My friend, can your heart stand the
shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space? Can you handle unspeakable
horrors from outer space paralyzing the living and resurrecting the dead? If
so, then do we have the film for you!
Gloriously inept and twisted b-movie visionary Ed Wood Jr unleashed Plan 9 from Outer Space – his much-ridiculed el cheapo sci fi horror thriller – on an unsuspecting world on 22 July 1959. Come celebrate the 60th anniversary of this notorious cinematic atrocity on Wednesday 17 July when the FREE monthly Lobotomy Room sinema club downstairs at Fontaine’s bar (Dalston’s most unique nite spot!) devoted to Bad Movies We Love presents Plan 9 from Outer Space!
Starring horror legend Bela Lugosi (in his final film appearance), hulking Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson and wraith-like glamour ghoul Vampira, the plot - incorporating flying saucers, zombies and nuclear war - offers a nightmare scenario about what happens when aliens administer long distance electrodes into the pineal and pituitary glands of the recent dead, bringing them back to life! A true cult classick, Plan 9 simply must be seen to be believed and will improve immeasurably by drinking Fontaine’s frosty cocktails!
Is Plan 9 from Outer Space one of the worst films ever made? YOU be the judge on 17 July! Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm prompt! And remember: “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives! ..."
Gloriously inept and twisted b-movie visionary Ed Wood Jr unleashed Plan 9 from Outer Space – his much-ridiculed el cheapo sci fi horror thriller – on an unsuspecting world on 22 July 1959. Come celebrate the 60th anniversary of this notorious cinematic atrocity on Wednesday 17 July when the FREE monthly Lobotomy Room sinema club downstairs at Fontaine’s bar (Dalston’s most unique nite spot!) devoted to Bad Movies We Love presents Plan 9 from Outer Space!
Starring horror legend Bela Lugosi (in his final film appearance), hulking Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson and wraith-like glamour ghoul Vampira, the plot - incorporating flying saucers, zombies and nuclear war - offers a nightmare scenario about what happens when aliens administer long distance electrodes into the pineal and pituitary glands of the recent dead, bringing them back to life! A true cult classick, Plan 9 simply must be seen to be believed and will improve immeasurably by drinking Fontaine’s frosty cocktails!
Is Plan 9 from Outer Space one of the worst films ever made? YOU be the judge on 17 July! Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm prompt! And remember: “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives! ..."
“Plan 9 is my pride and joy … if you want
to know me, see Glen or Glenda, that’s me. That’s my story. No question. But
Plan 9 is my pride and joy.” Ed Wood quoted in Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life
and Art of Edward D Wood Jr (1992).
The following blog post is cobbled-together
from my introductory speech on 17 July plus some random observations and fun
facts about Plan 9 from Outer Space.
It was deeply gratifying
to have such an enthusiastic crowd riveted to the screen to commemorate the 60th
anniversary of Plan 9 from Outer Space. I feel like we did Ed Wood proud.
It’s been said that Wood directed Plan 9
“with brazen confidence but no taste, common sense or budget.” Wood himself
would regard Plan 9 as his greatest artistic achievement for the rest of his tormented
but productive, abbreviated and booze-sodden life. (He died in 1978 aged just
54 after years of chronic alcoholism and abject poverty).
Plan 9 was little
seen when it first emerged in 1959 and mostly languished in obscurity (aside
from late-night TV screenings) until 1980 when Harry and Michael Medved
published the book The Golden Turkey Awards, in which they nominated Plan 9 as
the official worst film of all time. Thrust back into public attention, it’s
been embraced by subsequent generations as an enjoyably terrible must-see cult
film ever since. Certainly, you can’t call yourself an aficionado of cult or
exploitation cinema without experiencing Plan 9 at least once.
Wood completed the film in 1956 but it took
almost three years before he could find a distributor willing to touch it.
The original title was meant to be Grave
Robbers from Outer Space.
The budget was an ultra-frugal $60,000 and those
economic limitations are harshly visible onscreen. The tombstones in the
graveyard are plywood and they wobble. Shadows of boom microphones are
sometimes visible onscreen. When two pilot are shown in the cockpit of a plane,
it appears to be a shower curtain behind them. It’s been widely reported that
the flying saucers were hubcaps painted silver, but they were in fact made from
a child’s model kit bought from a hobby shop. (Actually, there are multiple
accounts of those flying saucers. I highly recommend you read the biography Nightmare
of Ecstasy for more details about the making of Plan 9). For me, rather than detract, the cheap’n’cheerful aspect of Plan 9
– the fact that Woods’ ambitions vastly outstrip the financial restraints
imposed on him and his own film-making expertise – considerably add to the film’s charms. This is genuine naïve
outsider art.
/ Above: Bela Lugsoi. Below: Thomas Mason. I can't spot the difference, can you? /
Famously, Plan 9 represents horror icon –
and definitive Dracula - Bela Lugosi’s final film appearance. In fact, you only
get the most fleeting glimpses of Lugosi (looking gaunt and desiccated) at the
film’s beginning. When he died of a heart attack on 16 August 1956 aged 73 with
virtually no completed shots in the can, the resourceful Wood simply replaced Lugosi
with a chiropractor named Thomas R Mason - who looked nothing remotely like him,
was significantly younger and taller. Undeterred, Wood compensated by having Mason
hunch and keep his face concealed with a cape. There’s something poignantly
optimistic later when Wood intercuts footage of Lugosi and Mason assuming the
audience won’t notice the difference.
The rest of the cast incorporate Wood’s colourful
entourage of freaks from the lunatic underbelly of Hollywood Babylon: hammy psychic
The Amazing Criswell (visibly reading his lines from cue cards), massive Swedish
wrestler Tor Johnson and morbidly beautiful Finnish-born horror movie hostess
Vampira (real name: Maila Nurmi). Honourable
mention must go to the exhausted-looking John “Bunny” Breckenridge (1903 - 1996) as the
queen-y, disdainful leader of the aliens simply called The Ruler. I treasure
his undisguised contempt, heavy eyeliner and lemon-sucking expression. (Bill
Murray beautifully and accurately channeled Breckenridge’s hauteur in the 1995
biopic Ed Wood: the sole Tim Burton / Johnny Depp film I genuinely like). And
those poor actors playing the aliens wear
wildly unflattering tunics and leggings, unforgiving for their portly
middle-aged frames.
I am unashamedly obsessed with cult icon
Maila Nurmi (1922 - 2008), though, so for me Plan 9 feels like a paean to her macabre beauty
and bizarre charisma. The woman is a sacred icon / touchstone for generations
of punks, queers, goths, psychobillies and other assorted misfits. Re-visiting
Plan 9, it’s always striking to see again just how freaky and extreme the
cadaverous Nurmi’s look was. That emaciated waist! She was truly a pioneer in
terms of body modification and fetishism.
The passage of time certainly hasn’t muted the shocking impact of coffin cutie Nurmi’s
appearance.
Nurmi was the original TV horror movie
hostess and a pop culture sensation between 1954 and 1955. But then The Vampira Show was abruptly cancelled in a dispute with ABC (they wanted to own the
rights to her persona, she refused and was blacklisted), her career
dramatically fizzled-out and never recovered. (Like Wood, Nurmi pretty much
spent the rest of her life in poverty). She also alienated many by exploiting for
publicity her friendship with James Dean following his death in 1955. By the time Nurmi
appeared in Plan 9 she was widely considered washed-up and a show business
pariah. All her scenes were filmed in one day, she was paid a grand total of
$200 for her performance (the union minimum) and she was presumably glad to get
it. Nurmi considered Plan 9 a humiliating nadir, but considering no footage
of her TV series survives, it remains the definitive document of her onscreen
allure. Enigmatic, mute and studiously indifferent, she is mesmerizing to watch
in Plan 9.
Nurmi has claimed she was so horrified by
the dialogue that Wood wrote for her that she demanded she play the role
entirely in silence. But this oft-repeated theory feels apocryphal: remember - she
and Tor Johnson both play zombies and he speaks no lines, either. And let’s pause here
to ask: is Nurmi meant to be a zombie or a
vampire in Plan 9? In many synopses, she’s called a vampire. But she’s raised from the
dead by the aliens just like Johnson, and he is consistently referred to as a
zombie. Which is it?
But seriously: how
can such an entertaining, highly individual and compellingly weird work be
considered “the worst film ever made”? The movie is Ed Wood’s labour of love and
shouldn’t be dismissed. I prefer the more generous “so-bad-it’s-good” approach
to Plan 9. At 80-minutes long, it zips along rapidly and never outstays its
welcome (although when one of the aliens starts lengthily defining what a solaronite
bomb it certainly threatens to).
At its best, Plan 9
unfolds like a dream (or should that be nightmare?). Wood’s convoluted, jumbled
story-telling - with reason, coherence and narrative jettisoned - only makes “sense”
as nightmare logic. There are moments that almost anticipate David Lynch or Guy Maddin.
Characters are almost always isolated, rarely sharing the same frame, which is
disorienting and breaks movie-making conventions. And consider the repetition: Wood
recycles the same footage over and over. We get glimpses of the long-dead
Lugosi popping-up late in the film for no plausible reason, wandering through
the woods in his Dracula cape. The
sequences of Tor Johnson and Nurmi shuffling silently and zombie-like through
the bargain basement mist-enshrouded graveyard, past bleak gnarled trees, are hauntingly eerie – and are repeated over and over.
Adding to the
strangeness, we’re never certain what time of day it is and seemingly neither
is Wood. It changes shot-by-shot. For example, Wood will depict grave diggers
in broad daylight – then cut to Vampira menacingly approaching them in
night-time pitch darkness – and then cut to daylight again as they recoil in terror. The scene where Mason - doubling for Lugosi, face shrouded by his vampire’s cape - silently breaks
into the sleeping woman’s bedroom and carries her off feels like primal silent
cinema horror, a fragment from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. It’s like watching a
waking nightmare. Sixty years later, Plan 9 from Outer Space still casts an
uncanny spell.
The next film club is Wednesday 21 August! Event page
If visionary director Josef von Sternberg was the Leonardo da Vinci of cinema, then German glamourpuss leading lady Marlene Dietrich was his Mona Lisa. The Devil is a Woman (1935) was the last of the seven exquisite films the duo collaborated on together. And boy, did they conclude in high style! Sumptuous and bizarre, it’s a kinky and cruel black comedy about sexual humiliation, tinged with sadomasochism, and offering one final swooning and ambivalent valentine from von Sternberg to his gorgeous muse.
Set in a dream-like, deliberately artificial turn-of-the-century Seville, it stars Dietrich (clad in a wild wardrobe of lace mantillas) as heartless gold-digging femme fatale Concha Perez (variously described as “the most dangerous woman you’ll ever meet!” and “the toast of Spain!”) cruelly pitting virile young Antonio Garvan (Cesar Romero at his most handsome) against the self-destructively besotted Captain Don Pasqual Costelar (Lionel Atwill – deliberately styled to resemble von Sternberg himself) for her own amusement.
The Devil is a Woman is a deliriously perverse, borderline-surreal spectacle! Come see the movie the Spanish government successfully banned and that Dietrich herself called her favourite (“because I was most beautiful in it”) on Wednesday 21 August!
Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club downstairs at Fontaine’s bar (Dalston’s most unique nite spot!) devoted to Bad Movies We Love (our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People), specializing in the kitsch, the cult and the queer! Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm prompt!
