I have a fascination with terrible films.

This all stems from me growing up during a time where the TV companies in England decided that they were going to run 24 hours a day, so they had a lot of time to fill through-out the witching hours, and they figured that the best, and cheapest way, of doing this was to dig out whatever old black and white movies they had kicking around in their vaults and playing them from dusk till dawn.

For any boy, or girl, lucky enough to have a portable telly in their bedroom, and zero care as to whether or not they could functionally be educated at school the next day, this was a goldmine of B-Movie madness and Hammer Horror scares and helped shape an entire generation of children into crappy silver-screen aficionados.

Having felt, for a long time, that these little motion picture masterpieces don’t get the respect and recognition they deserve I always swore that if I was ever in a position to shine a light upon them, then I would and with the BMA ticking over nicely, and being pretty sure that I’m far too lazy to run two seperate websites, I thought I’d use this opportunity to do just that.

Which is where we find ourselves today, and what better way to kick the whole thing off than with something that was, at one point in time, considered the worst movie ever made.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, Plan 9 From Outer Space.

When Ed Wood shuffled off this mortal coil on December 10, 1978, due to a heart attack brought about from years of alcohol abuse, his career was viewed by nearly everyone as a complete and utter failure.

The Director/Writer/Editor/Actor/Occasional Stuntman had 45 credits to his name and, if I’m to be honest here, not one of them was what you’d call good, or decent, or even passable. Hell, if The Razzies had existed when Ed was alive, he’d have swept every category, every year.

This was down to the fact that Wood’s love for cinema completely outstripped his abilities within the field. He made disaster after disaster, throwing himself lock, stock, and two smoking reels into such fantastic trash as Glen or Glenda and Bride of the Monster, but he would never be acknowledged, at least in is lifetime, as anything more than a hack that Hollywood spat out as soon as it could. Then in 1980, a book was released that changed how people perceived Ed Wood and his work.

The Golden Turkey Awards hit the shelves and named him “The Worst Director of All Time” and Plan 9 from Outer Space as “The Worst Film Ever Made” and just like that, people decided they needed to have more Ed Wood in their lives. But what is it about Plan 9… that made it such a catastrophe and is it as bad as everyone claims?

In a nutshell, yes. If you look at everything that’s wrong with it, individually, then there is no way anyone should ever waste even five minutes of their life watching it. The acting is as wooden as the furniture department of IKEA, the script is the nonsensical ramblings of a drugged up madman, and the editing and special effects would’ve been better handled by Stevie Wonder, but when you view it as a whole it somehow works and instead of being something you’d use to torture a confession out of criminals, it’s a glorious disaster of a masterpiece.

Before Plan 9… had even started filming, Bela Lugosi decided that he’d had enough of life and up and died, leaving Wood with about 15 minutes of film that he had no idea what to do with. Never being one to let something as trivial as a dead leading actor get in the way of his art, Wood decided that the best way forward was to higher wife’s chiropractor, Tom Mason, to replace the horror, legend, which wouldn’t have been a problem except Mason was about a foot taller than Lugosi and looked nothing like him.

Wood’s way around this was simple, have his replacement stoop over as much as he possibly could while covering his face in a replica of Bela’s iconic Dracula cape and he’d have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s never explained why the character is full-faced in one shot and then in the next, his face is totally obscured for the camera. That and the fact that it’s so obviously NOT Lugosi in those scenes is just hysterical.

The whole acting department deserves special mention here, with performances ranging between players reading their lines off of cards that are taped to items on set to so much ham it would make a vegan explode at a thousand paces, it truly is a masterclass in how not to act. Also, the brilliance of having someone as well known as Vampira in the film and then have her say nothing is either down to some inspired directing from Wood or, as I suspect, her straight out refusal to say any of the lines he might have written for her. And, to be honest, that’s not surprising.

The script is utter garbage. It’s so convoluted that it’s almost impossible to explain, but it revolves around an alien race coming to Earth to stop the human race from developing ‘Solaronite’ which they’re convinced that the stupid humans will use to blow up the universe, but when the governments of the world ignore their attempts at communication, they figure the best way to make their point is to enact ‘Plan 9’ and raise the dead from their graves.

Why they do this is never really explained, neither is why they can only raise three at a time but I suspect that might have something to do with a very small budget and the fact that most people considered Wood as mad as a bag of rabid badgers that had been poked with a pointy stick and flat out refused to work with him. But Edward D. Wood needed nobody.

He wore three hats on Plan 9... as writer, director, and editor, and I’m pretty sure when they have the climactic fight scene at the end of the film he’s also Dudley Manlove’s stunt double. This proves that Wood’s ambition was always a lot larger than his ability as his work behind the camera and in the editing room leaves a lot to be desired.

There are boom mics in shot, a graveyard that looks like it could fall over in a light breeze, and inexplicable scenes where it’s blatantly daylight one second before the cut puts us in a backstage lot with a jet black backdrop, his directing style makes Uwe Boll look like Christopher Nolan and seems to revolve around a belief that “To hell with it, let’s just shoot it now and I’ll fix it in editing”. Which he doesn’t, leaving every mistake in and then doubling down on the ‘special’ effects. Every battle that isn’t stock footage, a trick Wood used as often as possible because it didn’t cost him a single penny, has explosions literally scratched onto the negative and the flying saucer he used is…well…I’ll let you be the judge.

But you know what, I don’t care.

For all of its faults, I dare you to watch Plan 9 from Outer Space and not come away with a smile on your face. The whole exercise is a testament to a man who didn’t get the credit in his life that he deserved and it’s a tragedy that he died a penniless alcoholic who was all but forgotten until a new generation of movie fans with incredibly bad taste would discover him.

Ed Wood is the epitome of ‘Do It Yourself’ and is the poster boy, at least in my mind, for The BMA and I will never tire of re-watching Plan 9… among his other movies, as it stands as proof that you don’t need the talent to make it big, kid.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I hear something shuffling towards my door…