Worst In Show: Review for "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

The movie that was helmed as the worst film ever made is truly that. Ed Wood's Citizen Cane of bad movies, Plan 9 from Outer Space, is the worst film I have ever seen. Yes, that includes The Dukes of Hazzard. Aliens from outer space (duh!) have come to Earth to rase dead bodies to get our attention (and with the look of Vampira and a wrestler, they did). Bela Lugosi, friend of Wood, played the old man zombie, tough he died two days into filming. They hired another person to play his part and hold a cape over his face. At the end, some cops get into the alien ship and the alien commander gives a speech that sounds like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth on crack. The settings are dreadful (the graveyard building where they have the coffin of the dead body is so squalid, it looks like a bookshelf), the special effects horrible (the flying saucers are merely miniatures attached to string swinging in front of the camera, the aliens' planet looks obscene), and the dialogue benine ("The flying saucer looked like a giant cigar."). The acting is terrible, but looking at all this evidence, I think to myself, "I guesse that's what you get with Ed Wood." The faces of the wrestler zombie looks hysterical, as if he is in mighty pain, and Vampira arms are as stiff and huge as a tree stump. But the atrocities are very funny, looking back then and now and all the progress we've made from that in film making (even though this was made in the 1950s).  I think the saddest fact is that Wood was trying to be serious.

Grade: F

Born to Be Bad: Review for "Ed Wood"

Ed Wood is the biography of writer/director/producer/actor Edward D. Wood, Jr., who is claimed as the worst director of all time, while his films Glen or Glenda, about a man who likes dressing in women's clothes, and Plan 9 from Outer Space, which is about aliens raising corpeses from the dead to attack earth. Plan 9 is said to be the WORST. From it's less-than-convincing special effects to it's outrageous plotline. In reality, Ed Wood (Johnny Depp) was a good hearted young man, who liked to dress in women's clothes (which was his insparation to direct Glen or Glenda), who was a visionary artist with all the wrong ideas and crew. He eventually befriended his idol, Bela Lugosi (excellently portrayed by Martin Landau), who's career since Dracula and others had gone done the drain. He had been addicted to drugs for the last 20 years, but that didn't stop the child like wonder in Wood's eye.The film chronicles the making of some of his films. It is well done, though I think that Tim Burton tried to hard to give the Wood like feel to the film, corny music, bad camera angles, and weird lighting. While Ed Wood remains the worst director, Tim Burton is still great! It's just a matter of overdose.
Grade: B

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