YMMV / Robot Monster

• Awesome Music: None other than the vastly overqualified Elmer Bernstein did the music for this movie, (during a period where he had been blacklisted and was forced to work on smaller B-Movies) and delivers a jangly, impressively spooky title theme that is so very much better than the movie deserves.
• Complete Monster: The Great Guidance is the cruel leader of the Ro-Man Empire, who forcefully forbids that his own people feel any human emotions. Arriving at Earth to eliminate any potential rivals, the Great Guidance sends XJ-2 down to activate a device that destroys countless cities and causes the survivors to go to war, with XJ-2 killing the survivors. Discovering a surviving group, the Great Guidance has XJ-2 try and kill them while occasionally contacting them to show them footage of the Earth's destruction to lower morale, at one point killing two survivors on a rocket ship just to show it to them. When XJ-2 refuses to kill one of them, having developed feelings for her, the Great Guidance kills him and proceeds to destroy Earth himself.
• Cult Classic: One of the most famous examples in sci-fi history. Despite being torn to shreds by critics, the movie maintains a large following of people who think it's the apex of So Bad, It's Good entertainment; one of the reasons it got an comprehensive and high quality restoration by 3-D Film Archive 70 years later. There's even a group of fans who question the "bad" part of that trope, citing its competent direction, sound design (the C-Ray is a simple but effective trick), and Bernstein's excellent score.
• Moral Event Horizon: Attempted with Ro-Man murdering a little girl. However, that girl is so incredibly annoying that it counts as more of a Take That, Scrappy! moment.
  • In a straighter example, if sending Ro-Man to exterminate humanity doesn't send the Great Guidance over the line, then destroying Earth out of wrath definitely does.
• Narm Charm: Pretty much the whole thing.
• Nightmare Retardant: How could we ever think of Ro-Man as scary?
• Padding: Ro-Man goes up a hill. Ro-Man goes down a hill. This repeats for ten minutes.
• Retroactive Recognition: The film's score is an early effort by renowned composer Elmer Bernstein, who would later go on to score such classics as The Magnificent Seven (1960), To Kill a Mockingbird, and Ghostbusters (1984)
• So Bad, It's Good: One of the classic examples.
• Special Effects Failure: The best effects the movie has is the "Billion Bubble Machine" (which had its own credit) and using a negative of the film spliced in at certain parts.
  • Not to mention the toy rocket with a sparkler in its butt and the very obvious hand spinning it around in circles.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: This is a depressing damn movie if you ignore the unintentional humor. The human race starts out reduced to eight people, and over the course of the film humanity's last hope at escape is destroyed, a young child is murdered, and a woman's lover is killed in front of her on their wedding night. It's All Just a Dream... except the Great Guidance shows up at the end, meaning we might be heading towards it anyway. If this movie was made competently it would be impossible to sit through.

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