Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

*cue catchy jingle*

Fourteen days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween.
Fourteen days to Halloween - Silver Shamrocks!

Welcome Boys and Ghouls to Month of the Living Dead, my thirteen day (and then some) tribute to that most wonderful of holidays ever - Halloween! Join me, wont you, as I watch the sinister and the silly, the morbid and the macabre, the violent and gruesome in a two week bloodletting that comes to a boil on the eve of all saints.

*cue thunder and lightning effect*

So sit back, turn the lights down low and get ready for today's presentation of. . . .

PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE! Bwah-hah-hah-hah-hah!

*cue commercial break*

Despite what you may have heard, Plan Nine From Outer Space is not the worst movie of all time.

One might think that to be a bold statement, but when you consider cinematic disasters like Battlefield Earth or Baby Geniuses 2: SuperBabies out there, stinking up the cinematic landscape, it isn't. It would take a whole truckload of Plan Nines to equal one blindingly inept Batman and Robin. In a world where movies like It's Pat and Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo exist, their crimes against humanity without number, Ed Wood's efforts seem like childs play.

Compared to those Hollywood train wrecks, Plan Nine From Outer Space is a freakin' Casablanca remade by Akira Kurosawa staring Sir Laurence Olivier.

Let me quickly follow up that statement with this: Plan Nine From Outer Space is an absolutely dreadful movie. Make no mistake about it, I'm not defending Plan Nine as some overlooked and forgotten Citizen Kane or that Ed Wood is some kind of idiot savant. However the reputation of "Worst Movie Ever" is not entirely fair, either.

The film opens with a brief introduction from Criswell, a noted psychic from the 60's, with a monologue *SO* ridiculous, that I have no choice but to reprint it here:

Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, friends - future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the inexplicable - that is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing you the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony of the miserable souls who survived this dreadful ordeal. The incidents, the places . . . . . my friend, we can’t keep this a secret any longer! Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend… Can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave-robbers from outer space?

And thus sets the tone for the rest of the movie. Every single line of dialogue out of every single actor's mouth is exactly this. . . . um, colorfully awkward and oddly verbose. The strangely stilted reading from the Amazing Criswell isn't universal amongst the other actors, but it's not that far off either. So we've hit pure gold, and we're only 45 seconds into the movie!

Anyway, we open in the skies far above San Fernando. Jeff Trent, the pilot of American flight 812, (played by Gregory Walcott - who actually had something of a real acting career before this movie) sees of one of the most unconvincing flying saucers ever committed to film in the history of Hollywood. That includes Doctor Who at its lowest budget of its run, and the reel of film I shot with my mom's camera when I was 10 years old.

Meanwhile, in remote graveyard near San Fernando, an Old Man (an extremely aged Bela Lugosi) is at the extremely small funeral of his much younger wife. Ironically, while Ed Wood's budget held him back from hiring extras for the scene, it really plays up the forlorn and isolated existence of the Old Man. It's the best scene of the movie, very well done and really moody and emotional.

Pity that it's totally inconsistent with the rest of the film.

To prove my point, it's not but mere moments later that we get some "comic" redneck gravediggers, who witness the landing of said unconvincing flying saucer shortly before being killed by the Old Man's reanimated wife (played the amazingly busty late-night TV horror hostess Vampira).

An undetermined amount of time later, the Old Man walks out of his house and directly into the path of an oncoming automobile. At his funeral, mourners discover the corpses of the gravediggers. The police come to investigate the deaths - including Inspector Daniel Clay (master thespian and Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson, star of The Beast of Yucca Flats), along with several police officers, comes to the cemetery to investigate. Inspector Clay is promptly killed by the Vampira.

Meanwhile, Jeff is complain to his wife Paula (Mona McKinnon, from Jail Bait and Mesa of Lost Women) about not being able to tell about his close encounter of the weird kind when a powerful wind knocks them to the ground as a spaceship lands nearby. The ship lands in the nearby cemetery, where Vampira and The Old Man (now very much NOT played by Bela Lugosi) return to the spaceship

Suddenly flying saucers fill the skies. The military, under the command of Colonel Thomas Edwards (B-western star Tom Keene), launches a counter attack of stock footage and force the aliens to retreat to their space station to regenerate (but not in the Doctor Who sense of the word). There we meet the commander of the Earth operation - Eros (Dudley Manlove, from The Creation of the Humanoids and a couple episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents), and his second in command - Tanna (Joanna Lee, of The Brain Eaters - but you'd probably know her work from Gilligan's Island better. She wrote the episode where Mrs. Howell decides to engineer a romance between Gilligan and Mary Ann).

There the aliens begin to formulate a new plan for dealing with the Earthlings - Plan Nine! What exactly is 'Plan Nine', you ask? Plan Nine involves the resurrection of FLESH EATING GHOULS to assault the capitals of the world. Considering that it took about a week to resurrect these three, the invasion should be ready to proceed sometime around 2019.

Sadly, we never do learn what Plans 1 through 8 have been.

Anyway, from here the military gets involved and send a man to San Fernando, we have a couple more encounters with the alien animated ghouls (where Bela Lugosi dies again for the last time), some wandering around the graveyard, and a final encounter between Eros and Jeff, Colonel Edwards and police lieutenant Harper aboard the flying saucer where we learn of the true purpose for the invasion of Earth.

It seems that the aliens are concerned about human advances in weapons. From the firecracker to the hand grenade to the hydrogen bomb - “in which you actually explode the air itself!" (Well, not really - but we're looking for scientific accuracy from the film at THIS point?) - humanity has developed newer and bigger explosives. Now we stand on the brink of developing the biggest explosive reaction of them all - solarbonite!

Solarbonite does to light molecules what fission does to the atom, but the reaction is uncontrollable and will spread to everything ever touched by that sunlight, eventually engulfing the entire universe in flame. Since we're a stupid, war like race, if the aliens cant reason with us - for the good of the universe, they will destroy us.

So Plan Nine basically borrows the plot of The Day the Earth Stood Still? Astounding!

And so instead of doing the sensible thing of taking this vital knowledge back to Washington DC, informing the president of the aliens intentions and saving the entire human race, our three heroes get into a fist fight with Eros, destroy the Zombie Controller device and blow up the flying saucer.

Criswell then returns to give us one last monolog about how people of the past laughed about commonplace innovations we see today, and wonders if life in outer space really is that farfetched. He ends with "God help us all in the future".

The End.

Yes, the movie has a litany of major problems - consistently mind-bending dialogue, spacecraft and airliner cockpit sets that were assembled from plywood (where you can still see the wood grain on the "metal"), backdrops made of shower curtains, boom mikes in the shot, actors calling each other by their real names - not their characters, word war II surplus electronics bravely attempting to standing for state of the art spaceship controls, cardboard tombstones constantly being knocked over by the cast members, a stand-in that spends the entirety of his scenes traipsing about holding a cape over his face because he has no resemblance to the original actor whatsoever, jumps between day and night and back again in the same scene, recycled footage, stilted acting and continuity errors that would make a mortal director weep.

The problem here is not the pie tin flying saucers or that Bela Lugosi dropped dead after filming only a few minutes of footage, but that while Ed Wood had a grand creative vision and burning passion, ultimately he was betrayed by microscopic budget and a simple lack of talent. His earnestness and love for the movie is clear in every frame exposed, even if the ability to pull said vision off is just simply not there. It's a testament to the love of his art that he managed to release one film under such conditions, let alone as many as he did. For that reason alone, I'd say that Ed Wood is a vastly superior filmmaker to the movie making hacks that put together a crappy Highlander film every two years, or boobs that make I Know Who Killed Me purely for the paycheck.

TOTAL BODY COUNT: 4 (Vampira doesn’t count since she was dead before the opening credits rolled)
MOST MEMORABLE KILL: Bela Lugosi being hit by a car off screen - though we can still clearly see his unmoving shadow against the wall not get hit by anything.
GALLONS OF BLOOD USED: 0
SPRING LOADED CATS: 0
THE MORON OF THE MOVIE AWARD GOES TO: The Earthmen with their stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
BREASTS ON DISPLAY: 0 (Although its not for lack of trying on Vampira's part)
BEST LINE: "But one thing's sure. Inspector Clay is dead - murdered, and somebody's responsible." (but honestly, how can I pick just one line from all these gems!)

THE DVD -
Considering the amazingly low budget of the movie, we get a really nice print mastered from the original negative.. Sure there is some print damage, but it's pretty on par with other films of a similar vintage. The sound is pretty consistent with what you would expect from this film - mono, with a bunch of flaws on the original master exposing the yet again the considerable budgetary constraints the film endured.

THE EXTRAS -
We get some pretty good extras. The centerpiece of the disc is the documentary Flying Saucers Over Hollywood. And really, you have to love a documentary that's half an hour longer than the actual feature that it's covering. Produced, directed and hosted by fans Mark Patrick Carducci and Lee Harris, we get a really well done look behind the scenes and the cult that surrounded the movie in the decades since its release.

Honesty, unless you'd just going after Plan 9, I'd pass on this disc and grab the Ed Wood Collection, a set that not only includes Plan 9 (and the accompanying documentary), but also the Woodian treasures Glen or Glenda?, Jail Bait, the Bride of the Monster, Night of the Ghouls and a extra bonus documentary The Haunted World of Ed Wood. Essentially seven movies for 20 bucks - if you passed this up, you're stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!

THE BOTTOM LINE -
Plan 9 From Outer Space, when you get right down to it, is an absolute failure. It manages to fall short on nearly every level imaginable - dreadful dialogue, incompetent acting, an appalling screenplay, wretched special effects, shoddy continuity and amazing lapses of even the most basic logic, all presented with an utter lack of directorial skill.

How could you not like it?

Join me next time for another journey into the macabre. Until then. . . pleasant SCREAMS! Bwah-hah-hah-hah-hah!

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My Month of the Living Dead reviews:
* THE EVIL DEAD
* NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
* PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE
* THE FOG
* REVELATION OF THE DALEKS
* DAWN OF THE DEAD
* THE LAST MAN ON EARTH/HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL
* DAY OF THE DEAD
* RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD
* THE OMEGA MAN
* NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 3D
* THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED UP ZOMBIES
* LAND OF THE DEAD
* MASTERS OF HORROR - HOMECOMING
* 28 DAYS LATER
* WHITE ZOMBIE
* HALLOWEEN


-Other Ed Wood Reviews -
* GLEN OR GLENDA?
* JAIL BAIT
* BRIDE OF THE MONSTER
* PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE
* NIGHT OF THE GHOULS
* THE SINISTER URGE
* THE HAUNTED WORLD OF EDWARD WOOD JR.
* THE ED WOOD COLLECTION
* ED WOOD



Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children up Ages 8