by Greg Goodsell
It was my good fortune to recently view Edward D. Wood Jr.’s Plan 9 from Outer Space on a stadium-sized movie screen. Rifftrax, the masterminds behind TV favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000, were on hand to breathe life into the legendary science-fiction stinker with witty asides and snide remarks. The end result was one of unbridled hilarity, which provided comfort as this writer has always found Plan 9 to be rather…unremittingly tragic.
Winning by a landslide in a poll conducted by Golden Turkey brothers Harry and Michael Medved as “The Worst Movie of All Time,” Plan 9 retains that title among people who haven’t seen that many movies. Any seasoned movie viewer will attest to the fact that there are far worse films that don’t retain the fascination of Plan 9.
The film’s failure is directly traceable to writer-director Edward D. Wood Jr., who was in over his head on many things, in particular science-fiction. Plan 9 appears to be Wood’s attempt at recreating the thrills found in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (1953). In those epics, flying saucers attack Washington D.C. or land a stone’s throw away from the White House lawn. In Plan 9, toy-store model spaceships — and not pie tins or hubcaps as mentioned in legend — fly over a San Fernando graveyard and raise a proto-Gothic beatnik girl (Vampira) from her grave to kill two grave diggers. It’s all part of “Plan 9” — plans one through eight remain a tightly guarded secret — by space aliens Eros (Dudley Manlove) and Tanna (Joanna Lee) to alert us earthlings to our wicked ways.
Banged out by Wood in his typical alcoholic haze, the movie fails to explain how humanity would be brought to its knees with the deaths of two gravediggers. One could picture how this would play out across breakfast tables across the nation:
WIFE: Hon, did you read this in the paper? A girl came back to life in a graveyard and killed two gravediggers!
HUSBAND: Well, I’ll be God damned! Tell me, how did the Dodgers do?
Utilizing existing footage of Bela Lugosi for a project that was never finished, and quite a few years after his death in 1956, Wood then introduces us to the character of “the Old Man.” Walking out of a pitifully plain tract home, the onetime horror great finds time to sniff a rose from a nearby bush, when our far-from humble narrator Criswell — the one guilty of saying the quote at the beginning of this article — intones this lugubrious bit of nonsense:
“The grief of his wife’s death became greater and greater agony. The home they had so long shared together, became a tomb. A sweet memory of her joyous living. The sky to which she had once looked, was now only a covering for her dead body. The ever-beautiful flowers she had planted with her own hand, became nothing more than the lost roses of her cheeks. Confused by his great loss, the old man left that home, never to return again.”
Bela exits stage left, we hear a car screeching, a scream — and another one bites the dust. At the old man’s funeral, as the mourners leave a crypt that plainly served as a refrigerator box in a previous life, the body of the two gravediggers are discovered. Enter some cops just this side of Keystone: Inspector Clay (wrestling icon Tor Johnson), Patrolman Larry (Carl Anthony) and Lieutenant Harper (Duke Moore, who scratches his lapel constantly with his loaded gun). Johnson’s Swedish accent is highly apparent. “Who found him?” “Medical, uh, examiner been ’round yet?” “Finding a mess like this oughta make anyone frightened.” Wood had the foresight to make Johnson’s role in Bride of the Monster (1955) silent, and has Johnson killed off shortly afterward by Vampira and Lugosi’s stand-in, played by a chiropractor drafted into service who holds a cape in front of his face.
In the meantime, airline pilot Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott) and his lovely wife Paula (Mona McKinnon) discuss the recent flying saucer phenomena. You would think that being an airline pilot would pay better than it does in the film; the Trents live near a graveyard and have the same exact furniture on their front porch as they do in their living room! In spite of the recent wave of reanimated corpses and flying saucers breaking out all around them, Paula insists that her pilot husband not be overly concerned about her safety. “Now, don’t you worry. The saucers are up there. The graveyard is out there. But I’ll be locked up safely in there.”
Anyone reading this knows the story by now. There’s lots of talk, stock footage, and a confrontation of members of the military and police force by the two unarmed, ineffectual aliens in their very terrestrial spacecraft. The recent shabby activity, Eros claims, is because the human race is on the verge of creating the much dreaded “Solaranite bomb.” Say what?
“Take a can of your gasoline. Say this can of gasoline is the sun,” Eros passionately explains. “Now, you spread a thin line of it to a ball, representing the Earth. Now, the gasoline represents the sunlight, the sun particles. Here we saturate the ball with the gasoline, the sunlight. Then we put a flame to the ball. The flame will speedily travel around the earth, back along the line of gasoline to the can, or the sun itself. It will explode this source and spread to every place that gasoline, our sunlight, touches. Explode the sunlight here, gentlemen, you explode the universe. Explode the sunlight here and a chain reaction will occur direct to the sun itself and to all the planets that sunlight touches, to every planet in the universe. This is why you must be stopped. This is why any means must be used to stop you. In a friendly manner or as (it seems) you want it.”
According to legend, this bit of pseudo-science about Solaranite was the script addition of Wood’s long-suffering wife, Kathy Wood, who lived to the ripe old age of eighty-four. Standing by Ed through thick and thin, as the 1994 Tim Burton biopic Ed Wood dutifully mentions, Kathy never remarried after Wood’s death in 1978. It was my good fortune to see Kathy at a film convention with other members of Wood’s repertory at a Hollywood film convention in 2000. I figure that Ed was drawn to this small, feisty woman due to their shared fondness for drink. It appeared that Kathy had a snootful that morning and told the assembled audience that her Eddie had “a wonderful life!”
Back to the movie: Things deteriorate, the stupid, stupid earthlings get into a tussle with Eros, and the wobbly spacecraft takes to the skies where it catches fire and explodes like a firecracker. So much for superior alien technology. Criswell reappears to ask, “Can you prove it didn’t happen?”
We could go on all day about Plan 9. The mere appearance of John “Bunny” Breckenridge as the alien ruler seemingly exists only to topple Zsa Zsa Gabor’s claim as The Queen from Outer Space (1958). The spaceship interior consisting of radio equipment, old and outdated by the time the film was made, on wooden tables. Furiously scribbled dialogue that strives for importance but all too surely shows sign of alcohol-fueled dementia. It’s all been cited and enjoyed numerous times before, so we won’t go there.
What is it that makes Plan 9 a dispiriting experience for this writer? Blame falls solely to the participation of Jeron King Criswell of “Criswell Predicts” infamy. Serving as a narrator to an already off-the-rails narrative, Criswell’s booming voice intrudes on the stoic non-action to either state the obvious or attempt to wax eloquent over Wood’s turgid, purple prose.
A radio announcer, Criswell is said to have reportedly made a few off-the-cuff predictions one day when he was short on news copy. Some of the predictions actually came true and, smelling money, Criswell donned a tuxedo and a newfound mysterious persona. Becoming a fixture on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show for several years, Criswell went on to publish several books based upon his highly unreliable predictions. Among his many unrealized prophecies was that his good personal friend Mae West would be elected president of the United States in 1960 and that he and West, along with his other personal friend Liberace, would fly to the moon five years later!
While a cheerful fraud in private, confessing that he couldn’t tell anyone what the weather was like staring out of a window, Criswell’s participation is what makes Plan 9 for this writer a gloomy experience. Criswell calls to mind the lonely, paranoid homeless person on the street corner, his flight-of-ideas delivery a classic example of dime-store schizophrenia. Criswell can be a funny guy, until you are regularly confronted by people just like him, who insist that fluoridation is a communist conspiracy to sterilize the western world, or that there was more than one gunman on that grassy knoll, or how vaccinating your children makes them autistic.
It’s been said that when Plan 9 from Outer Space is screened, the world is automatically transported to a place where the time is perpetually three o’clock in the morning, with long, dark shadows. The tragedy surrounding its makers permeates every frame and again the disembodied head of Criswell reappears to ask us, “Can you prove it didn’t happen?”
Well…can we?