The Revenge of the 31 Days of Cheese - Day 18 - The Colossus of New York

Title notwithstanding this is a rather small film.

We join the Spensers, Jeremy is a world class genius at everything who has a lovely wife Ann and small bothersome ‘cute’ child (which we will call Kenny) his brother Henry is while a ‘brilliant’ electronics expert who we very quickly learn is a bit jealous of Jeremy. Jeremy is given the Nobel peace prize because he’s been doing so many good things.

On the return from Sweden Kenny manages to lose his toy airplane – Jeremy the Genius at the urging of Kenny chases after it and ends up getting hit by a truck. Dead. Nice going kid.

However it turns out that Dad is a brilliant brain surgeon – who removes the brain from the body and keeps it – alive – in a fish tank looking thing. After that he dragoons his other son (the one he never really loved) Henry into making a robot body for Jeremy so he can continue his work.

As a side note Jeremy’s work is to use the polar regions to grow food – however it turns out that large amounts of methane gas are trapped underground in the polar regions which if released could cause catastrophic weather changes.

Amway so they build a robot body and put the brain in the robot body – Jeremy is no happy with this but as the robot body gives him enormous strength he uses it to fight crime as Robotman – no sorry that’s the Doom Patrol storyline. Or is it Robocop or is 8^th Man?

You may get the sense that this plot line has been used before and since

Anyway the put Jeremy’s brain in this HUGE DAMN Robot body – like 9 feet tall robot body. Nobody bothers to explain why – and Jeremy as said before he is not happy but for a while tires to press on with his work but being just a brain removed from a body (there’s a argument about man’s soul vs. intellect earlier in the film) Jeremy gradually goes mental. He isn’t helped by the fact that his brother makes moves on his wife. (and guess who is Jeremy’s first victim?)

As he goes mental develops esp and mind control powers. Why? I think to pad out the running time of the film – that at 70 minutes feels really long.

He also ends with some kind of death rays coming out of his eyes? Why? Because the plot needed it. At the end he

Jeremy decides that the best way to help humanity is to kill the useless ones – but to do that he feels he needs to off the folks in the United Nations first (oddly enough, as I think about this, he seems to sound more like a backbench GOP member of congress rather than a lunatic brain in a robot body – or maybe that is the explanation of some GOP members of congress – but I digress.) he for reasons of plot also wants his wife and child there and mind orders his dad to make it so. I’m not sure why – there are lot things in this film that just don’t seem thought out very well.

So amok he runs at the UN shooting down folks with his eye beams one at a time. And here’s something else that bothers one about this film – when the first person is beamed to death by Robot Jeremy folks stand and look. Okay shock will make you do that - at first but you have to assume that by the 3^rd person the shock would wear off and they would be running like hell but they don’t seem to do that.

It’s rather odd really.

In the end Kenny runs up to his dad (the robot’s been visiting the kid on the sly) and tells him he hates him and that he’s bad – and robot agrees – and it seems (we were told about this earlier) there’s an off switch under his left arm where he can’t reach so he tells Kenny to turn him off.

He does so –everybody looks somewhat shamefaced . the father babbles something about being wrong and hoping that Jeremy can forgive him. Nobody seems to give a thought to all the other dead bodies lying about. And we fade out knowing that Kenny is going to have to deal with the knowledge that he killed his father, twice.

The whole film feels like a stretched version of the twilight zone – in fact I think a half hour would have sharpened the focus of the screen play. As a last note the soundtrack is mostly piano that sounds a little to my ears anyway like it was composed by Stravinsky while he was on ether. It’s just another annoying part of this film.

Enjoy with a Kinish – hey it’s New York right?