THE 3RD HALL OF INFAMY: Infamy Rises Again

All that leaves is Takoma, right?

noob question:

Am I supposed to assign a rating to each film, or am I just ranking them?

__________________
Captain's Log
My Collection

Robot Monster, 1953

A creature who is part of an invading force destroys almost all of the Earth’s population with a death ray. A mere handful of survivors remain: the family and colleagues of a professor (John Mylong), including his wife (Selena Royle), their two daughters Alice (Claudia Barrett) and Carla (Pamela Paulson), young son Johnny (Gregory Moffett), and the professor’s assistant, Roy (George Nader). Desperate to survive, the family tries to negotiate with the creature known as Ro-Man.

Resplendently cheesy, and most certainly saved by its meager run time.

There is a high level of commitment to real science in this film, and to see this you need look no further than . . . um . . . the machine that puts out bubbles or the way that electronics are rewired by gesturing at them enthusiastically.

This is a very stupid movie, but for the most part it’s an inoffensive and charming stupidity, like Roy’s obsession with picking Alice up and carrying her around in exactly the least romantic moments, such as when he’s physically controlling her so she won’t do something he doesn’t like, or when they need to run away from a threat.

There’s also a certain surreality to the way that the family reacts to their circumstances that might have been thematically interesting if it felt more intentional. They, as a group, show very little emotion about the fact that everyone they know (well, aside from Roy) is dead. They talk a lot about needing to keep the human race going but . . . how is that going to work? (I mean, Alice and Roy clearly know how it WORKS, but an upsetting amount of incest would have to happen for the human race to survive past a single generation.)

There’s also something very bizarre about how casual they are about the alien menace who is explicitly bent on destroying them (well, he wants to get to second base with Alice, but the rest of them are toast!). They just go wandering around the land, then act surprised when they start getting picked off.

The effects are all oddball and totter on the edge between shoddy and amusingly low-rent. The bad guys are all men in gorilla suits wearing astronaut helmets on their heads. Whenever the poor actor inside of the Ro-Man costume is forced to chase one of the human characters, you can sense the weight of the costume. The overall effect is of a TeleTubby who has overdosed on Rogaine.

Anyway, back to the family and how weird they are! These people are straight up sociopaths, right? Allow me to quote, in full, the eulogy they give to one family member who is killed by Ro-Man: “No regrets! We enjoyed her as long as she was with us, and now, somehow, we have to find a way to live without her.” I mean, you might have one regret. Like letting someone wander into the hands of a monster you all knew was roaming the countryside? Later, they do not even hesitate to use a young child as bait.

I don’t maybe even want to know the answer here, but if the writer/director of this film had an older sister named Alice, we need to call the authorities. It’s hard to explain just how weird and fetish-lite the film’s treatment of her is. The part where Ro-Man tries to get Alice to grab his boobs, then half-heartedly drapes a rope around her, then backhands her is just . . . I have concerns. She’s constantly being carried around by the male characters, and she minces around in this too-tight shirt---which is later ripped off of her shoulders---and pencil skirt.

So most of this movie is a kind of fun-bad. My only genuine qualm with the film was the extensive use of unsimulated footage of two reptiles who had been literally thrown together to fight, which is gross and unnecessary.

Very silly.

You can do either, but your only responsibility is to watch all the movies and then rank them at the end.

Thanks, just wanted to be sure our host didn't need ratings for math purposes.

Nope, all the math comes from how you order the films.

I still haven’t finished yet. Oh ye of little patience.

I can hardly wait for the next one .....or can I

You should join us...OR DIE!!!!!

If this is the worst you all can do I should've joined! I actually liked this movie. It starts out with some great theme music during the credits and I'm thinking, 'pretty good score for a z-movie', then I see it was scored by Elmer Bernstein who scored all sorts of respected Hollywood films. I loved the shooting locations of the rocky terrain which looked appropriately sci-fi-ish. But who in the hell goes to a picnic in such a place? Equally I liked the shots of Ro-Man walking through what looked like a hillside that had been swept by a brush fire, which then works with the whole destruction of Earth thing.

When the movie started I thought it must have been made for Sunday matinees for the kiddies, but no way...it's too bold for the little tykes. We have everyone on Earth dead except eight people, that's pretty grim. An alien promising a quick death if they surrender and if they don't a torturous painful death, yikes. Dad has a gun for killing his family just in case, OMG...I couldn't believe that made it into the film. We have the newlywed couple going off behind the bushes to consummate their marriage and remember this is the 1950s we're talking about! Then a little girl gets strangled, while her big sister almost gets raped by apeman. Way too adult stuff for the kiddies back in the 50s. So I'm guessing this was made for teens at the drive-in theater.

At any rate if it wasn't for the reused stock footage of the dinosaurs being stuck in the film, I'd say this was a decent little z-1950s creature feature flick. There was enough weird stuff going on that I'm giving this a but then again I Iove 50s sci fis, so this was right up my alley.

I'm in damnit! At least I think so! Lol

I just realized something. Since they had a fully loaded gun, why didn't anyone think about using it on the creature?

__________________
IMDb
Letterboxd

You could do what raul is doing and review the nominations as they come in and join in later on if you decide you'd like to be a part of it. That said, I can guarantee you would hate my nomination.

It's a well-established fact that Earth guns have no effect on aliens.

It's fascinating that the Human Female is considered desirable by literally every species that ever existed. Ro-Men, Gill-Men, giant gorillas, Martians, Hutts. No matter how un-human the species might be, they all like a nice set o' gams.

I like to imagine an alternate universe where a Morlock gets a look at Rod Taylor and is like, "helloooo"....

It's the classic "They're after our women!!!" trope that, itself, often branches out from racism/xenophobia and/or classism. I watched a YouTube video about a woman who had been killed and one of the top comments was "Immigrant violence against our white women is out of control!!!". Sexual assault is infamously used in warfare by invading militaries, with the psychological element of not only committing the violence, but "invading" the gene pool of the victimized community. It's such a pervasive fear, and like you say, it starts to teeter into absurdity when the "men" in question are, like, space lizards.

I think that I Married a Monster from Outer Space actually has a pretty nice variation on this trope where the alien in question not only isn't very attracted to the human woman (at first), but also cannot impregnate her.

And naturally any alien that lusts after men just happens to look like an incredibly sexy human woman. (I think it's absolutely hilarious that in Lifeforce, they have to kill off the male aliens almost immediately because the absolute horror of a nude man walking around is simply too much, while the film has no qualms about parading around a nude teenage woman for the entire runtime).

And in all seriousness: I can't think of any film that use aliens in queer framing, which seems incredibly strange. (I mean, there's a gay platonic kiss that's used as sort of a goofy bit of comedy in Starman, but that's it).

(I'm not really counting Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, because that's a comedy and not mainly sci-fi).

Right, as I prepared dinner last night I was trying to think of ANY example where an unattractive, Not-Natsha-Henstridge alien and/or monster (male or female) abducted a dude for lustful reasons and came up empty. It just doesn't happen unless the "monster" looks a lot like a sexy human lady. No such thing as a hideous frog-headed girl monster that just wants a fella to bring back to her pond. (There's probably an obvious example I'm forgetting but I'm drawing a blank.)

The more charitable explanation is that the writers need an excuse for the hero to rescue the leading lady, but underlying that is all the gross stuff you've already mentioned.

I think that sexual violence against women is much more normalized in storytelling, so that you will get a screaming woman being carried away by a man (or a "male" monster) with obvious sexual subtext and it's considered appropriate even in children's cartoons or entertainment. Sometimes for laughs you get monstruous female characters carting off men, though this is always framed as a joke and never as a serious threat. It's the air we breathe at this point, and no one would hesitate to show children a villain carrying off a screaming and kicking woman. But a man being carried off by a male villain in a similar way would get people all riled up.

I think that homophobia combined with how often horror and sci-fi are firmly rooted in male gaze genuinely makes it harder to have the threat of sexual violence against men, even implicitly. Movies are willing to go as far as allegorical sexual violence (such as the alien penetration/"impregnation" you get in Alien), but never the outright lust that you see toward female characters.

Again, this is where I think that I Married a Monster from Outer Space is just such an interesting outlier, because the focus isn't on the alien lust toward a human woman, but about the main character as a protagonist trying to rescue her husband. The marriage isn't saved by a man defending his woman from the invader, it's saved by a woman rejecting the invader and trying to reclaim her husband.

I also think that there's this integral tie between invasion and impregnation, and so there isn't the same cultural weight to sexual violence against men. The horror of the woman being taken by the alien/monster isn't that she's experiencing violence, it's the idea that she might be carrying a baby now and it isn't yours. Or rather, the cultural weight is different, because for a man the cultural push seems to be shame at having been "dominated" and participating (even unwillingly) in a gay encounter. Like, I think that you could create a very fun or a very disturbing film about an alien going after men in that way, but the framing would have to be very different from what is done when the victim is a woman.

Anyway, this conversation is 10x deeper than anything I expected from Robot Monster, you pooped-out pinwheel.

Robot Monster was entertaining and inspired in-depth discussions. Its chances of winning this challenge are not good.

Honestly, I was deciding between two movies to nominate: one that is bad in a fun way, and one that made me legitimately miserable to watch. I went for the former, so I don't think my odds are good at winning, but in the end I decided to respect what I implicitly consider to be the good faith boundaries of this HoF.