Plan 9 from Outer Space

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.

Somewhere, in the great and mysterious beyond, Ed Wood looks down (up?) and laughs maniacally. Why? Because we're stupid! Stupid! Fools! The Maestro's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE is his zenith / nadir in one! It is a cultural phenomenon!

From Criswell's crackpot intro / narration, to Dudley Manlove's (Never, has there been a better name for any actor, male or female! Never!) scolding of all mankind, P9FOS hypnotizes with it's eerie, cardboard brilliance! Wood's use of Vampira as... well, Vampira, is a masterstroke of casting! Tor Johnson's take on the world's largest police chief is sheer genius!

The sets, assembled in mere seconds, rival those in BEN HUR! The FX, while certainly not computer generated, were powered by the latest D batteries of the time! Other, lesser films by the thousands, get no attention at all, while this towering giant of cinematic immensity is universally known!

HA! HA! HA!

It is inescapable! Vampira and Tor are revered! Bela Lugosi lives forever, immortalized by an enigmatic chiropractor from some other world (Burbank perhaps)! Indeed, PLAN 9 is, at this very moment, conquering this puny planet! All hail Ed Wood! Amen...

I agree with many that this movie has many shortcomings, but I don't consider it ''the worst movie of all time''. Yes, it is poorly made, it was cheaply made, but I think that there are many movies that are MUCH worse than this one (MANOS THE HANDS OF FATE and THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS are much more amateurish and poorly made than this) and there are much worse directors than Ed Wood (Harold P. Warren and Coleman Francis for example). And I consider PLAN 9 one of the greatest bad movies.

The many flaws of this movie are: the acting, full of corny dialogue and overacting (especially by Tor Johnson and Vampira); the sets and the special effects may be poor and cheap (I laughed a lot when I saw the pie plates used as UFOs); and lots and lots of stock footage. But I find this movie entertaining for the dialogue and also for Bela Lugosi's final performance (here billed ''Almost starring Bela Lugosi'' since he died before the movie was released). And Ed Wood directs nicely, and except at half-way the movie is very fast-paced.

All in all, a nice and funny time passer and among the cults of bad movies! Not to be missed.

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...

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."