Review of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) by Kenneth L — 05 Aug 2010

This has the reputation of being the worst movie of all time, and while I have seen a few worse movies, it is indeed very bad (and very funny in its badness). Everything about it is pretty much incompetent: the utterly silly story, the bare sets, the bizarre costumes, the laughable special effects (you can actually literally see the strings on the UFOs).

The story is actually built around some unrelated footage of Bela Lugosi, the old star of Dracula; the footage is just edited in in a way that kind of shoehorns it into the story. There's also a lot of stock footage of soldiers launching rockets and missiles that is incorporated.

There's also a lot of scenes of people who look like vampires walking around very slowly and not really doing anything. It's all about a bunch of aliens (who look suspiciously like normal people in silk shirts) using some harebrained scheme to raise the dead in order to.

.. do... something or other, it's not exactly clear. I give the movie a star instead of a half-star because it is funny, and because I found the idea of the Solaranite bomb, a bomb which could cause the sun to explode, thus burning up the entire universe, actually pretty interesting.

It's actually not the worst movie ever (I thought The Room, Troll 2, and Antichrist were all worse), but it's the earliest example of the "so bad it's good" movie, so that definitely counts for something.