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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)

How did this stupid film become the greatest science fiction cult classic ever? Who knows. This is Ed Wood’s magnum opus. Written and shot in a month, on a budget of $60k.

Here are a couple of excerpts from Wikipedia, “...his ideas tended to be too expensive to film, yet he tried to film them anyway.” and “[Wood’s films were] notable for their campy aesthetics, technical errors, unsophisticated special effects, use of poorly-matched (sic) stock footage, eccentric casts, idiosyncratic stories and non sequitur dialogue...”

Filmed in the San Fernando Valley, north of Hollywood, the movie contains many shots of historical interest from the area, including Tor Johnson’s house where Bela Lugosi did some unrelated test scenes before his death which were later worked into the film as his “last performance”. (Johnson was a professional wrestler and friend of Wood.)

Wood continued to make low-budget sensational films in the Valley, later shifting to porn in the late 1960s because they made more money. His productions were at the start of the boom in the porn industry in the San Fernando Valley, where 90% of porn films were make from the 60s through the 90s. (The industry declined significantly at the beginning of the 21th century due to the Internet.)

The film also starred Gregory Walcott, Bela Lugosi, Maila Nurmi, Tor Johnson, Lyle Talbot and Criswell.

The title was inspiration for the UNIX-like OS, Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

A biopic of Wood’s career was later produced, Ed Wood (1994), starring Johnny Deep as Wood and Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi.That biopic covers his productions from Glen or Glenda (1953) to Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). The former was about transvestism -- Wood himself was a cross dresser and many of his friends were in the LGBTQ community.

(View this film at: https://video.qoto.org/videos/watch/21371376-a49f-499e-acb8-af232c0dea8e )

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