By Emi Gruender and Mia Hanuska
Welcome back to Groovy Movies, where The Shield writers Emi Gruender and Mia Hanuska scour Amazon Prime’s movie selection to find the most hilariously terrible movies! This episode is a bit of a special one, because we didn’t actually scour Amazon Prime for this movie—it was a recommendation (relentless insistence) from the amazing AP Lang teacher Chris Haskett. Each brunch, he would waltz into room 58 and room 25 and beg us to watch this film, so, finally relenting, here it is: Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Episode 13: Plan 9 From Outer Space
★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ — 1/10
It is quite an achievement to earn a 1/10 rating on a Groovy Movie installment, be not mistaken. While other movies were prodigiously boring with subpar pacing, the less-than-shining dialogue and special effects made us double over in laughter. The plot holes and tonal whiplash let us point and laugh, and despite knowing it was an objectively “bad” movie, we were hardly able to sit through an hour-and-a-half of mild amusement. Plan 9 from Outer Space, unfortunately, was just low-quality and completely unamusing. Which, of course, translates to quite a dull viewing experience.
*Beware! Spoilers below!*
Plan 9 From Outer Space begins with an extended cut of a television-host-esque man with slick-backed hair delivering a monologue—which, in essence, was just “Future events will happen in the future.” He also mentioned something about this story being told from the accounts of the poor souls that survived these harrowing encounters, but little did we know, only a total of three (3) people died throughout the whole 1.5 hour viewing.
The first scene to grace our eyes was an uncomfortably long eulogy in a low-budget graveyard, and an old man crying over the body of his deceased lover. We then cut to a shot of a big heavy airplane careening through the sky, and a suspiciously roomy cockpit with cardboard steering wheels. The pilot and his copilot have an inconsequential conversation about literally nothing at all, when suddenly there was a strange noise. “Don’t like hearing noises. Especially when there’s not supposed to be any,” says one of them. Jim, maybe? We’re not sure, we couldn’t tell them apart. Then suddenly, a flying saucer zips past their window. (We will admit, the clearly model UFO held up by fishing wire was quite a charming effect) They freak out their control tower operator by saying “What was that?” over and over again without answering the operator’s increasingly panicked tone. And then, of course, they move on with their day.
As hard as we try, we cannot seem to piece together the sequence of events in this movie. We remember that there was an inspector, this very large and tall inspector, that got zapped by an electrode gun to become a zombie, we remember two other vampire-esque zombies just wandering around the graveyard and occasionally killing people. The woman, with her waist-cinching black dress, straight black hair, pale complexion, and worryingly long red acrylic nails, looked strikingly like Morticia Addams, from the Addams family. And the old man, who allegedly had died at the beginning of the movie, looked like a knockoff Nosferatu.
We remember that the “aliens” were just humans with light eyeshadow and silly metallic shirts and gold corsets, and that at the very end, the climax was literally a seven minute scene of aliens telling the humans with an extended metaphor about why they were attacking. “Imagine the sun is a big can of gas…” and he continued to talk for literally ages. We kept checking the time, waiting for the moment when this continued suffering would be over. And finally, after a very long hour and thirty minutes, the slick man from the beginning returned to say, “Perhaps you will pass someone on the way home, and you will not know, because they’re from outer space!” And… blackout.
In general, we did not enjoy this in any way, shape or form. Despite being a “cult classic,” we advise all that traverse the jungle of Amazon Prime’s video selection to steer clear of Plan 9 from Outer Space—sorry Haskett.
Notable Quotes:
- “Im a big boy now, Jonny”
- “Im muzzled by army brass!”
- “Now toddle off”
- “We haven’t seen the last of those weirdies”
- “A town of people. People who died”
- “That is because of your big guns :(“
- “Now you just hold on, Buster.”
- “Don’t like hearing noises. Especially when there’s not supposed to be any”
- “I? A fiend?”
- “Because all you on Earth are idiots!”
- “Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!”
- “Perhaps you will pass someone on the way home, and you will not know, because they’re from outer space!”
- “In my species, women are only used for the advancement of our race.”