PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE

Description: The story of space aliens who try to conquer the Earth through resurrection of the dead. Psychic Criswell narrates ("Future events such as these will affect you in the future!") as police rush through the cemetery, occasionally clipping the cardboard tombstones in their zeal to find the source of the mysterious goings-on.  — Amazon.com

Director-writer-producer-actor Ed Wood is the regular posthumous recipient of the Golden Turkeys for Worst Film and Worst Director, not just of the year, but of All-Time.

His badness is the stuff of legend. His heyday was the 1950s and he featured an over-the-hill Bela Lugosi in multiple, virtually identical B-horror movies. Wood’s life and friendship with Lugosi is examined in the amusing film Ed Wood, which is perhaps director Tim Burton’s finest hour and one of Johnny Depp’s best performances. They portray Wood as a kind of Othello, “of one that loved not wisely but too well.”

His Plan 9 From Outer Space is sluggish, clunky, repetitive, a technical nightmare, without proper funds, badly-acted, and preachy almost to the point of an insult. Yet it is absolutely earnest. Therein lies its humor and its persistent appeal to cult audiences: it tries so hard, it tries so honestly, and it fails so horribly.

Plan 9 takes a story similar to The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which intelligent aliens come to Earth, warning us to curb our war-like ways and end our experimentation with nuclear weapons. The movie fails on so many levels and is beloved for all of them, transforming through no intention of its own into a game of “spot the catastrophe.”

Budget concerns — the movie was funded by a Baptist church Wood duped — lead to the excessive use of stock footage, to phony headstones knocked over by passers-by, to cockpit controls that are wooden chairs turned backwards. And let’s not forget all the bad model spaceships, or Wood’s inability to convincingly meld his outdoor shots to his soundstages, or to even light them the same. And let’s definitely not forget that star Bela Lugosi died during filming, and was replaced by a man with a cloak pulled over his face!

The story of Plan 9 is an absolute, incomprehensible mess that throws together as much pop culture paranoia and 1950s sci-fi conventions as possible without connecting any of them into a sensible mass.

Why do the aliens, who speak perfect English, send encoded messages to Earth? Why, if they come in peace and want to save Earth from itself, do they breed homicidal zombies? Why is the movie introduced by a psychic, when it has nothing at all to do with telekinesis or ESP? Why the hell do people call flying saucers “cigar-shaped” when they are so clearly not cigar-shaped at all, but saucer-shaped? The answer to these questions, and more, are because Wood wanted to pack the movie with as many sensational, tabloid-style fantasies and buzzwords as possible, regardless of how contradictory their various lore might be.

While the recent film Underworld uses “vampires and werewolves in the same movie!” as its gimmick, Wood, like a child wanting to play with all his toys at once, was first with “aliens, psychics, vampires, and zombies in the same movie!”

The failing of Wood and his films is entirely of the head, and not of the heart. You hear the words “worst,” “terrible,” and “awful” attached to them all the time, but never “hate.” No one is as venomous toward Plan 9 as they can be toward Bad Boys 2, Battlefield Earth, Gigli, or the average slasher movie. The Worst Director in history is without cynicism, irony, or contempt for his audience. Wood is at least filled with wonder when it comes to the filmmaking process and the ideas he wants to convey, even though he’s not smart enough to convey more than an iota of that awe.

Plan 9 defies traditional criticism. It has enormous camp value and a strange appeal to even the most discriminating film lover. It is hopelessly inept and incompetent, but has a place in the canon, albeit a lowly one. It lets us know how badly things can go wrong, and how passion is not always enough.

Every potential filmmaker should see Plan 9 at least once . . .
 

- The Friday & Saturday Night Critic
 

• Read the script.