Dir: Edward D Wood Jr, 1959, US, 79 mins
Cast: Gregory Walcott, Bela Lugosi, Mona McKinnon, Duke Moore, Tom Keene
A group of aliens have tried and failed eight times to grab the attention of the stupid earthlings. With Plan Nine, they set up shop in California and attempt to raise an army of the dead…
Ever since the clown prince of modern cinema Tim Burton portrayed director Ed Wood as a gloriously inept idiot in the eponymous titled feature film Plan 9 From Outer Space has seemed wilfully condemned to the annals of bad taste and glorious ridicule.
If the scope of Wood’s career had always seemed too drivel-ridden, badgering away in the lower echelons of the B-movie market, the sheer range of ineptitude on display in Plan 9 clambers out of the toilet basin and head first into a frothy cesspit all of its own making. Trepidation and disbelief supersede all logic and reason as Wood and his motley brigade of misfits and has-beens deliver vulgarity and bemusement on all fronts.
Regarded by many as the worst film ever committed to celluloid, Wood’s tour de farce is a film low on cinematic guile and high on understated camp. Detailing the eight failed attempts of alien invaders and their ninth attempt involving the re-animation of dead corpses Plan 9 is hilariously risible in its unintentional crassness. Featuring the last ever screen performance of Dracula incarnate Bela Lugosi, as a ghoul resurrected by space aliens, Plan 9 is fully deserving of it’s inclusion in the canon of cult classic cinema. The fact that the two minutes of Lugosi footage, originally filmed for one of Wood’s abandoned projects, are supplemented by scenes acted by out an unemployed chiropractor hired as a double, despite being a good foot taller, only serve to harbour the incessant tenacity of Wood’s flawed vision. Plan 9’s infantile charm lies in its ability to saturate the most naïve intent into a ludicrously indulgent concoction of juvenile proportions.
Despite the emotional hollow at the centre of Plan 9, Wood invigorates his narrative with enough gleefully sporadic gestures to consume our curiosity. Thanks to the brazen nature of Wood’s direction no twisty corner or cardboard crevice is left unearthed. The framework of the film is skinned to the bone and left bare for all to see in its cheap and nasty reverie as alien invaders reanimate corpses and a third rate cast struggle with a woefully benign script. The fun in watching Wood’s modus operandi comes from spotting the next great fumble amongst the shadowy debris.
Thankfully Wood, as wonderfully demonstrated by Johnny Depp in Burton’s film, is eccentric enough in his chaotic enthusiasm to filter a thin streak of humanity and empathy through a film that is so wonderfully bad it verges on the triumphant. Reminiscent of the glorious series of 1950’s B movies featuring giant ants, carnivorous blobs, and festering alien entities Plan 9 is the lobotomised relative of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and a precursor to Burton’s stellar Wood pastiche Mars Attacks! Chaotic and continuously flat Wood’s pet project is a tumbler of morose and languid filmmaking that somehow never fails to raise a hearty guffaw.
Plan 9 From Outer Space stumbles blindly along that delicate line between bad taste and gluttonous humour and therein lies its joyous potential. While Wood’s film may include hubcaps as UFO’s, cardboard tombstones, and funding from the local Baptist church, it remains a fantastically dumb relic of a feverishly muddled mind.
Craig Driver
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