Plan 9 from Outer Space

There is a scene in Tim Burton's Bio-flick/homage to Ed Wood where the director bumps into Orson Welles in a Hollywood watering hole-in-the-wall, and gets a brief spirit-lifting speech from the great one about remaining true to your vision and not letting the clerks and backers (who ARE clerks, regardless where they live or what fate finds them doing for a living) get you down. Maybe we should have to look at that scene before watching this film.

If Plan Nine is awful, it is probably so precisely because it IS so grandly ambitious. --If all ambition cannot culminate in a Citizen Kane or a Vertigo, maybe it gives us a moment to mourn quietly for the rest of us, the ones who worship genius –as Ed Wood no doubt did– without being geniuses ourselves. Bottom line, no matter what cards you get, you can laugh or you can cry at life. Ed Wood put on nylons and pumps and, making sure his seams were straight, marched into the fray of life like a true Hero Born. He stuck incongruous, obvious stock footage into his magnum opus, knowing the poetry would arise from the montage; he improvised long stretches, fully certain he would get the same results Welles could working under similar circumstances; he tried valiantly to coax performances out of wretched actors, or fatally self-conscious non-actors, like Criswell and Vampira, and put them in no matter how their work turned out ("No time to re-shoot!"). No matter what, you have to admire his staying in the game.

VanGogh is perhaps the best case scenario of a loser who cranked away, certain he was onto something, who is lucky enough to have the entire world one day concur. Ed Wood's is, sadly, the more often played scenario. He is positive attitude, high ambition and wishful thinking, unsupported. He was certain he was onto something. He could not have been more wrong about anything if he had tried to be.

Oh yeah baby. "Ich bin ein Ed Wood."

While it thoroughly deserves its reputation as a film only worth seeing so that you can enjoy its remarkably amateurish production, on the other hand it seems a bit unfair to label "Plan 9 From Outer Space" as the worst film ever made. Most of it is quite watchable, it's not at all offensive, and the story - utterly ridiculous as it is - moves fairly quickly, and gives you some reasons to stick around to the end. Those qualities put it well ahead of a great many movies that cost a lot more to make and that involved many more recognizable names than you'll find in this cast.

To be sure, almost everything about it is of amazingly poor quality, from the incompetent directing and acting to the slipshod special effects to the dialogue that produces countless unintentional laughs. The story is goofy, and uses ideas and devices that lack credibility even by sci-fi standards. Everyone who watches it has their own list of favorite examples of this film's complete ineptitude.

If you have any interest in old movies, you should see this if you have the chance, as long as you can do so without paying for the privilege. It says something that so many viewers are still talking about it over 40 years after it was made, which is a lot more than will ever be said about most of the movies you could see in a theater today. Whether you will ever want to watch it again is an entirely different question, although there are those who have managed to enjoy watching this several times. Take a look for yourself and see what you think about this classic example of inept film-making.

O.K.,I've just seen the movie "Ed Wood",listed currently in the best 250 of all time . Being listed there is a hard thing to reach as well as being listed in the worst 100 where "Plan 9" surely belongs ."Ed Wood" is all about a young wannabe-producer/director who is so fascinated and driven by the idea of producing movies that he does everything,sets every wheel in motion to make his dreams become reality,doing movies with a least-cost budget simply because he couldn't afford anything else,but he gave his whole heart to that movies and dedicated his whole life to them .

O. K. ---

Maybe that movie glorifies Ed Wood a bit.I don't know.Ed Wood is, by the way the director of "Plan 9".Having seen the above mentioned movie before, I just cannot help enjoying Plan 9. And, for the record , I was not LAUGHING about it , I have been SMILING nicely, about a film that has been done in a time when computer-effects were not yet invented, and, I enjoyed it. And there have been definitely worse movies.Maybe the director wasn't so bad at all but simply didn't have the money to make it better,maybe he had the talent to do better but not alone as writer,producer,director? At least he DID a movie. And I don't know whether I might be childish here, but that guy at least did what he wanted to do ,and here we are , 50 years later, still discussing his movie. The keyword is fantasy. If you put a little fantasy into the story , you might as well believe in it. A book doesn't give you any special effects at all and you can still enjoy it, can't you??? On the other hand, if you are so cool and so good in discovering any movies weakness and every leak of special effects that even the major 21st century Hollywood movies hardly get to you anymore,you will surely find a lot to complain about in this one. Or you can simply take it as an eyewitness of a time, long time gone, when life wasn't so "perfect" and peoples' brains weren't so oversaturated yet, that some guys still went to cinemas to see flying saucers...

OK, I'm Deaf. There are no subtitles in this movie. Usually, I would turn it off after five minutes because there was too much talking.

But this was different... it was hillarious even without dialogue. The hearing person I was watching it with told me that I could make up my own dialogue and it would be better. Now, I don't know how true that is, but any movie that I can watch without subtitles is a 10 in my book.

Hillarious. :)

First things first - anyone who calls 'Plan 9 from Outer Space' "the worst movie ever made" needs to watch more movies! To me "the worst" would be one that was dull and has no entertainment value whatsoever. 'Plan 9' is the complete opposite of dull, and is it entertaining? You bet! It's still one of the greatest beer'n'pizza and have a bunch of your pals over movies ever made. Hell, it isn't even the most inept and bizarre movie Ed Wood ever made, that would still have to be 'Glen Or Glenda', which for some strange reason still doesn't have a tenth of the cult following 'Plan 9' does. Speaking of cult, in some ways 'Plan 9' is almost THE definitive cult movie if you consider that it virtually vanished without a trace when it was first released and it still lives on because it was subsequently rediscovered by thousands of enthusiastic movie nuts, collectors, journalists, cartoonists, rock musicians (e.g. The Damned), and other film makers (Joe Dante, Sam Raimi, Tim Burton). I think 'Glen Or Glenda' is Wood's most amazing achievement myself, but I still love 'Plan 9'. I've lost track of how many times I've seen it over the years. I wouldn't go so far as to say I have it memorized or anything, but it's always in the back of my mind. It's like part of the collective pop culture unconscious that I carry around with me at all times. As much as I love Bela Lugosi I think the three main reasons this movie is truly unforgettable (apart from the obvious - silly aliens, laughably bad dialogue and "those" flying saucers,etc.etc.) are Criswell, Vampira, and especially Tor Johnson. Any three of those people being involved would have made this something special, but all three! Man! This is trash heaven! It's hard to believe there's anyone left alive who hasn't already seen this movie, but if by some strange twist of fate you are one of the uninitiated, you MUST, I repeat MUST watch 'Plan 9' as soon as possible! And remember, my friends, future events such as these will effect YOU in the future!