Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 8 (Plan 9 From Outer Space)

Sorry for this one being a day off, I actually went out to a spooky movie night the local town recreation committee was hosting. It was a studio movie, so I can't say anything about that, but the experience itself was certainly something. I made the mistake of sitting in the front row, quite close to the central surround sound speaker. That's one advantage of watching a film in your own home: being able to control the damn volume. That was a very loud movie laden with many a jumpscare and loud noise, and ow did my ears hurt. This, of course, has nothing to do with the movie I watched at home a few hours earlier. Oh yeah. It's this shit.

What does one say about Plan 9 From Outer Space? Well, they usually start with the fact that it is not a very good movie. This is an assessment that I agree with: Plan 9 From Outer Space was not a very good movie. I knew it had this reputation going in, but I was expecting a legendary "so bad it's good" picture, the type where the joke was that it got made and you could laugh at the absurdity of such a thing being filmed and distributed. There are parts to that, I'm sure: lots of people will make fun of the airplane cockpit set or the flying saucer effects or the silly acting. The one amusing line read for me was the alien invader Eros berating humanity and "YOUR STUPID MINDS! STUPID! STUPID!". Beyond that, this is... Well, it'd almost be unremarkable if not for its reputation.

That in itself is a bit of interesting alchemy. This film is a bit of cinematic shlock that was left forgotten, the detritus of the B-movie age, for 20 years until some guys in the 80's dug it up and declared it The Worst Movie Of All Time. For good measure, they wrote it in a book, and so they made it true for a legion of moviegoers. It will be, now and forever, the legacy of Ed Wood Junior. Yet here I am, ages in the future, struggling to agree. Not a very good movie, certainly. But the worst of all time? I don't know about that. It isn't morally outrageous, it's not [[that]] technically incompetent, and its acting is not [[that]] bad. I have had worse experiences with cinema. Hell, I'd watch Plan 9 again over V/H/S. 

Now maybe, if I had a huge knowledge of 50's sci-fi/horror films, I would have better criteria to judge Plan 9. As it stands? This doesn't look any worse than any non-classic of the era. Dig through the detritus of history and you could find dozens of films at least this bad, if not worse. Of that I'm certain. The only reason we're still talking about this one is that some folks who wrote a book dug through the detritus of history and deemed this one the worst. I don't know if I agree. It's a film so unremarkable aside from its history that I have little more to say on it. Moving on.