LogFAQs > #984504393

20. Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957)
Directed by: Ed Wood
Score: 148

Forty: 4
Evillord: 11
Seginus: 14
Red: 17
Bitto: 18
Johnbobb: 18
Karo: 21
Suprak: 21
Inviso: 24

Forty:
Flying saucers on a string will always be awesome. Plan 9 honestly is a contender for number one although I cant personally place it there. Its pretty much the epitome of so bad its good, a cult classic that deserves respect for being one of the OGs of crappy campy cinema. It has all the hallmarks of a bad movie: horrible acting (although there are a couple of performances that somehow are decent), technical problems, and a nonsensical plot, but it does manage to be entertaining enough to hold ones interest. Thats the most important thing, because the worst thing a movie can do is be boring. Its kind of a shame that this is Bela Lugosis last appearance on film, but he still has a presence even if its weirdly placed archival footage. Vampira is always great too. I dont know too much about Ed Wood (havent seen the Depp movie but now I want to) but he seems like an interesting person, and I feel like his passion for his craft actually comes through in Plan 9. I imagine if he had bigger budgets and better actors he would be more highly regarded, but his existing legacy is cool too.

Evillord:
This one has a long history of being regarded as among the worst films ever, and is a major source of inspiration for the type of film culture that allowed a list like this to be made. I continue to feel like these older bad movies needed MST3K to talk over them, or preferably a group of inebriated friends, to really be entertainingly bad though. There's some amusement value in the horribly cheesy and out of place narration ("Perhaps, on your way home, someone will pass you in the dark, and you will never know it... FOR THEY WILL BE FROM OUTER SPACE!!!") the cheap and low effort special effects and set designs (much has been said of the airplane cockpit consisting of two chairs and a curtain), or the narrative Frankensteined together from elements Ed Wood saw in older genre films and pulp sci-fi novels, where a group of "aliens" who the filmmakers didn't even try to use makeup to make distinguishable from humans try to destroy the earth because they're afraid of humanity's violent nature but also reanimate a few corpses to walk around doing a vampire impression to try and scare our species straight. But mostly all the elements are so half baked and the narrative such a fat load of nothing that it's just kind of boring.

Seginus:
I didn't think this one was nearly as terrible as its reputation would imply. It starts off pretty weak, relying on excessive narration to get the plot moving, and the writing and acting are generally awful. But the final confrontation onboard the alien craft was halfway decent, not too far off from Star Trek in its messaging. It got to par for boilerplate cold war sci-fi there, with the aliens reprimanding us about atom bombs and such. What makes the whole thing goofy and memorable is that the aliens' strategy involves raising our own dead against us, so it's a zombie movie on top of an alien movie (featuring Vampira and Bela Lugosi, no less). The elevator pitch by itself is worthy of its spot in the geek pantheon.

Red:
Aliens try to defeat earth with a couple zombies or something. The plan never makes much sense logically, don't think about it. The movie is paced like a snail and while conceptually interesting just drags itself out and will take 20 minutes to explain the simplest of concepts. Nevermind the completely nonthreatening zombie people.

Bitto:
It's interesting that this was so often panned as "the worst film" for decades because it seems mostly fine. The infamous cockpit scene, for instance, the main issue to me was the shoddy setpiece. I didn't notice the boom mic shadow or the clipboard or any other thing. Then the more confusing aspects of the movie like everything regarding Bela Lugosi's portion (especially the intro where he's setting up flowers) are kinda interesting just on its own.

It is funny that the three zombies are Elvia before Elvira, a police chief that JUST died, and Dracula. And Dracula being such a non-threatening presence to Jeff's wife was silly too. Of course, the special effects aren't great. The random bits of narration during scenes might actually be the worst of all the "bad" effects. It's really jarring and made me realize how few movies have this omniscient narrator. Which makes sense. It's quite literally the opposite of show, don't tell.

The idea of aliens using Earth zombies to prove their technological superiority to Earth is a really cool idea that I'm surprised hasn't been used more often. When you read that Ed Wood loved Lugosi and just spliced footage of Lugosi into this film when he died during the middle of production, the Lugosi footage becomes more endearing than weird. And the confrontation between the aliens and the humans is pretty good, especially so in 1957. It's interesting how willing the aliens just...wanted a conversation and nothing hostile and all the discussion about nuclear weapons were very relevant then and now. It's funny that the aliens basically just yelled and scolded the humans for like 5 minutes, though.

Genuinely Good: As mentioned, the plot. The speech against nuclear weapons is pretty impressive. The Nobel Peace Prize went to Pauling for efforts to stop nuclear testing and that was 1962. It seems like public sentiment started to show signs of anti-nuclear around 1957, which makes this cutting-edge.

Johnbobb:
"It's hard to pinpoint what exactly is the dumbest thing about this movie. Is it the fact that the aliens are randomly bringing back zombies for no real reason? Is it the fact that Maila Nurmi's zombie character is just Vampira (and she's literally billed as such), and Bela Lugosi's zombie is clearly just Dracula, depsite them not being vampires? Is it Tor Johnson's ridiculous zombie face that he makes for most of the movie? Is it the extended sequence of looped battle footage against what are clearly toy UFOs? Is it the fact that the ""aliens"" are just regular people with lightning bolt shirts? No. It's the world's smallest mausoleum that everyone has to keep ducking under.

Favorite 5 star Letterboxd review:
A classic of anti-war cinema"