Sunday, May 9, 2010

S01E07 - Robot Monster

Plot

Short: With Commando Cody and the police privy to the moon men's plan to sabotage Earth's defenses before the full scale invasion, the sabotage team is short of funds for its mission. Desperate to get money, the saboteurs first try to kidnap Cody for ransom, and then pull of a payroll heist, but nothing seems to go according to plan for them.

Film: A menacing robot monster called Ro-Man has killed every living human on Earth, all except for eight survivors. Ro-Man, unable to kill them with his death ray, pursues the remaining humans personally to pave the way for his race's conquest of planet Earth. But the humans are not willing to go without resisting.


Movie Review

Commando Cody was a no-show in the previous episode, so he returns in this episode with two episodes of his generic serial, which is twice the torture. If anything, watching two episodes of Radar Men From The Moon show just how much the show strains to maintain its end-of-episode suspense and how much contempt the writers have for the viewers' intelligence.

For example, in the first of these two episodes, the bad guys plan on kidnapping Commando Cody to hold him for ransom, but they are unable to find him in his lab so they instead kidnap the female scientist (who proves to be useless at everything) in hopes of luring Cody to them. But when Cody comes to rescue her, what do the kidnappers do? They fire their guns at him to kill him. As another example, one of the bad guys is caught in the second episode and is being transported to a jail via an ambulance. Do the police keep an eye on him with heavy guard? Not at all, they only provide a single policeman, which allows the captured henchman to escape with blinding ease.

And let's not forget about the cliffhanger endings, which are getting ridiculous. At the first episode's end, the woman scientist is trapped in a diving plane and Commando Cody climbs inside to help her. But the controls have been destroyed, which the woman knew about. So why did she only tell him about this when Cody tried to pilot the plane? Wouldn't it have made sense for her to jump out of the plane with the parachute that was available instead of waste Cody's time? But that wouldn't have given us a cliffhanger ending, now would it?

And now for the feature film. Oh. My. God.

This movie wants to be important. It tries to be important. It really tries to be important. And yet it fails. Spectacularly and hard. The only thing that prevents this film from being one of the most wretched pieces of cinema in existence is that it genuinely earns the "so bad it's good" label. It's a terrible film, but one that must be seen to be believed.

The first pitfall of this film is its framing device, which itself is introduced incredibly vaguely. The entire film is apparently the dream of the young boy after some unseen fall, and yet it's introduced with stock footage from previous (and likely better) movies. What was the point of this except to pad out the movie's length (obviously not enough to save us from two Commando Cody episodes)? And strangely enough, the same people exist in real life and in the "dream sequence," and yet they play different roles (from random archeologist to dad to most everyone). Again, what is the point of this?

The story is the next shortcoming. The overall plot is that Ro-Man is trying to kill every human on Earth, but he is unable to slay eight (or six, not counting two off-screen characters) final humans (oh, and all of this is excluding a garrison of human soldiers in a "space platform" that Ro-Man spared for some reason...moving on...). The humans are unable to fight this robot monster and instead stand around waiting for things to happen. When they do end up doing something, they do something completely stupid, like having an impromptu marriage ceremony or having a honeymoon in an area where Ro-Man is known to roam. Honestly, how did people this stupid survive?

But the biggest plot hole has to do with Ro-Man, who falls in love with the human female Alice upon seeing her. He is a machine built without human emotions or sentimentality, and yet falls for a human woman with one look. Why does he fall in love with her? Because monster movie monsters always fall in love with human women, isn't it obvious? Ah, but this sudden love is stretched into the realm of bizarre sexism when Ro-Man, after capturing Alice, tries to remove her dress to look at her breasts. Are robot monsters pre-programmed perverts or something?

This movie also does something that would be unthinkable in a blockbuster movie today: killing children with ease. Like The Mad Monster before it, a little girl is killed off-screen by the eponymous creature in the film, but Robot Monster one-ups them by showing the young boy being strangled on-screen. Oh, happy times. Maybe standards were looser back then, or maybe audiences knew how pathetic these "death" scenes really looked.

And one cannot leave without mentioning the look of the title character, Ro-Man the robot monster himself. If Ro-Man is a robot, then this movie grossed more money than Gone with the Wind. No one in their right mind would believe that a man wearing a diving helmet with rabbit-ear antenna and a gorilla suit is a robot. Maybe a monster (a stupid monster, but a monster), but not a robot. The poor actor must've been extremely hot underneath that suit while trudging through the wilderness during filming.

So, in short: no plot, no characters, terrible monster. Watch it once and then never again. Or...


MST3K Review

...watch Joel and the bots tear this film a new one. The three are obviously getting sick and tired of Commando Cody, because the riffs for the two serial shorts were bland and not as sharp, but they had a lot more fun with the movie itself. They still have an annoying tendency to talk over the film's dialogue at inopportune moments (even for a bad movie, we'd like to know what's going on), and still need to perfect some of their timing, but overall, the jokes in this episode were fantastic during Robot Monster.

Commando Cody, not so much.

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