Plan 9 from Outer Space

The plot involves aliens who come to Earth to stop humans who have developed the ultimate weapon — one that can explode the "particles" of sunlight — and the aliens try to conquer Earth by resurrecting corpses from a cemetery. Actors screw up their lines, night turns to day and back in a single scene, and the movie's top billing goes to an actor who died early in the filming (Bela Lugosi) and appears only in a couple of scenes at the beginning. Later in the film, Lugosi's character is doubled by a taller, younger, blonde-haired man (some say Wood's chiropractor) holding a cape over his face. The special effects consist of pie tins substituting for UFO's and multitudinous stock footage.

The movie has a "campish" or cult film popularity among those who appreciate hilariously bad motion pictures. Such appeal is heightened by quotable lines such as, "Inspector Clay is dead. Murdered. And somebody's responsible!"

In 1994, Tim Burton directed a fictional biopic, Ed Wood, based on the making of this film, starring Johnny Depp in the title role and Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi.

Because of its reputation and Bell Labs' choosing of unmarketable names, the operating system Plan 9 was christened from the name of this movie.

External links

• Internet Movie Database's profile of the film: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0052077
• An illustrated review of the film: http://www.badmovies.org/movies/plannine/
• A detailed list of the film's mistakes: http://www.angelfire.com/il/dauber/PLAN-9.html

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