cinema history class: plan 9 from outer space

Session: Ed Wood Month, Week 3
Movie 2: PLan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
Directed by Ed Wood

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
Space aliens are reviving the dead in order to save humanity from itself. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
As far as I'm concerned, Plan 9 didn't live up (down?) to its reputation as the worst movie ever. Having said that, I should note that Dave gave it a 9 quoting the common refrain that it's "so bad it's good," and Sean explained his rating of 4 out of 4 as recognition that it's the quintessential bad movie. But Glen or Glenda, which we saw two weeks earlier was much worse. I guess it was more fun to see GorG in the class, but that was because of the bizarre way it was put together. Plan 9 is a better movie in the sense that it does a better job of satisfying the implicit contract a movie makes with the viewer. If I'm a 1950's moviegoer sitting down in the theater to have a story told to me, Plan 9 is less likely to disappoint.

But that's not to to say that Plan 9 is a good film. There's just too much wrong with it:

• The acting is horrendous.
• The dialog is almost as bad. I love the part where the the alien commander starts repeating the word "stupid" to tell the humans how, well, stupid humanity is.
• Don't get me started on the continuity errors -- police cars change, and scenes are constantly changing between night and day.
• Most famously, there's the Bela Lugosi issue. Lugosi dies during production, and the stand-in they got to film the rest of the scenes was much taller.
• Budgetary constraints forced Wood to use sparse sets, which kind of reminded me of the acting I did in small black box theaters. We had minimal set pieces, and the audience had to use their imaginations. Here, the scenes on airplanes space ships didn't really look like they were on such vehicles, and on;y worked as well s they did because the audience member wants to b e drawn into the story.

But the movie also had enough going for it that I really wanted to like it more than I did.

First, I have to give Ed Wood credit for the story itself. The basic premise that I liked is that space aliens want to get humanity to abandon its pursuit of weapons because, if we don't, we will eventually destroy the universe. There's some technobabble to explain it, and that sounds as reasonable as the worst of Star Trek. But this movie was made in the 1950s, when the US and USSR were stuck in a nuclear arms race. With the two superpowers developing more and more powerful weapons, the message about destroying the universe must have resonated. Say what you want about Wood as a filmmaker, but he had his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist.

One simple fact about Plan 9 is that it was probably too ambitious. This had space aliens and zombies, and it tied them together in a coherent plot. And this was a "message" movie (see previous paragraph). I think it was Keith who noted that this should have been Ed Wood's epic -- if he had had the funds for an epic. Instead, he had to make do with what he could manage on a small budget. Given the constraints, he did as good a job as anyone could have expected.

Another interesting thing about the movie is the ending. The space aliens get killed, which would be a standard happy ending, except for the fact that these aliens were actually benevolent. They were only trying to get humans to change from a course that would inevitably lead to the destruction of the universe. But we made their ship explode, so maybe our fate is sealed.

Oh well, pass the potato salad.

Ratings:
Me: 7
Dave: 9
Ethan: 6
Joe: 9.3
Sean: 4 out of 4