Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Retrofit Drive In

Jun 13, 2021

That’s right, Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) in blazing interplanetary color. Hollywood's most beloved bad horror film has been colorized for modern audiences who still will shut it off after about ten minutes.

I saw it in its first run, long before it became famous as director Ed Wood’s masterpiece, as well as an all time low for the genre, show business, and the millions of who fell in love with it. Fourth grade Professor Mikey sat in a fan-filled theater on a sticky summer afternoon.

I was nine. I wasn’t impressed by the “fakey” UFO’s. Hey, I was a fan of Ray Harryhausen! The acting was stagey. The gravestones were made of styrofoam. The cops were sleepwalking and the aliens spoke like substitute teachers. The critic in me was jostled.

I so wanted to see Bela Lugosi’s last movie and he was barely in it. I would later learn his screen time was less than two minutes. The disappointments piled higher.

But I wasn’t completely repelled. Vampira, who I knew hosted late night horror movies on a local LA television, was pretty frightening, except when she blinked at gunfire. She didn’t have a word of dialogue, but she was the living dead dream. She was fabulous.

Man mountain Tor Johnson was no slouch either. A 400-lb former wrestler who was a big teddy bear in real life, was also on point as a horror actor. Especially when he crawled out of his semi-final resting place and staggered around the foggy graveyard. No one was home, but the home was walking. His stage, Pioneer Memorial Cemetery in Sylmar, California, is still the last stop for many who were stepped on during the production.

After that period of suspended animation and late night TV screenings in local markets, the film took on new life as a camp sensation. Brothers Harry and Michael Medved published Golden Turkey Awards (1980), a compendium of bad movies. The winner, with 393 physical pre-internet votes was Wood’s little known space zombie cop caper.

Plan Nine is so very bad that it exerts a strange fascination. It appears to have been made in somebody’s garage.” --John Brosnan, The Horror People (1976)

The revival was on. It was the Eighties, filled with mousse, cocaine, and synthesizers. Ed Wood, who left us in 1978, barely missed the Tinseltown recognition he had sought. Fans wanted more than the grave robbing vampires, reanimated like Volta’s frogs by aliens who spoke like outgoing answering machine messages. Wood’s low budget quickies including Glen or Glenda (1953), Jail Bait (1954), and Bride of the Monster (1955), were dusted off for film festivals and midnight movies.

The Plan 9 craze culminated with director Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), an homage not only to the film but the director whose lack of talent and funds never stopped his attempts at cinematic glory.

True and fake tales exist around Plan 9. Yes it was Bela’s last film, yes he’d kicked a morphine habit, no he didn’t shoot formaldehyde. The script for the movie didn’t even exist when his scenes were shot. Bela died and was buried in his Dracula cape, never knowing the name of his final film. Or its reputation.

The shots of the caped actor playing Lugosi in the afterlife were completed by Mrs. Wood’s chiropractor, Tom Mason. Karl Johnson, son of Tor and an officer with the San Fernando Police Department, provided the uniforms and cop cars. Vampira, actress Maila Nurmi, was paid a paltry two hundred bucks. She rode a city bus to the 1956 set in full costume and makeup.

The flying saucers were laughable, but they weren’t paper plates ignited by cigarette lighters as some suggested. They were 1/48 scale models from the plastic kits manufactured by the Paul Lindberg company. So airplane glue was definitely in the budget.

Like Vampira, spooky narrator and host Criswell had a following for hosting Criswell Predicts (1953) on KLAC, Channel 13, Los Angeles.

1973 - Homosexual communities will flourish as metropolitan suburbs. 1976 - The U.S. will give New Mexico back to the native Americans 1978 - Lake Michigan drained for land use 1980 - Outbreak of cannibalism in Pennsylvania 1983 - Plague of baldness among women of St, Louis, Missouri Sometime in the 1980s - Interplanetary Convention in Las Vegas with representatives from Mars, Venus, Neptune, the moon, and the USA

The color version improves the original slightly but not much. The charm of the original is intact, Vampira has roses in her deceased cheeks, and the spacesuits worn by Eros (Dudley Manlove) and Tana (Joanna Lee) are glorious purple slipper satin.

Wood’s intention, in addition to reaching for money and fame, was to give Bela a last hurrah. That would include a bit of a financial cushion and perhaps some dignity or insulation from a system that had not provided for a unique actor who had created a franchise. There were also opportunities he created for others, who, like the director himself, had always just missed the ring on the Hollywood-Go-Round.

Like most of his endeavors, the result was an obscure but public flop, ripped by the critics and destined for oblivion. As a study in futility, Ed Wood’s best known effortoffers a valuable life lesson about Hollywood, show business, and our own personal galaxies of broken dreams. As an example of how the most wayward plans can succeed in ways unimaginable and hilarious, there is no better one than the ninth plan. The one that came from outer space.

Also on tap, we dive into a new serial that takes us back to the origins of a special character who has undergone a universe of changes, sexual and otherwise, Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941) stars Tom Tyler as the mighty captain and Frank Coghlan Jr. as his secret identity, Billy Batson in this, the first motion picture depiction of a comic book superhero. SHAZAM!!

The program stays in space with an eye-popping cartoon from 1996, Marvin the Martian in the Third Dimension, history’s first stereoscopic 3-D polygonal short film.

Stick around for the Extras. The bush Bela picks a rose from in Plan 9 is still around!