Review of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) by Curtis S — 28 Apr 2009

Plan 9 From Outer Space is a difficult film to rate. On the one hand, it's shoddy sets, terrible actors, plot holes and the re-use of footage of a dead lead actor should leave this film with a review in the minuses, but on the other hand, it was one of the most entertaining films I have ever seen, just not for the reasons Edward Wood (The director of this and many of the other worst films ever made) would have wanted. No matter how many times I see this movie it leaves me doubled with laughter.

The film is supposed to tell of a horrible tale of formiddable aliens, mindless zombies and the folly of mankind, but instead is a garbled, confusing and cheaply made affair that leaves its viewers wondering what they just witnessed. The film begins with a cheesy introduction in the form of a pretend show called 'Criswell Knows'. In this he attempts to make the scene sound dramatic whilst attempting to sound profound. Credit given to the actor for not cracking up at lines like ''The future is of interest to us because that's where you and I shall live''.

The fun continues as the movie introduces us to a world where aliens are attacking and raising the dead in order to scare Earth into not inventing a bomb called solarmanite that blows up sunlight. That's right, sunlight. Apparently the alens must have had knowledge, but how if it destroys everything around it? And yes they do raise the dead using an electric gun. The film has so many plot holes it's ludicrous. The aliens park their ship in the local cemetery and we are talking a big ship and noone notices it, the aliens disintegrate one of their own undead minions at one point to scare the humans but because they don't know its the aliens doing this, it just leaves them confused.

All of these issues aside, there is one major point that makes this film famous for its hilarious stupidity, when one of the main actors (Bela Lugosi) died midway through filming they used the footage of him they had but they didn't have enough footage of him to fill out his role even though they repeated some of the footage of him about fifteen times each throughout the movie. So they used a different actor to make up the rest of the film and not just a different actor an entirely different actor. Bela was old, rotund and had white hair, the new actor was tall, gaunt and had black hair. This makes for hilarious scenes where it will switch between the two a maddening number of times in the space of 5 minutes.

Overall, this film is so bad it is definitely good. Whether you think it is as entertaining as I did or not, this film is worth the watch as you will never see anything like it again.