Plan 9 From Outer Space Movie Review
PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE: A FILM THAT ALL BAD MOVIES ARE MEASURED AGAINST
With Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood continued his legacy as the worst movie director around. With cheap effects, horrible acting, and an unoriginal story at best, the movie is a painful 79 minutes. It is so bad that you almost start to feel bad for the cast and crew that were a part of this disaster.
Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott) is a pilot that has just seen a UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) while flying. He can’t believe his eyes. When he touches down, he is told by the military that he didn’t see any such thing. But when he and his wife Paula (Mona McKinnon) see a flash of light that knocks them to the ground, he knows that Earth is being attacked by aliens. And when bodies start rising from the nearby cemetery and killing people, the local police and military are on the hunt to stop them.
To go into detail as to how bad this film would take more than a few paragraphs. To be short, the storyline is sad and clichéd. The dialogue is pathetic with the cheesiest words to ever be said onscreen. To excuse the actors because of this horrendous script would be to say their acting was okay. But that is not the case. Dead corpses could have done a better job of acting than this ensemble. You can practically see them reading the lines word for word from cue cards (I swear in one scene a policeman does exactly that). Everything feels forced. At one point the light from the UFO shines down on the humans. You see a delay in them falling to the ground like they all forgot what they were supposed to do. Never mind the fact that Bela Lugosi, Ed Wood’s star, died before filming was supposed to start. But that didn’t stop Wood from using a stand in and covered his face with a cape the entire movie. The stand in was probably grateful that his name isn’t associated with the film now that he looks back on it. And just when you think it can’t get any worse, there are the special effects. More like the underwhelming effects. The alien spaceships are actually hubcaps suspended by wires, and it shows. I kept waiting to see the wires. But the best part is when Paula is being chased by one of the zombies through the graveyard. The camera shoots her running and then goes to the zombie. Each time it goes back to her, she is running through the same part of the graveyard. And the ground she is running on looks more like a brown wool blanket as opposed to dirt. You keep waiting to see the sign of the studio in the back ground it is so obvious everything was shot on a sound stage.
Going into this movie I knew it was going to be bad. I usually will start watching the film with an open mind. But when all you read about this film is that it has been billed as “The worst movie ever made”, you get an inkling that it might be. Ed Wood lived up to his reputation in Hollywood with this atrocity but hopefully served as a cautionary tale to other directors who thought about cutting corners.
Report Card:
Story-D
Acting-F
Visuals-F
Originality/Innovation-F
Enjoyability Grade–D
Overall Grade-D-
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