One’s furry. Another throws a killer basketball. We salute a few of cinema’s ungainly, weird and downright unexpected robots… We’re all well aware of cinema’s more charismatic and famous robots. RoboCop, his arch-nemesis ED-209. The Terminator. The beloved, bobble-legged Robby from Forbidden Planet. These are the celebrities of science fiction cinema who, if they existed, ... A few of cinema’s more unexpected and strange robots
One’s furry. Another throws a killer basketball. We salute a few of cinema’s ungainly, weird and downright unexpected robots…
We’re all well aware of cinema’s more charismatic and famous robots. RoboCop, his arch-nemesis ED-209. The Terminator. The beloved, bobble-legged Robby from Forbidden Planet. These are the celebrities of science fiction cinema who, if they existed, would probably get the best seats in fancy restaurants.
But what about those other robots in genre cinema? The awkward robots, the ungainly robots, the robots who suddenly appear in a movie and receive only hoots of bemusement or outright scorn for their trouble?
This article is dedicated to those less fortunate machines. Whether they’re inexplicably covered in fur, have a strange predilection for eating brains, or simply don’t have a reason to be in a movie at all, they’ll find a safe haven here, as we give these artificial friends the recognition they deserve. Welcome home, metallic friends.
Ro-Man: Robot Monster (1953)
Poor Ro-Man – or Ro-Man Extension XJ-2, to give him his full name. Director Phil Tucker had so little money to make the invasion movie Robot Monster that he couldn’t even afford to make Ro-Man a proper robot as the script demanded. What Tucker did have, however, was a friend,George Barrows, who happened to have made his own gorilla outfit, so the director simply crammed a space helmet on his head and – presto – the terrifying Ro-Man was born.
Robot Monster is often listed as one of the worst films ever made, while Ro-Man has become the epitome of the shambling 50s monster. It’s a pity, really, since Tucker’s film was nothing if not ambitious; inept though its effects are, it nevertheless contains everything you’d expect from a period sci-fi movie, including rockets, a death ray, a screaming lady, and even some (reportedly) quite good 3D if you could see it in a cinema.
Ro-Man doesn’t strike fear into our hearts, but he’s at least a memorable robot, even if he doesn’t particularly look like one. Barrows, meanwhile, got great mileage out of that homemade gorilla outfit, and wore it in several films and TV shows through the 50s and 60s.
Chanti: Devil Girl From Mars (1954)
It’s not often that aliens invade Scotland, but Nyah, this film’s titular Martian devil woman, ends up in the Highlands on her way to London. A female political uprising on Mars has left men emasculated and unable to procreate, so Nyah’s on a mission to find virile Earthmen to take back home and replenish her planet’s population.
Although her spaceship isn’t particularly reliable (hence her pit stop on a desolate moor), she’s well protected; not only does she carry a raygun that looks like an aerial torn from the top of an old television, but she also has a personal guardian in the shape of Chanti. He may stagger around like a man trapped in a cardboard box, but Chanti packs a terrifying death ray that can dissolve the husk of a tree in seconds. Scotland’s other alien visitor, Scarlett Johansson (see 2013’s Under The Skin) probably could have done with backup like this.
Kronos: Kronos (1957)
“You’ll have to be shock-proof to withstand the emotional assault of science fiction’s biggest thrill sensation!”
So ran the tagline for this fabulously cheesy 50s invasion flick, directed by B-movie specialist Kurt Neumann (Rocketship X-M, The Fly) and starring Jeff Morrow (This Island Earth, The Giant Claw).
The biggest robot on this list, Kronos is an alien ‘Destroyer of Worlds’ who emerges from what appears to be an ordinary crashed meteorite and begins sucking energy from power stations. As he does so, he grows to the size of a skyscraper. Doctor Gaskell (Morrow) soon learns that Kronos is actually an alien machine designed to strip planets of their energy, and that even dropping nuclear bombs on the thing will only cause it to grow to even greater size (‘Failure!’ screams the following day’s newspaper headline).
As well as the largest robot, Kronos is also among the most minimal; essentially a pair of roving onyx blocks with twin antennae sprouting out of a dome at the top, there’s something disarmingly bold and odd about the way he’s designed – lacking the usual wobbly legs of most 50s robots, Kronos instead roams the landscape on piston-like stilts.
Like any monstrous invader, Kronos’ Achilles heel is soon found; by somehow reversing its polarity, Doctor Gaskell manages to trick the power-hungry machine into consuming itself. A pity – with a bit of taming, Kronos would have made a fabulous novelty vacuum cleaner.
Box: Logan’s Run (1976)
When this silver-clad robot comes trundling into an ice cave, even actors Michael York and Jenny Agutter look surprised. This particular robot is named Box (voiced by Roscoe Lee Browne), who was once intended to catch and freeze animals for the film’s future society to eat.
As well as freezing food, Box has also taken it upon himself to freeze humans attempting to flee from the dystopian Dome – a place where all humans are vaporised at the age of 30. “Fish and plankton! Sea greens and protein from the sea!” the alarmingly shambolic, very sparkly robot rambles. “I’m ready! And you’re ready! It’s my job to freeze you!”
With a cackle, Box produces his deadly weapons – some sort of laser gun, and what can only be described as an electric carving knife. Compared to the sorts of robots George Lucas would bring to the screen just one year later in Star Wars, the shambling Box looks like something from a bygone age. But like so many robots on this list, there’s something quite endearing and homemade about his wobbly tin foil face and angular metal skirt. Perhaps he could come to our house next Christmas and cut the turkey.
Proteus IV: Demon Seed (1977)
Artificially intelligent machines tried to take over the world before and after Demon Seed (see Colossus: The Forbin Project and The Terminator), but few rampaging computers are as weird as this 1977 film’s Proteus IV.
When a semi-organic computer designed by scientist Dr Harris (Fritz Weaver) begins to think for itself, it quickly begins to display a worrying fascination with human bodies. “When are you going to let me out of this box?” Proteus asks the doctor, in the creepily hushed tones of actor Robert Vaughn.
When Dr Harris mocks Proteus’ question, the computer begins to formulate an escape plan. The computer takes over the good doctor’s automated house, trapping his wife Susan (Julie Christie) inside, and slowly builds a robot body for itself out of various components and metal appendages. The resulting robot – an electric wheelchair with a whining mechanical arm – is a quite disturbing-looking thing, and its infatuation with Mrs Harris grows to almost Cronenbergian extremes, as Proteus decides it wants to sire a half-human, half-mechanical child. Then things get really weird, especially for poor Julie Christie.
Elle: Starcrash (1978)
Knocked together by Italian director Luigi Cozzi, and featuring performances from Christopher Plummer and David Hasselhoff, Starcrash is a delightfully awful camp classic with some surprisingly fetching cinematography.
After Star Wars, any sci-fi adventure needed a robot side-kick with a faintly deranged personality, and Starcrash's contribution to the genre was Elle, a jet-black automata with a suggestively-shaped head and the voice of a jittery Texan car mechanic. (Elle was played by Judd Hamilton, then married to the film’s co-star Caroline Munro. Hamilton’s voice was later over-dubbed by Hamilton Camp, a British actor and folk singer.)
Although less famous than C-3PO or R2-D2, Elle does at least get some of the movie’s best lines, including: “Don’t move, or I’ll shoot your queen!” Poetry.
Hector: Saturn 3 (1980)
With veteran director Stanley Donnen (Singin’ In The Rain, Funny Face) onboard, as well as a script by hot young writer Martin Amis, Saturn 3 should have been a classy movie. Instead, it’s almost as cheesy as Starcrash, and memorable largely because Kirk Douglas keeps taking his clothes off all the time (something Amis referenced in his novel, Money).
The real star of the piece, though, is the incredibly elaborate Hector, a robot Harvey Keitel’s character, Captain Benson, jacks into and controls with his mind. Unfortunately, Hector eats baby brains (yes, really) and shares Benson’s homicidal personality. Before long, he’s rampaging around a space station, scaring Farrah Fawcett and killing her pet dog, Sally.
It’s all incredibly silly, but Keitel’s stern demeanour (but not voice, which was dubbed by Roy Dotrice for some reason), plus some quite stylish lighting and set design make it just about worth watching. And then there’s Hector, whose stylish, retro design makes him the true star of the show.
Sico: Rocky IV (1985)
By 1985, the boxing franchise had mutated from Oscar-winning drama into a jingoistic revenge movie, with Rocky IV featuring Dolph Lundgren as towering Soviet boxer, Ivan Drago. SICO is an LED-encrusted robot who’s given to Rocky’s layabout brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young) as a birthday present, and has occasionally been cited as a symbol of the movie’s underlying theme: humanity versus technology. Stallone’s analogue boxer trains by carrying logs and running in the snow; meanwhile, Drago trains in a high-tech gym. You could even argue that Ivan himself is a sort of robot, brainwashed into submission by evil, evil Communism.
Looking like a cross between a Dalek and a housefly, Sico soon becomes fast friends with Paulie, and it even becomes a childminder of sorts; there certainly doesn’t appear to be anyone else looking after Rocky’s son when he and his wife fly off to the USSR for the Drago fight.
In real life, Sico was the brainchild of Robert Doornick, founder of International Robotics Inc, and there’s quite a moving story behind it. Doornick originally created Sico to help autistic children with their communication skills; Stallone saw the creator and his invention on a talk show one day, and contacted Doornick to see if Sico could help his own neurodivergent son, Seargeoh, then around five years old. Stallone subsequently became so enamoured with the robot that he decided to put it in Rocky IV – and thus a star was born.
Sico subsequently went on tour with James Brown (who performed Living In America in the film), appeared in a Carly Simon music video, and met Ronald Reagan at the White House. There’s a somewhat bitter ending to the story, though: in 2023, Stallone released a new cut of Rocky IV, in which all traces of Sico had been removed.
“The robot is going to the junkyard forever,” Sly reportedly said. For shame.
BB: Deadly Friend (1986)
Did you know that Kristy Swanson was once turned into a robot? Well, she was – in one of Wes Craven’s less widely discussed horror movies. Deadly Friend tells the story of Paul (Matthew Labyorteaux), a young science genius who’s built his own artificially intelligent robot named BB. When sweet-natured girl next door Samantha (Swanson) is left half-dead by her abusive father, and BB’s destroyed by a shotgun wielded by Anne Ramsay, Paul has the not-so-smart idea of fixing Samantha’s shattered brain with a chip taken from the robot.
Samantha is then revived as an inhumanly strong killing machine, after which nobody is hurt and everyone lives happily ever after.
Deadly Friend is an odd mix of youthful fantasy (with a young cast who could easily have appeared alongside Ramsay in The Goonies), domestic violence and extreme gore: Ramsay, for example, has a basketball thrown at her head so hard that it shatters into a crimson mist.
BB, meanwhile, is perhaps the ultimate 80s robot, with his pincer hands and ominous round eyes. It’s worth hanging around for the ending, too, where BB makes an unexpected and extremely strange reappearance.
Various: Cobra (1986)
Sylvester Stallone’s cop thriller, a kind of sub-Dirty Harry for the Reagan era, shudders to a halt for over a minute so that Brigitte Nielsen can pose for a photoshoot with several robots. Stallone wrote the script for Cobra, so we’re guessing these were his idea. He had robots on the brain in the mid-80s, clearly.
Jinx: SpaceCamp (1986)
In the mid-80s, a group of school children were sent into space by mistake. What was the reason for this disastrous mistake? A mechanical error? Computer malfunction? No. It was all the fault of Jinx, the ‘overly-literal’ robot. Having overheard his 12-year-old friend Max (Joaquin Phoenix) exclaim “I wish I were in outer space” (good use of the subjunctive mood for such a young kid), Jinx sneaks into NASA’s control room, and while Max and four other youngsters are cheering and whooping in the cockpit of a space shuttle, engages the launch procedure.
With his round body and tiny head, Jinx looks a bit like a Sputnik satellite with a baked bean tin resting on top. And if his throaty voice sounds oddly familiar, that’s because he’s played by Frank Welker, the ubiquitous voice artist of such 80s cartoon characters as Slimer in The Real Ghostbusters and Uni in Dungeons & Dragons.
He may look and sound reasonably cute, but it’s worth remembering that, although he drones on about “Best friends forever”, Jinx almost managed to kill more people than Hector, Kristy Swanson and Proteus IV combined.
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