#168: Plan 9 from Outer Space
Release Date: March 15th, 1957
Format: Blu ray (colorized version)
Written by: Edward D. Wood Jr.
Directed by: Edward D. Wood Jr.
2 Stars
When I worked at a private secondary school called Fusion Academy, I would help students make short films with my teaching colleagues Vosgan and Baruch. They were usually silly little things that would have to be developed with our limited budget in mind (we had none) and our less than ideal location, which was a small school in a commercial building complex. Visually it didn’t really read as a school, or a business, and our outdoor areas consisted of a nondescript parking garage and a couple patches of grass.
Despite this, with a lot of heart (and not a lot of acting talent) we made movies about everything from kids standing up to bullies, to a haunted sandwich, to a making-of mockumentary about our students shooting a vampire movie, to a story about two kids who steal a watch from a homeless guy, to a time travel movie, to a French New Wave movie about…what was that one about?
Anyway, we weren’t going to let limitations - financial, geographical, or experiential - get in the way of swinging for the fences and having some fun.
So I felt a kinship watching Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space for the first time. Here’s a creative guy with a clear vision: To make an epic sci-fi-gothic-horror-creature-romance flick on a budget of $60,000. He’s got a movie star to slap on the movie poster (in the form of a washed up Bela Lugosi, in his last role, who appears in a couple recycled shots repurposed from other unrealized Wood-led projects), he’s got some aliens and gothic monsters, and he’s got a cop car and the exterior of a house and two or three small sets.
And damn it, what he lacks in talent and money he more than makes up for in heart. It’s really endearing, the experience of watching Plan 9 from Outer Space. Once forgotten, then rediscovered only to be mocked for decades, it has now settled into its rightful place in film history: an auteur’s heartfelt attempt to make a big, bold, exciting movie, despite the odds.
How can you not love that?
