Notes: 84 minutes. "In intriguing 2-D."
Roy: George Nader
Alice: Claudia Barrett
Mother Marta: Selena Royale
The Professor: John Mylong
Moron Johnny: Gregory Moffett
Fat Brat Carla: Pamela Paulson
Ro-Man: George Barrows
Voice of Robot: John Brown

Produced: Al Zimbalist
Co-Produced and Directed: Phil Tucker
Screenplay: Wyatt Ordung
Special Effects: Jack Rabin, David Commons
Music: Elmer Bernstein (not Leonard's brother).

Summary: Playing in a rocky wasteland, a behelmeted Johnny tells Carla, "You're disintegrated." She whines about wanting to play house as they run into two archaeologists at a cave, Roy and an older man, who are far too tolerant. Mom and sis Alice (hubba hubba, thinks Roy) show up to cart off the brats to their nap. Johnny laments, "Say, are we ever gonna have a new father around our house?"

What doesn't become clear until later, if ever, is that we seem to go into Johnny's naptime dream at this point. Or does he get conked on the head? Or is that my wishful thinking? We see lightning and that same lizard footage from the 1940 film, One Million BC. Johnny sees bubbles at the cave and out comes Ro-Man, an alien monster (a gorilla suit and diving helmet with antennae) at "extension XJ2" who reports via tv to "The Great Guidance," another similarly attired being. Earth was their only rival, so a cosmic ray has destroyed all but eight humans on earth.

The older archaeologist is now the germanic "Dad" who has managed an invention to keep beams from the house and has immunized the group with an antibiotic. They speculate about making it to a garrison on a space platform, but Ro-Man appears on tv saying, "You escaped destruction because I did not know of your existence." He shows footage of destruction, gloating that a "calcinator beam" wiped out the human race, almost. "Your death will be indescribably foul, humans. There is no escape." We assume Roy is dead, but he actually is spying a few feet away on Ro-Man at the cave. Contacting "the Great One" (Jackie Gleason?), he is scolded: "You sound like a human, not a Ro-Man." Ro-Man miscalculates that "three elude me." "Eliminate error; is this not the law?"

Roy reappears among the group and banters with Alice: "You're so bossy you ought to be milked before you come home at night." Two unseen humans made it to a rocket, but tv shows them blown up, and Ro-Man sneers, "Now of the two billion, there are six.... By your clock time, in one hour I seek you out."

Alice connects circuits, and in video confrontation and an attempt to reason with Ro-Man towards "peace with honor," Dad shows individually the fine people Ro-Man intends to destroy. There's a certain something about Alice, so Ro-Man agrees to meet her alone. "Is Alice gonna have a date with Ro-Man?" asks one of the brats. Alice talks herself into this with an insane rhapsody on the wonder of humankind, "up from the sea, the slime ... to stand erect...." But the others stop Alice and tie her up. Johnny sneaks off instead. Ro-Man tells him, "Your people were getting too intelligent" (another miscalculation clearly). Johnny notes, "You look like a pooped-out pinwheel" and spills about the protective serum, which will allow Ro-Man some kind of "calibration" to wipe the rest out now. Dad forgives Johnny instead of kicking his ass in.

Roy and Alice are wander pointlessly about looking for Johnny, run from Ro-Man, pantomime with each other, and get off on aggression. When back home, they ask Dad to marry them: the "biggest social event of the year." Roy weds shirtlessly, and Dad yammers about following the ten commandments, the beatitudes, the golden rule, and hopes humanity still has a chance.

The serum is familiar to the Ro-Man leader, similar to XZA in protection against the death ray, you see. Brat Carla is kidnapped and strangled to death, and Mom seems upset by this. At the funeral, Johnny, whose ass is still not kicked in, wishes he had played house more often with her.

Roy and Alice experience love-picnic interruptus and Alice is kidnapped. Johnny volunteers to be a decoy for an Alice rescue. Meanwhile, Ro-Man is making time with her: "Suppose I were human. Would you treat me like a man?" Don't you hate it when the Great Guidance calls you in the middle of these things? "Why do you call me at this time? ... Call me again at another time." But Ro-Man is violating the plan by not killing her immediately. "To be like the human. To laugh, feel, want. Why are these not in the plan?" Ro-Man searches his soullessness: "I cannot yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do must and cannot meet? Yet I must what I cannot."

Ro-Man tells the Great Guidance, "I cannot kill the girl but I will kill the boy." GG is pissed: "You wish to be a human? Good. You will die like a human." He unleashes lightning from his fingers and kills Ro-Man. "Prehistoric reptiles" appear again in world cataclysm.

Cut to Johnny with Roy. Hm. It was all a dream. The two archaeologists are invited to dinner. A vision of Ro-Man emerging from the cave again and again accompanies the final sounds of "zot zot zot."

Commentary: Ro-Man is not the brightest of Robot Monsters. "I cannot yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do must and cannot meet? Yet I must what I cannot." This is as baffling, convoluted, and yet vacuous as Troilus' predestination speech in Troilus and Criseyde.

In any case, the "dinosaurs" are pointless. Ro-Man looks like a reject from the New Zoo Review. And in Johnny's construct, incest is inevitable.