Andy Warhol reportedly said it was his one of his favorite movies and underground filmmaker Mike Kuchar cited it as an inspiration for his movie, Sins of the Fleshapoids.
Creation of the Humanoids was an odd, stagey, technicolor science fiction movie made up of long dialogue scenes.
I had never heard of the director, Wesley Barry, but he was a major child star in silent film. He had red hair and in movies back then, they would cover kids with make up to cover their freckles. But in 1917, the director of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm filmed him without make-up and audiences were strangely charmed. After that, he would play disheveled freckle-faced country boys. He may have been a progenitor of the Little Rascals. I looked him up on YouTube and found a lot of old newsreel if him making appearances at public events.
He was born in 1907. His acting career finally petered out in 1938. He had one last acting job in 1943. I don't know how or if he stayed out of World War Two, but he began working as an assistant director starting in 1946. He worked in television and B movies. Also worked as a producer starting in 1950 and directed a few things himself. His last credit in IMDb was as assistant director on the '70's cop show The Rookies. Creation of the Humanoids was the last thing he directed.
The movie was obviously cheap, but it looked pretty good. It had an Oscar-winning cinematographer, Hal Mohr, and Jack Pierce who had done the make up for Frankensteiin and other Universal horror films, did the make-up. They were talented but at the end of their careers.
The androids looked impressive, covered with green make-up, wearing bald wigs with their eyebrows concealed with contact lenses that made their eyes look metallic.
Most of humanity has been wiped out in a nuclear war. Many of the survivors have been rendered sterile by radiation. The birthrate is extremely low and humans are expected to die out within two hundred years.
To cope with labor shortages, the begin producing more and more advanced robots with vast knowledge downloaded from a master computer.
Don Megowan playes Cragis, one od the leaders of an "ultra-right pressure group" called The Order of Flesh and Blood, an anti-robor hate group. They know humanity is on its last legs, but they don't want to be replaced by robots. They walk around wearing Confederate caps and pants with sparkly shirts as they harass robots on the street.
But Cragis' position in the order is threatened. His sister is in "rapport" with a robot. She had to get a permit to buy a robot boyfriend which is how the Order found out.
One of his sister's friends visits her in her apartment.
"Pax, you're wonderful!" she tells the robot. "He's so glib! I'll bet he even has a sense of humor!:
"He'd better have! I paid extra for it. Say something funny, Pax!"
"Don't put me on, dear," Pax says. "I have a sense of humor bur I'm not creative."
Today, most people who form a romantic attachment to AI have psychiatric issues and fall into it by accident. In this movie, Cragis' sister lives with a robot programed to be her boyfriend, but she's presented as the normal open-minded non-bigoted one while her horrified brother is the screwed-up weirdo.
Free on Tubi.
