In Its Own Weird, Wonderful Way, Plan 9 From Outer Space Is a Miracle

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This column compelled my to finally watch Manos: The Hands of Fate after somehow going my whole life without experiencing it. Now I have the extraordinary honor of getting to write about Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space. 

It’s hard to overstate the role Plan 9 From Outer Space and its eccentric creator have played in the birth and evolution of bad movie culture. 

When the Medved brothers dubbed Plan 9 From Outer Space the worst movie ever made in their influential 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards, and Wood the worst director, it introduced a bold new dynamic: trash aficionados wanting to see a movie specifically because it’s terrible, not despite being terrible. Indeed, the enduring cult of Plan 9 is rooted in the transparently false but irresistible notion that it’s not just a bad movie, but literally the worst movie ever made. Plan 9 was the original best worst movie. 

At this point I have seen Ed Wood so many times that it starts to feel like Plan 9 From Outer Space is lifting scenes wholesale from Tim Burton’s cult classic rather than the other way around. 

This begins with Criswell’s opening narration, which is delivered directly to the camera in a state of barely controlled hysteria: “Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here.

And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are bringing you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places. My friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?”

As a writer, one of the worst things you can do is repeat yourself. If you’re going to use the same words, for the love of god, please space them out a little. So I can’t tell you how much malevolent joy it brought me that over the course of just two sentences and thirty two words Criswell repeats the word “future” no less than three times. 

This opening monologue beautifully embodies the cracked poetry of Wood’s feverish over-writing. Wood could not write, or tell a story, or make a coherent film but the joy he takes in his non-existent gifts is both irresistible and infectious. The world would be an infinitely better place if everyone who was as bad at what they do as Wood took such pride and pleasure in their job. 

Criswell’s opening narration uses a lot of words to tell us almost nothing except that the laughable travesty we’re about to watch happens in the future, albeit a future that looks and feels exactly like the present, and is rooted in scientific, factual-sounding words like “evidence”, “testimony” and “incidents.”

Criswell’s narration continues just as floridly when the action shifts to a funeral where a melancholy figure known only at the “Old Man” played by special guest star Bela Lugosi is burying a beloved wife played by proto-Elvira Vampira.

The Old Man’s wife isn’t content to stay in the ground, however. For it seems a highly developed race of aliens have developed the technology to bring corpses back to life for their own sinister purposes. 

At first the aliens’ intentions are not quite so sinister, but when their attempts to seek a meeting with the governments of the world so they can share their incredible secrets are rebuffed they resort to plan B, or Plan 9, as it were. Plan 9 involves resurrecting the dead to create an army of zombies who will march on the capitals of Earth and overtake humanity. 

It’s a terrible plan, particularly since the aliens seem intent on bringing the dead back to life individually and with great effort. At the rate they’re creating zombies, it would probably take them a few thousand years to animate enough corpses for an unstoppable army of the undead. Hell, it’d probably take a couple of years just to assemble a softball team worth of re-animated corpses.

The aliens here really did not think things through. No wonder all their previous plans failed. As they are only too happy to point out, their technology is far superior to that of stupid earthlings but their plan-making is rudimentary at best. 

John “Bunny” Breckinridge, who Bill Murray played in Ed Wood hilariously plays The Ruler, the head of the aliens, less as an all-powerful otherworldly being bent on world domination than as a harried middle manager frustrated that his latest project is falling apart due to bad design and even worse execution. 

As Ed Wood indelibly and hilariously chronicled, a big part of what makes Plan 9 From Outer Space so unintentionally funny is that, for reasons known only to him, Wood chose to replace Lugosi, who was too busy being dead to finish shooting, with a body double who looks nothing like Lugosi but is also markedly taller than the six foot one Dracula star. 

That would not be a problem if the re-animated corpse of the Old Man, who holds a cape over his face to ineptly try to hide the fact that he’s being played by a moonlighting chiropractor and not one of the great icons of horror cinema, did not have so much screen time.

There is a very good reason zombie movies generally involve terrifying packs of the undead stalking the living in search of brains for nourishment. As Plan 9 establishes, there is nothing particularly scary about a single zombie shambling towards humans slowly enough to give them more than enough time to get away safely. 

Yet due to budget constraints and also total incompetence, Wood limited himself to three zombies: The Old Man, his Old, Dead Lady and finally Inspector Daniel Clay (Tor Johnson), a detective who meets a bad end in the spooky graveyard where much of the film takes place. 

For the role of a sharp detective skilled at getting to the bottom of things Wood adorably chose a Swedish professional wrestler with a hulking physique so unintelligible that he talks like he has a mouth full of borscht. That’s less of a problem when he becomes a zombie thanks to alien technology.

The aliens, in their zeal to destroy humanity, teach humanity lessons, or possibly do both, dispatch flying saucers over Washington D.C and the West Coast. The “flying saucers” were not paper plates or hubcaps, as commonly thought, but rather a commercially available UFO model kit, complete with a little green man inside. 

Plan 9 is so wonderfully threadbare and homemade that it’s downright startling when Wood shifts from the ingratiatingly inept footage he shot to stock footage of massive guns shooting down UFOs or a plane soaring through the sky. 

Plan 9 looks like it cost about a dollar yet Wood inexplicably but adorably chose a style of film—special effects-intensive science fiction about a war between aliens and earthlings—that requires a sizable budget and a skilled battalion of craftsman to do adequately, let alone well. 

Yet Wood went for it anyway. Like his creative progeny Tommy Wiseau and Neal Breen, Wood wasn’t about to let the fact that he couldn’t do anything keep him from attempting to do everything. 

Plan 9 even has a socially conscious message: as a disappointed Ruler informs the stupid, stupid, stupid earthlings, the real purpose of the alien’s visit is to keep human beings from creating and then using weapons so powerful they destroy the whole universe, not just their own stupid, stupid planet. 

Criswell returns at the very end to jab an accusatory finger in the direction of audience members unconvinced that space aliens are real based on the exceedingly realistic, plausible, verisimilitude-rich motion picture we just experienced. 

Did you forget the part where he said it was all based on sworn testimony? Did you? You can’t just make stuff up and say that it’s based on sworn testimony. That would be dishonest. 

Criswell closes the film by imploring, “We once laughed at the horseless carriage, the airplane, the telephone, the electric light, vitamins, radio, and even television. And now some of us laugh at outer space. God help us in the future!”

The writing in Plan 9 is wildly entertaining. It’s eminently quotable. It’s colorful. It’s iconic. It’s flavorful and unique. It has stood the test of time. These are all qualities we associate with great writing so why is Plan 9 considered not only not great but the worst of all time? 

Probably because “worst of all time” is less criticism than high praise that Plan 9 richly merits not because it’s actually the worst movie of all time but rather because it’s so crazy, unique and eminently re-watchable that it deserves that kind of superlative. 

The future that Ed Wood forces us to contemplate would evolve in ways its creator never could have imagined, for better or worse. 

Wood couldn’t imagine just how many people would end up seeing Plan 9 From Outer Space and enjoying it. In his wildest dreams he couldn’t have foreseen the huge role it would go on to play in bad movie culture. 

From the vantage point of 2020, Plan 9 From Outer Space looks like nothing less than the Big Bang that gave the world podcasts like The Flop House and We Hate Movies and television shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000 and careers like my own. 

Plan 9 From Outer Space was, of course, not the first movie so excruciatingly, exquisitely bad that it attracted a huge, loyal cult that never stops deriving ironic enjoyment out of its spectacular awfulness. 

Reefer Madness pre-dates Plan 9 From Outer Space by nearly two decades but the auteur behind Reefer Madness is not a household name. He did not inspire a critically, acclaimed, Academy Award-winning movie that functions as an unabashed love letter to dreaming and one unforgettable dreamer in particular. 

It’s impossible to separate Ed Wood from Plan 9 From Outer Space. Its idiosyncrasies are his idiosyncrasies, its wonderful madness his own. 

Plan 9 is Wood’s triumph, the one they will remember him for and a movie that thoroughly earns its place high atop the pantheon of movies so bad they single-handedly make the world a better, crazier place. 

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