Closing Music:DJFredse - U Can't Understand
Abstract: This is a script for a podcast. Deepgeek reviews Ed Wood's classic bad movie "Plan 9 From Outer Space."
“Plan 9 From Outer Space,” perhaps you have heard of this movie, perhaps you haven’t. To help some people come up to speed, this movie is a movie that is widely held to be the worst movie ever made.
The movie was written, directed, and edited by Ed Wood, of which a movie was written about him, and of whom Johnny Depp said once in an interview that if this renegade’s influence was missing, directors such as John Waters, Tim Burton, David Lynch, might not have been able to have such careers. Of course, this statement could be attributed to mere promotion of the movie “Ed Wood.”
Another way you may have heard of this movie, is if you are a Seinfeld fan. Seinfeld, in at least one episode, is trying to get to a theater to see “Plan 9 From Outer Space” precisely because it is “the worst movie ever made.” In the Seinfeld episode, Jerry, a victim of weird circumstance, misses his chance to see this classic bad movie.
First, a taste of the plot, which is to say that I won’t give you any spoilers this early. But the plot has to do with a group of UFO beings who decide to create zombies on our planet by re-animating the dead.
Even the basics of the plot make me laugh, I mean, UFO movies, sure; monster movies, well, OK; mix and match, geesh!
Let’s talk about the production values of “Plan 9.” In a word, Ed Wood must have been a cheap bastard indeed! The legend of this movie, which is true, is that in some scenes you can see fake grass being kicked by feet-dragging zombies. But it gets even better.
Let’s start with the advanced race from another planet, here is how they dress. Basically, from the waist down, it is a Renaissance fair look, with boots and leotards. Haza! Now, from the waist up, its a metallic-shiny bloused shirt bought back in around the waist by a plastic belt adorned with little UFO shapes. To complete the shirt, there is the obligatory patch over the heart, in this case, it is a semi circle with a lightening bolt on it!
The supreme commander wears a shirt much more befitting to his rank, the same from the waist down, but his tunic has a great big square on it with a hatchet thing on it!
The UFOs are funny to, in at least one scene you can see the wire, they look like hub caps with round silver ball on top. When they move, they wobble as if they were being operated by one guy with a wire attached to each hand behind a screen.
The first scene with the supreme commander shows his desk, it looks like a ham radio gear swap meet circa 1965. Really Cheesy! Even better is the machine in the space ship that keeps the zombies animated. It is a pair of rabbit ear antenna’s with one of those battery operated flashing lights you sometimes see on a barricade in a construction zone!
So much for the accouterments of an advanced race, let’s talk about the cockpit of the airliner, I swear, the steering wheel of a commercial airliner in this movie looks like a cardboard cut out.
Those are the props, now unto the filming. There is one clip of a police car racing in the daytime. When the cops are responding at night, they use this daytime clip! They do this several times!
As matter of a fact, the difference in exposure at different places in the film is amazingly blatant. There is a battle scene where we launch missiles from jeeps at three UFO, and they use stock footage with different exposures, and then they cut away to a scene of our military commander talking with a captain. Absolutely hysterical stuff.
Guess what, this is cheesy too!
First, Wood has some shots of Bela Lugosi that he took shortly before he died. He attempts to exploit them by mixing them in here, and to complete the affect, he has a double that walks around with a cape drawn up over his mouth and nose to fill in some missing parts.
Other than that, the acting is totally flat. These actors are more like fashion store dummies than actors.
OK, time to give away the full plot in is sickening cheapness!
It goes, of course, beyond the synopsis given on the DVD cover, that a race from space uses zombies to try to stop us from developing a super weapon. Here comes, so if you don’t want spoilers, fast forward now.
Turns out that they are really into telling humans to their face that they are juvenile and stupid. They got upset a long time ago because they know that after you invent the A bomb and the H bomb, you go on to figure out how to blow up sunlight itself. However, the problem is that when you blow up sunlight, you blow up everything that light ever lands upon, which is the whole Universe.
Now they say they wanted to stop us peacefully, even though they know how to blow up our planet anyway. But now they seem to be hurt cause they feel that we ignored our radio transmissions. Now they are seemingly obsessed with making us notice them by making zombies run around our planet.
Do you like camp? Some movies are simply so bad they are good. If your with me on that, you probably would enjoy “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” a movie simply so bad it is funny.