Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- I Introduction: Science Fiction Double Feature
- 1 From “Multiverse” to “Abramsverse”: Blade Runner, Star Trek, Multiplicity, and the Authorizing of Cult//SF Worlds
- 2 The Coy Cult Text: The Man Who Wasn't There as Noir SF
- 3 “It's Alive!”: The Splattering of SF Films
- 4 Sean Connery Reconfigured: From Bond to Cult Science Fiction Figure
- 5 The Cult Film as Affective Technology: Anime and Oshii Mamoru's Innocence
- 6 Whedon, Browncoats, and the Big Damn Narrative: The Unified Meta-myth of Firefly and Serenity
- 7 Iron Sky's War Bonds: Cult Sf Cinema and Crowdsourcing
- 8 Transnational Interactions: District 9, or Apaches in Johannesburg
- 9 A Donut for Tom Paris: Identity and Belonging at European SF/Fantasy Conventions
- 10 Robot Monster and the “Watchable … Terrible” Cult/SF Film
- 11 Science Fiction and the Cult of Ed Wood: Glen or Glenda?, Bride of the Monster, and Plan 9 from Outer Space
- 12 Visual Pleasure, the Cult, and Paracinema
- 13 “Lack of Respect, Wrong Attitude, Failure to Obey Authority”: Dark Star, a Boy and His Dog, and New Wave Cult SF
- 14 Capitalism, Camp, and Cult SF: Space Truckers as Satire
- 15 Bubba Ho-tep and the Seriously Silly Cult Film
- A Select Cult/SF Bibliography
- A Select Cult SF Filmography
- Index
10 - Robot Monster and the “Watchable … Terrible” Cult/SF Film
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- I Introduction: Science Fiction Double Feature
- 1 From “Multiverse” to “Abramsverse”: Blade Runner, Star Trek, Multiplicity, and the Authorizing of Cult//SF Worlds
- 2 The Coy Cult Text: The Man Who Wasn't There as Noir SF
- 3 “It's Alive!”: The Splattering of SF Films
- 4 Sean Connery Reconfigured: From Bond to Cult Science Fiction Figure
- 5 The Cult Film as Affective Technology: Anime and Oshii Mamoru's Innocence
- 6 Whedon, Browncoats, and the Big Damn Narrative: The Unified Meta-myth of Firefly and Serenity
- 7 Iron Sky's War Bonds: Cult Sf Cinema and Crowdsourcing
- 8 Transnational Interactions: District 9, or Apaches in Johannesburg
- 9 A Donut for Tom Paris: Identity and Belonging at European SF/Fantasy Conventions
- 10 Robot Monster and the “Watchable … Terrible” Cult/SF Film
- 11 Science Fiction and the Cult of Ed Wood: Glen or Glenda?, Bride of the Monster, and Plan 9 from Outer Space
- 12 Visual Pleasure, the Cult, and Paracinema
- 13 “Lack of Respect, Wrong Attitude, Failure to Obey Authority”: Dark Star, a Boy and His Dog, and New Wave Cult SF
- 14 Capitalism, Camp, and Cult SF: Space Truckers as Satire
- 15 Bubba Ho-tep and the Seriously Silly Cult Film
- A Select Cult/SF Bibliography
- A Select Cult SF Filmography
- Index
Summary
As Lincoln Geraghty reminds us, early 1950s sf cinema, typified by films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Thing (1951), Invaders from Mars (1953), and War of the Worlds (1953), was often marked by a rather serious tone and effect, presenting “America and the world in the grip of emergencies … that jeopardized the future of the [human] race” (23). Despite their sometimes strange monsters and strained plots, the “emergency” visions in these films urged audiences to contemplate the trajectory of their newly atomic–driven world, to reconsider the tense and potentially destructive relations between nations, or, simply, as The Thing prompted viewers, to “watch the skies, keep watching the skies” for possible threats—from aliens of the extraterrestrial or earthly sort. Yet other films of the same era, works like Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), Cat–Women of the Moon (1953), and Robot Monster (1953)—all similarly invoking the specter of monsters, invasion, or what Susan Sontag famously described as the “imagination of disaster” (215)—just as often moved viewers in rather different ways. While tracking many of the same concerns and anxieties of the era, these works and their monstrous visitors prompted, both then and now, a less than serious, at times even a laughing response—albeit, I want to suggest, one that only underscores the sorts of strains and exaggerations that often characterize sf films.
As most will readily recognize, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Cat–Women of the Moon, and Robot Monster are also typically cited as cult films, movies that have a special following and special appeal; in fact, films that often seem to traffic in or derive an element of their popularity from that very tension between the serious and the strained that, for some, is the downfall of many sf films. Some commentators describe these as exploitation films, some as camp texts, and others, like Jeffrey Sconce, simply as “bad” films that have been effectively redeemed for viewers and critics by a “paracinematic sensibility” they project (“Trashing” 102), that is, by their tendency to make us mindful of conventional film aesthetics and, in the process, to subvert those same aesthetics.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Science Fiction Double FeatureThe Science Fiction Film as Cult Text, pp. 159 - 171Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015