PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE: Flying Saucers, Bela, and the Best Bad Movie

 

Is it the worst movie of all time? Or the most entertainingly bad? Can anything be said about it that hasn’t already been said?

Filmmaker William Hopkins and APFB host Carey Vickers search for the answers to these questions as they look back to 1957 at the crowning achievement of notorious schlock maestro, Edward D. Wood, Jr: PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, a film whose charm and lasting appeal may lie in its misfit cast, which features a 400-pound Swedish wrestler, a flamboyant TV psychic, a proto goth girl with a 17-inch waist, and an actor who was dead and buried a year before the film went into production — all under the direction of Wood, a tireless but talentless filmmaker with a passion for angora and stock footage, whose life post-Plan 9 would become a slow descent into poverty, pornography and alchoholism.

Other films and TV shows mentioned in the course of the discussion include ED WOOD (1994); GLEN OR GLENDA (1953); BRIDE OF THE MONSTER (1955); ORGY OF THE DEAD (1965); ROBOWOMAN (2019); VEROTIKA (2019); DARK SHADOWS (2012); ALIEN (1979); FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (1996); DRACULA (1931); HORROR OF DRACULA (1958); MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935); RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE (1943); RETURN OF DRACULA (1958); THE ROOM (2003); EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990); BATMAN (1989); PLANET OF THE APES (2001).

Abundant SPOILERS in this episode. Don’t listen till you’ve watched the film, which can be viewed, for free, here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space_%281959%29.webm

Listen to an audio-only version of this episode: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-grd4r-10f98e2

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Watch William Hopkins’ film, DEMON RESURRECTION, free on TubiTV: https://tubitv.com/movies/597288/ or stream it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B01MTT7OLT/

Photos, film clips and poster art used in this episode are the property of the respective copyright holders and are used here for educational and review purposes only.

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