closes with a big twist and bookends itself with \u201cTHE END\u201d blocked over the spread of comic-book covers, the child-like dreamscape locked in between.<\/p>\n

Robot Monster<\/i> is nothing less than a triumph in American cinema and nothing more than cheap trash. Death, destruction, pain, and glory, the timeless film is survived by an affectionate crowd of cult followers.<\/p>\n

Pair with a glass of Plymouth gin and eat your heart out, Citizen Kane<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If two words effectively attract swarms of schlock-hungry audiences, they are \u201crobot\u201d and \u201cmonster.\u201d Plastered in large red text across an illustrated poster, Robot Monster (1953) was a lucrative success, bringing in $1 million USD at the box office. It isn\u2019t hard to imagine why\u2014the picture was filmed in elegant 3D, and with a title […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25727,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,316],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-september-3-2024"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25726"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25728,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25726\/revisions\/25728"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}