D: Wesley E. Barry. S: Jay Simms. P: Wesley Barry, Edward J. Kay. Cast: Don Megowan, Erica Elliot, Frances McCann, Don Doolittle, George Milan, Dudley Manlove. US Dist (DVD- Drive-In Double Feature w/War Between the Planets): Dark Sky Films.

What a strange, unpolished gem this is. On one level, it has the quality of an amdram Philip K. Dick adaptation, like a school play directed by precocious sixth-formers. But its ideas are ambitious, intelligent and delivered with intense conviction. The staging is often primitively theatrical: characters stand spread across the frame in groups of three to declaim dialogue at each other, in a succession of sparse and unconvincing sets. Exterior cityscapes are represented by outrageously bogus backdrops, with cardboard-cutout silhouettes standing in for futuristic tower-blocks. But the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts, thanks to an unusually intelligent script (by Jay Simms) and a highly-atmospheric electronic soundtrack reminiscent of Forbidden Planet. It’s thoughtful, wordy and often wilfully antidramatic. As cinema it’s dead in the water, but as experimental theatre it’s undeniably intriguing.

It is the future. A 48-hour nuclear war has left the world badly-irradiated, but a tiny enclave of humanity has survived, employing high-tech robot servants to maintain comfortable pre-war lifestyles. In a short sequence which must have inspired a similar vignette in Robocop (1987), various failed prototype robots are paraded before the camera (including the “solidified electricity” suit from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers), settling finally on the humanoid form deemed most user-friendly: hairless, blue-skinned, boiler-suited and anonymous. Their human masters know them by a contemptuous epithet: “Clickers”.*

Jealous of the technological sophistication of their robot “inferiors”, mankind has set in place stern laws restricting Clicker intelligence levels. People are outnumbered and (thanks to increasing sterility) effectively obsolete. A fanatically anti-robot organization, the Order of Flesh and Blood, unofficially monitors human-robot interaction and lobbies the government to discourage the state’s dependency on mechanisation.

But a robot underground movement has quietly arisen, dedicated to Clicker self-actualisation. In a novel twist, the robots are uninterested in overthrowing the humans: they only want to serve humanity in the best way possible, by becoming all that they can be – by fusing the best qualities of robot and human into a composite being. With a rogue human scientist, they have perfected a means of copying a human personality – thoughts, intelligence, emotions – into a transistorised circuit, which can then be implanted into the brain of a Clicker. With a few cosmetic adjustments, the robot will be able to mingle undetected amongst the humans.

The installation of this “thalamic unit” renders the Clicker an R-96, only 4 points short of a man – and, it is delicately suggested, adding reproductive apparatus will elevate the R-96 to full R-100 status. Their bodies will last for 200 years, impervious to the radiation which is remorselessly thinning the stock of humanity. Antihero Cragis (Don Megowan, of The Creature Walks Among Us), head honcho of the Order of Flesh and Blood, gets wind of the R-96 scheme during a raid on the rogue doc’s workshop – but there are further surprises in store…

Technically-remedial, dramatically null; nobody could accuse Humanoids of playing to the gallery. It doesn’t even have a real hero: Cragis is an absurd blowhard – who even, on occasion, refers to himself as The Cragis – and a thinly-veiled racist, to boot. For a low-budget science fiction flick, it may be unique in lacking a single exciting action scene. The surprises extend even to the cheap costumes for the Order of Flesh and Blood (Confederate army uniforms as designed by Liberace): their vainglorious absurdity is deliberately scorned in one dialogue exchange. Perfunctory atom-war setup aside, the future society has been sketched in some detail. The situations are unpredictable and even a little risqué. (Much to his disgust, Cragis’s sister is “in rapport” with a Clicker – shacked up with a robot, like Deckard in Blade Runner, though we fade out before they get down to conjugals.)

In fact, Humanoids has much more in common with written SF than with the typical big-screen sci-fi fare of the period. Its dry philosophical tone and unsensational storytelling would have been unlikely to endear it to the drive-in crowd, though its downright oddness may have wormed its way into selected young minds. It’s not hard to see why Warhol name-checked Humanoids as his favourite film: the noble plight of the Clickers will resonate strongly with anyone who dreams of becoming a machine. Director Wesley E. Barry seems not to have enjoyed much of a career; aside from this, his only other notable contribution to the genre was to shoot additional scenes for Invaders from Mars (1953). Few have seen Creation of the Humanoids, and fewer still have even heard of it. But for its tiny handful of admirers, Humanoids lingers oddly in the memory, and remains one of the strangest and most thoughtful SF films of the 60s. It may not be good, but at least it’s interesting.

* If The Blue Man Group weren’t inspired by Creation of the Humanoids, I’ll eat my hat.