Plan 9 from Outer Space 1959

[5.0/10] I scored this as a five out of ten, but the real answer here is that Plan 9 from Outer Space is unratable. It’s like trying to judge a bowl of tomato soup as a contestant in the Westminster Dog Show. The movie is so far out of form that using the same tools and standards we normally use to rank and rate things is all but meaningless.

The movie’s flaws have been well-documented. The acting is variable at best. The plot is a nonsensical hodgepodge. The writing is stilted and silly. The special effects are laughable. And the efforts to cover-up or compensate for all of these shortcomings are woefully inadequate. But no one signs up for Plan 9 these days expecting Kubrickian perfection. The movie effectively delivers what it promises to modern day viewers.

Here’s the dirty little secret though. Much of Plan 9 is undeniably bad, but much of it is also just downright boring. There’s humor in elliptical conversations that go nowhere and communicate nothing. But by the time Random Alien #3 is repeating the same point he made ten minutes ago in slightly different terms, it can be downright exhausting. There’s a strange art to bad movies. Being questionable in quality but rife with entertainment is a rare and special thing. In plenty of stretches, Plan 9 achieves that somewhat ignominious but still noteworthy standard, but in many others, it’s simply the dull kind of “not very good.”

More to the point, many of the things that mark it as a famous terrible film are hard to grok in the same way sixty years later. I like older movies. Plenty of them are as fascinating or profound as anything deliberately crafted to speak to us today. But they also require a certain allowance from the modern viewer for things like pacing, the style of acting, and the quality of the special effects that may differ substantially from what we’re used to.

Some of Plan 9’s performances or dialogue or chintzy effects are self-evidently crummy in any era. But honestly, a lot of it falls within acceptable tolerances for stories and presentations from so long ago. I’m a big fan of Star Trek, and plenty of the cheesier elements in the 1960s series -- whether in terms of acting or storytelling or visuals -- aren’t that far removed from what Plan 9 does here, and The Original Series remains a classic. Speaking only for myself, I’ve seen enough of the cinema from this era to be able to accept the stylistic differences without complaint, but not enough to be able to expertly discern embarrassing stumbles from conventions of the time.

All that said, wide swaths of Plan 9 are close to incoherent. The wants of any given character at any given time are opaque at best. There’s barely any sort of protagonist or central story to latch onto. There’s little in the way of build or progression. Scenes simply crash into one another, held together by the epoxy of voiceover narration that randomly goes away halfway through the movie. True to the film’s monster movie roots, this cinematic outing plays like it was stitched together from other random spare parts and jolted with just enough juice to be technically ambulatory.

And yet, there are themes here, bluntly delivered and didactic though they may be. Buried within all that flotsam is a legitimate point about man’s trajectory in the nuclear age. The movie is riddled with a certain fear, a common one in science fiction of the time, that our technology was outstripping our maturity as a species. The concept of using sunlight as an explosive sounds silly to the modern ear, but it’s not a far stretch from artists who watched scientists turn unseen atoms into weapons of mass destruction. The alien’s overextended, repetitive speech isn’t necessarily the grandest delivery mechanism for this idea. But it’s striking, to say the least, to see this germ of insight and maybe even profundity in a film that fails at so much else.

The problem is that Plan 9 isn’t really about that, outside of that scene. The best you can say is that it posits man as full of hubris and violence, that we are too impulsive and barbarous to become citizens of the universe. The efforts to cover-up the existence of aliens, the militaristic response to their visits, all suggest a version of humanity unready and even dangerous for the responsibilities falling into our laps as advanced technology propels us to the stars and to self-destructive capabilities.

But good lord, why does that mean the aliens need to revive corpses, or control them with ray guns, or give pontificating speeches about all of this? And why does it mean the same three zombies wander around...very slowly menacing people who should be able to get away at a light jog? And why would their extraterrestrial masters have them disintegrate down to their skeletons via the “decomposition ray” for no apparent reason? And why does one of the aliens repeat her compatriot’s name, Eros, fifty times like it’s going to revive him a la clapping for Tinker Bell? Trying to reconstruct this movie’s plot is like trying to build a bookshelf out of jello.

There is, however, one other element of note, which stumbles into potential thematic resonance, albeit accidentally. Paula, the wife of the pilot who first sees the UFO, is one of the only competent and half-intelligent people in the movie. The cops scratch and point with their revolvers. Others just sort of saunter into danger without thought, or act in baffling ways. But Paula seems to readily assess the situation and offer good advice that no one listens to.

It’s notable because there’s an odd, if era-appropriate streak of misogyny here. Characters talk about women being hysterical, and even the quasi-enlightened alien overlords utter jaw-dropping lines about what a woman’s place is. For someone who would sometimes dress as a woman, Ed Wood certainly doesn’t have the most progressive view of them.

The truth, though, is this sexist streak is a minor part of the film. But the same goes for pretty much everything. The struggles behind the scenes of the film’s production are legendary, and the fractured results bear them out. The grab bag of characters and story fragments and ideas bear little relation to one another. Some of them are funny. Some of them are boring, Some of them are even a touch profound.

But Plan 9 from Outer Space is a patchwork quilt made by amateurs by the side of the road, rather than a movie. It doesn’t make sense to judge it as a movie. Instead, the only proper response is to do what others have done: spelunk through the wreckage to find the humanity within and behind it, to understand the love of cinema and its leading lights that spurred it, and to marvel at why and how it was made at all. Therein lies all the intrigue and the glory of this messy little miracle. The film itself, for all its ridiculousness and infamy, is merely the bait.