J-bot6 Don't let the rating I gave this movie dissuade you. I actually think people who like 'thinking' science fiction should check this out. Some have suggested that this 1962 feature should be remade. If someone did do a remake, they'd have to just accept the fact that many casual viewers would claim that this movie's remake was ripping off Blade Runner, The Questor Tapes, Ghost in the Shell, and the 2000s Battlestar Galactica. However, it looks very much like all of those shows 'borrowed' from this 1962 motion picture. Clearly the concepts in this film were really coming to a head in the 1960s. "Do androids dream of electric sheep" was talking about a lot of this stuff in 1968 (and who knows how long the book took to write). Captain Future of the 1940s and 1950s touched on some of this too. Every time I dig a bit deeper, I find out that someone's tackled many of these concepts. Heck, even Fred Saberhagen's Berserker novels tread similar territory. I've written this in such a way that I don't give too much away. I think the best thing is to see the film for yourself. Be prepared though, since certain aspects of it are certainly dated. The preliminary robot designs during the film's intro are primitive looking (and almost comical). And the pacing is somewhat difficult at times. Stick with it though. The thesis comes out in the end and it's pretty entertaining to watch it unfold. This is a movie that could actually be done as a stage play. To that effect, I really enjoyed the sets and the lighting. With such a deep message, I felt that even more dramatic lighting and higher contrast ratios would have added even more gravity to certain scenes. So yes -- check this out. It must have come as quite a shock to audiences of the time. For audiences today, it covers topics that we're quite used to so the impact won't be as great. Still pretty neat though.

Scott LeBrun Legendary pop artist Andy Warhol was apparently a big fan of this low budget sci-fi flick. It takes place in a post-apocalypse Earth. Robots created to serve Man are becoming the majority since human life is now fragile. Gerontologist Kenneth Cragis (Don Megowan) is among those working to find ways to extend life spans. He's also adamantly anti-robot, heading up a group dubbed The Order of the Flesh and Blood. Trouble brews when the increasingly advanced robots prove themselves capable of killing humans."The Creation of the Humanoids" is one of those movies that's more notable for its intentions than what it ultimately accomplishes. The major criticisms is that it's almost all talk and very little action, and that it is admittedly static. There aren't very many set-ups from scene to scene. Characters endlessly stand around and talk about the plot. The performances are mostly stiff, although since some of the actors *are* playing robots, this can be forgiven. One exception is the enchanting Erica Elliott as Maxine, the young woman who catches Cragis's eye.On the plus side, the movie offers a fair bit for its audience to think about. It visits a very common theme in science-fiction: what it means to be human. It also touches upon the subjects of bigotry and advancing technology. It manages at least one provocative plot twist. It's directed in a very flat style by Wesley Barry, but its futuristic designs are decently done on a low budget - the assortment of colours is fairly pleasing to the eye.It might be worth a look for devoted B movie watchers.Six out of 10.

Michael_Elliott Creation of the Humanoids, The (1962) BOMB (out of 4) There seems to be a lot of debate over whether this film is downright horrid or way ahead of its time. Needless to say but I'm one who thinks it is horrid. The movie takes place years after a nuclear bomb has gone off and pretty much destroyed civilization. One human (Don Megowan) wants all the robots killed after one of them kills a popular doctor but the robots feel that they have much more to offer in the world. Soon the two sides are discussing their options and what might be best for the future. To say this movie is talky would be an understatement but it should come as no shock that this was apparently one of Andy Warhol's favorite movies. This movie might have a good idea hiding somewhere behind the badness and there's no question that this movie would influence upcoming films about human-robots but that doesn't take away from the fact that this thing looks incredibly cheap, has horrible acting, bad directing and goes on way too long. It's funny that one would say a 75-minute goes on too long but that's pretty much the case here because we get one long dialogue sequence after another and nothing being said is the least bit interesting. We have the robots talking about why they're important. We have the humans talking about why the robots should be destroyed. We have the robots explaining that they worship the same God that humans do. This talk is pretty much the entire movie and it gets boring within the first five minutes. Megowan played the Gil Man in THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US and even the Gil Man would be embarrassed by the performance here. We also have Dudley Manlove from PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, which is a classic compared to this thing. The robots look pretty cheap but the make up was done by Universal legend Jack Pierce and what a shame his talents were being used in movies like this. It seems this film has gathered a nice cult following over the years but the nice ideas behind some of the things in the movie isn't enough to make it good. You really can't overlook all the badness this film has to offer and especially how incredibly boring it all is.

junk-monkey What a peculiar, flawed little gem! Judged by any criterion this film shouldn't work at all. The script is insanely wordy and there is hardly action to speak of, for 75 minutes people just stand in a row across the screen and woodenly deliver screeds of expositional dialogue towards each other, often without any cuts or camera movements - sometimes, when there are cuts, the off screen dialogue is delivered by the other actor/s so straight and flat (almost as if they were just prompting) that it appears the editors either had no idea about sound editing or the director had given them nothing to edit together. The sets are minimal and flat, the costuming cheap, the score electronic 'Space Age' ooooeeeness seemingly unrelated to anything happening on screen.So far, so what? Sounds like every other cruddy 1950s / 60s lo no budget SF movie - it even starts with a montage of stock footage nuclear explosions. But what actually arrives on screen is an odd mix of genuinely novel SF ideas (I particularly liked the Human / Robot 'marriage' idea that sees one of the characters transferring aspects of her personality to a robot and then falling in love with the refection of herself) and a stream of philosophical ponderings and anti-prejudice messages that must have been mind-blowing to a teenage drive in audience of the time (if they had managed to stay awake long enough to see them). The plot has our central anti-hero character (an anti-hero in a cheap 60s SF movie in itself is a major oddity) is one of the leaders of a quasi-militaristic, group with growing influence over the police and government, dedicated to the preservation of MAN in a world where the already tiny population of a post holocaust Earth is declining due to radiation induced mutations and sterility. The group sees the ever more sophisticated Robots as a threat and agitates against them (think Brownshirts and Jews). Our 'hero' discovers a robot disguised as a human being and suspects a plot to replace real humans with replicas, then is told his sister is living openly with a robot she is in love with. He goes to visit her to put a stop to that sort of disgusting behaviour and meets a friend of hers. There is an immediate bond and the two fall in love - we discover (before they do) that both he and the girl are robot replacements implanted with false memories (this film was made in 1962, six years before Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was published), and the final shots hold out hope that the human race will allow themselves to be resurrected, one by one, in near indestructible robot form and that robots will soon have the ability to reproduce much in the same was as humans do now... cue end title...It's all pretty woodenly done and some of the writing is dreadfully dull but there are more SF ideas thrown out, and assumptions made, in this movie than in any dozen other more mainstream SF movies of the period. The film is unsurprisingly (but amazingly) adapted from a novel by Jack Williamson (at the time - as now - it was rare for Hollywood SF movies to be based on existing works). The movies main problem is that it looks just like it. A novel filmed.Apparently this was one of Andy Wahol's favourite films. It'll stand another watching.