Plan 9 from Outer Space

     Plan 9 from Outer Space is ironically considered to be Ed Wood's most well-known movie and greatest cinematic achievement, while at the same time, it has outright won the award for the worst movie ever made and Ed Wood was then declared the worst director of all time. Which made his films more famous now than they ever were when he was alive due to the new category of "so bad that it's good" type of movies.  And in an almost cruel twist of fate, Ed's story spawned an award-winning star-studded movie about his life directed by one of the greatest directors of all time, Tim Burton, with Ed being played by one of the greatest actors of all time, Johnny Depp.  I'm not sure whether Ed would have appreciated that amount of irony.

     Filmed with more goofs than one can count, it never ceases to make me laugh out loud. In addition to the cardboard tombstones that occasionally tip over and the rapid continuity errors that result from the scene changing back and forth between day and night like 6 times in a two-minute span. 

    Obvious goofs or not, Eddie wasn't really interested in the "small details", only the big picture. This thinking led him to make some pretty bad flicks.  For each new movie he made, that he was sure was going to be a massive hit, Eddie would gather up all of his friends and set out to make a really bad movie instead of a really good one, much less an actual hit. 

      Plan 9 is about an alien plot to take over the world by reanimating the recently dead. They succeed somewhat, by raising only three "zombies" total. These consist of an old man, who's half played posthumously by Bela Lugosi using some of Ed's old home movies and half played by Ed's chiropractor who kept his face hidden with a Dracula cape so that no one would notice that they were two different people. The man's wife, played by the recently unemployed TV movie horror host Vampira, who was so embarrassed to be in one of Ed's films that she only agreed to play the part as long as she didn't have to speak a single line, hoping that no one would notice her in the movie.  Spoiler alert, people noticed.  And a 500 lb cop, played by Tor Johnson, the gentle giant wrestler turned B-movie actor. 

      Cheap sets, wooden dialogue, flying saucers that look mysteriously like paper plates painted silver (which wobble uncontrollably throughout the entire movie), and the most stock footage that Ed could get his hands on (and boy, did Ed sure love his precious stock footage). All this amounted to an amazing cinematic experience (well, at least in Ed Woods's mind).  For the rest of us, we were left wondering how someone could make a movie that was so incredibly bad...on purpose!