PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, sociological*

I meditated on the best way to open a review of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE without falling into the usual cliches, and came up with this quote from one of my other reviews:

Modern-day Earthman Francis Melchior (note the Biblically inspired name) runs an antiques shop and spends all his free time star-gazing. He holds an enduring fascination with two seemingly contradictory spectacles: those that are "steeped in the mortuary shadows of dead ages," and those that suggest "the transcendent glories of other aeons." Smith incisively notes that these desires are both rooted in Melchior's distaste for "all that is present or near at hand," which might be seen as a comment on the tastes of horror-and-fantasy readers in general.

To be sure, what is profound coming from a creator like Clark Ashton Smith is just endearingly goofy coming from one like Edward D. Wood Jr. Nevertheless, Wood was definitely attempting to meld the appeal of Gothic horror with that of space-age menace. Wood had grown up enjoying Classic Hollywood's era of Gothic horror, which genre had for the most part been supplanted by aliens and colossal beasts. Wood wasn't the only fifties filmmaker to merge the two forms of terror. But Wood's helter-skelter approach, that of jamming together moldy corpse-people with aliens in shiny acrylic, adds an inevitable level of humor to his genre-bending.

So what is PLAN 9 about, aside from trying to appeal to audiences with those two forms of terror? 

The original title of Wood's film was GRAVE ROBBERS FROM OUTER SPACE, and since the aliens don't use any particular cultural name for their species, one might as well call them "the Grave Robbers" as anything else. In both their interpersonal conversations and in exchanges with Earth-people, the Robbers claim to have been trying to contact Earth's governments in order to warn humans about the dangers of their triggering a universe-destroying cataclysm when and if they uncover the principle of the "solaronite bomb." Wood's script does not represent the responses of any Earth-government except that of the United States, but this was a common trope in fifties SF-films, where aliens frequently interacted only with the country where the films originated. 

Wood almost certainly derived the essentials of his story from 1951's THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. But because he had a minimal budget, Wood avoided any scenes that might show humanity as a whole reacting to the advent of aliens. Instead, Wood presents the idea that the U.S. government steadfastly refuses to admit the Robbers' existence, or even to privately engage with them to find out what the ETs want. Given that the high-echelon officers of the army (we never see any actual governmental figures) know that the saucers are real-- one even remarks that the ETs destroyed some unnamed "small town"-- this level of mule-headed refusal to face facts makes no sense.

But of course, Wood wasn't worried about internal consistency, assuming he understood the concept at all. Wood, a notorious glad-hander, was all about spectacle, about making people see what he wanted them to see. Not for nothing does narrator Criswell pontificate, "There comes a time in every man's life when he can't believe his own eyes!"

And so unwinds the flimsy story of PLAN 9, in which Wood hopes that fans will overlook wobbling gravestones and the fact that the one "name star" in the film was being impersonated by a stand-in who bore no real resemblance to the late Bela Lugosi. 

Wood also apparently never met a malapropism he didn't like. In one scene, two cops investigating the case of the risen dead remark on the stubbornness of Paula Trent.

Cop 1: "Modern women!"

Cop 2: "Yeah, they've been that way all through the ages."

One might think that someone who had the gift of gab would also be able to discern the dissonance in that exchange, that "modern women" cannot possibly have existed "all through the ages." But maybe Wood's gift simply lay in telling people what they already wanted to hear, which didn't necessarily depend on good diction.

And yet some odd details were important to him. When he shows mourners exiting the crypt where Lugosi's old man (aka the "Ghoul Man") has been buried, one person remarks that it's curious that the old fellow was buried in the crypt while his recently deceased wife was buried in a grave. It's as if Wood felt he should clarify a point that would have occurred to no one. Yet he couldn't see bigger issues-- like, why is the Old Man's recently deceased wife a hot, wasp-waisted young chick (Vampira), and why does she walk around holding her hands like lobster-claws? And if the Grave Robbers really want to overthrow the Earth, why don't they revive more than just these two corpses (with their not coincidental resemblance to the roles played by Lugosi and Carroll Borland in MARK OF THE VAMPIRE) and that of the also-recently-dead policeman Inspector Clay (Tor Johnson). As the hilarious "electro gun malfunction" scene shows, the space-soldiers Eros (Dudley Manlove) and Tanna (Joanna Lee) can barely even keep Big Dan Clay under control. Imagine a horde of Plan-9 dead people invading Washington, while Eros and Tanna have to keep pointing their little space-guns at all those zombies to keep them on the right path.

In contrast to the many things that don't work in PLAN 9-- and I'm trying to avoid those that have been ridiculed to death-- the one thing that works well is the "nerd vs. jock" opposition of Dudley Manlove's Eros and Greg Walcott's Jeff Trent. The latter is a pilot and one of the first persons to see the Robbers' saucers, and he gets involved with the investigation of the UFOs. Eros is the polar opposite of Michael Rennie's cool, collected alien from DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, for Eros is filled with prissy conceit about his people's superiority to the "stupid minds" of Earthlings. Yet when Trent comments that the U.S, would only be "stronger" if they do invent the solaronite bomb, not even the most gung-ho warhawk in a movie theater would have thought Trent was supposed to be taken seriously-- though other fifties SF-movies have a number of warhawk characters who ARE fully justified. Eros and Tanna (Eros and Thanatos?) get away briefly, but their saucer malfunctions, and upon crashing they change into skeletons instantly, just like their zombie pawns did. Unlike the Rennie movie, which implies that Earth will be prevented from spreading its bad influence throughout the galaxies, the failure of the Grave Robbers from Outer Space leaves open the possibility that Stupid Earthlings may indeed bring doom to the entire universe.