Robot Monster (1953)

Phil Tucker, George Nader, Claudia Barrett, George Barrows · 1953 · 62 min

Ro-Man is a gorilla suit with a diving helmet on top, dispatched to exterminate the last eight humans on Earth, and he is quietly having a crisis about it. Shot in four days in Bronson Canyon for about twenty thousand dollars, in 3-D, with an Elmer Bernstein score far better than the film around it. The gap here between ambition and budget is so wide that it comes out the other side as a kind of poetry.

Chosen print (2026-08-17): Archive.org item robot-monster_202210, file ROBOT_MONSTER.mp4 — 0.37 GB, 640x480, 62.6 min.

The standard 62-minute cut (catalog corrected 2026-08-17 to match the 1953 Astor release), 640x480, with the theatrical trailer shipped as separate files so it stays out of the feature. Culled along the way: a 1480x1080 upscale running an impossible 73 minutes, a YouTube re-rip, and a colorized derivative.

Selected from our vetted candidate queue after the automated reject rules and the owner eye-pass. Torrent generated from this exact file on 2026-08-17; that torrent is what the swarm carries.

Public domain by long-standing distribution consensus: published 1953, renewal required in the 28th year and by all accounts never filed. The renewal window (1980–81) falls in the Copyright Office's post-1977 online records rather than the scanned CCE volumes, so the online renewal search is the named remaining verification step before the torrent publishes.