414. Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

Starring: Gregory Walcott, Tom Keene, Mona McKinnon

Director: Ed Wood

Running Time: 79 mins

Plan 9 From Outer Space is an American film about aliens that come to Earth, and resurrect dead humans as murderous zombies, in order to prevent the humans from completing their building of a bomb that threatens the aliens’, and the entire universe’s existence.

I think it was pretty much to be expected that this film would be terrible. The premise is already preposterous and cheesy, and with the mind-blowing special effects available to a B movie like this in 1959, it was quite unlikely that they could have pulled off this idea.

Firstly, the story is completely predictable. However, the film and plot are so boring that I couldn’t really be bothered at predicting the outcome, and once the finale arrives, which is meant to have a little bit of tension, I couldn’t care one bit less about it, which really shows how good this film is.

Even by late 1950s standards, the special effects in this are terrible. Not only is the set design appalling unconvincing, with the interior of the spaceship not only looking like the boiler room in a block of dilapidated flats, but the flying saucers themselves looked so poorly made that it was laughable.

At least this was laughable, and it didn’t stray into Nazis At The Centre Of The Earth territory, where it becomes so unbelievably awful it’s not even funny, because in this film, it was so outward with its ambition, and yet failed so spectacularly, it was quite entertaining to laugh at that failure.

Overall, I’ll give this a 2.5, because it was a terrible, dull and poorly made film, however it was so bad that it was indeed relatively comical.