Plan 9 From Outer Space
Image Entertainment

DVD, 1959, 78 mins.

review by Shade Rupe

Plan 9 From Outer Space really is a bad movie. It's just plain bad. Cheap. Nonsensical. A farce. But within its awfulness is some mighty memorable sequences that have given it what it needs to be remembered.

Ed Wood's most famous film, Plan 9 also featured the 'talents' of a good many citizens who continue to live off the film's notoriety. Vampira acknowledges her own weaknesses even today.

Thoughtless, selfish aliens want to take over Earth. They have decided to use Plan 9, the reanimation of the dead. Safely hidden in their spaceship with only curtains for walls, the very earth-like aliens calmly discuss their terrible deeds. The US governement personnel could not invoke less emotion in their findings that earth is in trouble. Most of the actors do go over the top enough with the atrocious dialogue to give their lines that extra oomph, but often the lines are just read.

Lugosi's few minutes of saved film are blended into the other footage in very bizarre ways. The last shots ever of Lugosi show him stepping outside a house and looking at a flower. Somehow Mr. Wood figured this would be a nice scene, showing the poor old man's heart broken. Later, of course, he's his feared cloaked self, quite reminiscent of his role in Dracula. These poor bits do not make up enough screen time so another actor did a poor imitation of Bela, with his cape pulled up to his eyes, and is done away with in typical Woodian spendthriftness, in both relation to effects and story.

The amazingly inept film is accompanied by a compendium of interview bits and other takes in Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The Plan 9 Companion. Gregory Walcott, Carl Anthony, Paul Marco, Vampira, Conrad Brooks, Forrest J Ackerman, Sam Raimi and Joe Dante all offer comments on the film's importance in their lives, and insights into Ed Wood's personal character.

Since I can understand and enjoy the appeal of this film, and since it really is amazing to have it on DVD and with the documentary, and it looks fantastic for what it is, I've given the film a sliding scale grade, somewhere between 4 and 8. 4 for the boring, though funny, occasional dialogues, images of Vampira approaching with taloned arms extended, or Tor Johnson's magnificent rise from the dead, bring my head right around to the 8.

Part of the Wade Williams Collection, Image Entertainment's Plan 9 is joined by a few other Ed Wood titles including his other equally famous non-hit, Glen or Glenda?

OFFICIAL WEB SITE:
www.image-entertainment.com

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