and
GLEN OR GLENDA?
Directed & written by Edward D. Wood, Jr.
PLAN 9 (aka GRAVE ROBBERS FROM OUTER SPACE)
Starring Bela Lugosi, Dudley Manlove, Gregory Walcott, Mona McKinnon, and Duke Moore
79 min
1958 NR
GLEN OR GLENDA?
Starring Ed Wood (as Daniel Davis), Dolores Fuller, and Bela Lugosi
65 min
1953 NR
It’s called the Golden Raspberry Foundation and its awards are Razzies. Painted golfballs, they are said to have a street value of $1.98, and every year they “honor” the worst film, director, actor, actress, screenplay, and so forth. 2002 was a bad year for Madonna, who, for her performance in “Swept Away,” shared the Worst Actress Razzie with her protégé/clone Britney Spears. She also “won” Worst Supporting Actress and Worst Original Song for “Die Another Day. Her collaboration with husband Guy Ritchie in order to remake “Swept Away” resulted in awards for Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Remake/Sequel (it, however, lost Worst Screenplay to the visually sumptuous but supremely clunky “Attack of the Clones”). But Madonna must be used to the awards, having already scored them with “Body of Evidence” and “Shanghai Surprise.”
But even Ms. Ciccone’s bad luck with the cinema cannot rival that of director-writer-producer-actor quadruple threat (with emphasis on threat) Ed Wood. Wood is the regular posthumous recipient of the Golden Turkeys for Worst Film and Worst Director, not just of the year, but of All-Time. His badness is the stuff of legend. His heyday was the 1950s and he featured an over-the-hill Bela Lugosi in multiple, virtually identical B horror movies. Also known as “schlock.” Wood’s life and friendship with Lugosi is examined in the beautiful and amusing film “Ed Wood,” which is perhaps director Tim Burton’s finest hour and one of Johnny Depp’s best performances. They portray Wood as a kind of Othello, “of one that loved not wisely but too well.”
Of Burton’s “Ed Wood,” film critic Roger Ebert has this to say: “He [Wood] was so in love with every frame of every scene of every film he shot that it achieved a kind of grandeur. But badness alone would not have been enough to make him a legend; it was his love of film, sneaking through, that pushes him over the top.” Inept and heavy-handed as Wood’s films are, you can see this sincerity and love in every sloppy frame. He wasn’t out to make money. He just wanted to do what he loved, even though he was horribly, blindly, unequivocally, hopelessly without talent.
“Plan 9 From Outer Space,” perennial winner of the Golden Turkey for Worst Picture of All Time, is sluggish, clunky, repetitive, a technical nightmare, without proper funds, badly-acted, and preachy almost to the point of an insult. Yet it is absolutely earnest. Therein lies its humor and its persistent appeal to cult audiences: it tries so hard, it tries so honestly, and it fails so horribly. “Plan 9” takes a story similar to “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” in which intelligent aliens come to Earth, warning us to curb our war-like ways and end our experimentation with nuclear weapons. The movie fails on so many levels and is beloved for all of them, transforming through no intention of its own into a game of “spot the catastrophe.” Budget concerns—the movie was funded by a Baptist church Wood duped—lead to the excessive use of stock footage, to phony headstones knocked over by passersby, to cockpit controls that are wooden chairs turned backwards. And let’s not forget all the bad model spaceships, or Wood’s inability to convincingly meld his outdoor shots to his soundstages, or to even light them the same. And let’s definitely not forget that star Bela Lugosi died during filming, and was replaced by a man with a cloak pulled over his face.
Page two of "Plan 9 From Outer Space/Glen or Glenda?" Back to home.