Plan 9 From Outer Space
(1959)
review by Died With Boots On

"My friends, can your hearts stand the shocking facts about grave
robbers from outer space?" the famed psychic Charles Criswell
over-emphatically asks through "tension-building" pauses and floods of the resonating staccato breed of Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" music. Even a debilitated Rheumatic heart being defibrillated in cardiac arrest could stand this simple-minded moth-eaten premise, but still tries early on to establish a gritty, documentary-style approach, punctuated by the florid Criswell's bombastic introduction preparing us for the unbelievable story we are about to witness, which is based on "the sworn testimony of the miserable souls who survived the ordeal."

Often funny and consistently entertaining (if almost always for the
wrong reasons), "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is an anti-masterpiece if there ever was one. Most of the action takes place in a California
cemetery, furnished with cardboard tombstones, where the beloved,
much-younger and well-proportioned wife (Maila "Vampira" Nurmi), with a sickening waistline, of an elderly man dressed in a Dracula costume (Bela Lugosi, in a few minutes of left-over footage grafted into this film) has just been buried. The grief-stricken old man wanders into the street and is killed by a passing car. He is laid to rest next to his wife.

This rigidly stereotyped film complies with the "Cemetery" motif of
late fifties science fiction horror: The dead do not rest easy. The
old man's very attractive voluptuous zombie wife is soon raised from
her casket, stalking the graveyard, and killing those who trespass.
Soon enough, her husband is also mysteriously reanimated and saunters amongst the tombstones. Police investigating the low-budget murders are further shocked when the remarkably overweight Police Officer Clay (Tor Johnson) is found dead, torn apart by whatever strange force is haunting the cemetery. The brilliant police Lieutenant in charge of the investigation sagely notes, "One thing's for sure. Inspector Clay's dead. Murdered. And somebody's responsible!"

Commercial airplane pilot Jeff Trent and his crew are "attacked" by
three flying saucers, suspended with visible wires, while on a routine flight. Trent is muzzled by the authorities, but he's not the only one to see the crafts. Intense saucer activity has congested our beautiful black-and-white skies and has drawn the worried interest of the U.S. military, who staunchly denies the existence of Unidentified Flying Objects (and apparently threatening-looking cigars dangling from fishing lines, wobbling in the breeze).

The saucers and the risen dead are connected, because, when I think "zombified corpses," oh yeah, I think, "alien invaders' attempted world domination." We soon learn that two advanced "space aliens," Eros and Tanna, are creating the zombies as part of an incomprehensible plan to communicate with Earthmen. This is creatively dubbed "Plan 9." I wonder why the previous eight, whatever they were, failed so miserably? Before long, the once-quiet cemetery will provide the battlegrounds for the climactic engagement of the living and the not-so-living-but-still-living-and-maybe-dead! As Criswell so flamboyantly puts it, "Can you prove it didn't happen?!"

"Plan 9 from Outer Space" is chock full of laughable special effects,
horrid editing, and abominable acting, but boredom is one sin that
Plan 9 does not commit. Characters are kept in constant motion and something is always happening. Part of this flow is watching and keeping track of the constant gaffes and goofs, which adds to the entertainment. The "Now it's day and now it's night" chant makes cult campus viewings all the more entertaining, as the constant nonsensical switching between day and night augments the unreality of the film. An attack takes place in the pitch-black cemetery, but the police car responding pulls up in broad daylight. When the cops arrive at the scene, it's night again. Come on!

The narration by the almost homicidally earnest Criswell demonstrates Ed Wood's bizarre, surrealistic dialogue that you will get an earful of. At one point, he lucidly states something like: "Future events such as these shall affect us all in the future." Durhhhhhhhhhh! I guess President George "Dubya" was a screenwriter before he discovered the Texas electric chairs. Many of Wood's directorial blunders provide amusement, but the endless recycled scenes of Bela Lugosi walking through the graveyard are ridiculous and only point out how much his stand-in (Ed's chiropractor in real life) doesn't look like him, even with a cape drawn stylishly over his face.

"Plan 9 From Outer Space" is just as immortal as "Citizen Kane" or
"The Rocky Horror Picture Show" (with just about the same amount of integrity). When one thinks of inept, goofball filmmaking, this is
usually the first film to hit them upside the head with a shovel, and
deservedly so. With its incoherent plot, jaw-droppingly odd dialogue,inept acting, threadbare production design, and special effects soshoddy that they border on the surreal, "Plan 9 From Outer Space" hasoften been called the worst movie ever made. But no movie obtainsthis classic status without striking some chord in the viewer. There's more here than meets the eye! Criswell's philosophical lightening strikes again: "There comes a time in each man's life when he can't even believe his own eyes!" (probably after viewing Plan 9 for the first time).