Rifftrax: "Plan Nine from Outer Space" (Districutors' Corporation of America, 1957, released 1959; Rifftrax version, 2008 or 2009)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Eventually I wanted to watch something a bit on the lighter side than all the Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) of the news, and I found it in a “Rifftrax” presentation on YouTube of Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s 1959 messterpiece Plan Nine from Outer Space. I first watched this notorious film in about 1976 or so (while Wood was still alive, by the way) after having read about it in two biographies of its more-or-less “star,” Bela Lugosi: The Count, by Arthur Lennig (1972, republished in 2007 as The Immortal Count); and Lugosi: The Man Behind the Cape, by Robert Cremer (1976). I had checked both books out of the Oakland Public Library, and one thing I was fascinated by was the final chapter of Lugosi’s life: his association with Ed Wood and the three films they amde together, Glen or Glenda? (1953), a pioneering work about Transgender people loosely based on the Christine Jorgensen story; Bride of the Monster (1956), yet another non-epic starring Lugosi (in his final speaking role) as a mad scientist who builds his own nuclear reactor and use ot to rule the world; and Plan Nine from Outer Space (1959, though copyrighted 1957).

Wood had originally planned to make a Dracula knock-off with Lugosi called Tomb of the Vampire, and for it Lugosi once more put on the familiar cape and weht through his undead schtick for a series of test scenes, including one in which he lurks sinisterly next to a tree. Then Lugosi died of a heart attack at age 72, and Ed Wood was left with a few minutes of footage of him. When a group of Baptists hired Wood, ostensibly to make religious films, Wood suggested that they first make a movie in a proven genre like science fiction and then use the profits from that to finance their spiritual movies. (The first time my husband Charles and I watched the bizarre film Hill Number One, a Roman Catholic production in which James Dean made his film debut as the Apostle John in a would-be drama about the two days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, he joked that if the Baptists had made religious movies with Ed Wood, this is what they would have looked like.) Wood wrote a totally new script that would incorporate his unused Lugosi footage into a completely different story about an interplanetary invasion, and for the central issue of his plot he ripped off the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (directed by Robert Wise and written by Edmund H. North based more or less on a magazine story, “Farewell to the Master,” by Harry Bates).

The plot deals with Eros (Dudley Manlove) and Tanna (Joanna Lee, who after a brief career as an actress in dreck like this and The Brain Eaters turned to writing and scripted some of the best TV-movies of the early 1970’s), two officers in a fleet of flying saucers, and their commander, “The Great One” (John Brekenridge, who plays the role as a screaming queen). They are supposed to conquer the Earth to keep us pesky humans from developing something called the “Solarbonite Bomb” (at least that’s what the actors playing aliens call it; the humans in the film call it “Solaronite,” without the “b”), which uses particles of sunlight to create a super-explosion that, if it is ever used, will blow up all the stars and explode the universe. To do this they have invoked the dreaded “Plan Nine,” which consists of reviving recently dead humans and turning them into mindless zombies who will kill on command and are controlled by “electrode guns” that look like toy ray-guns (and probably were, given Wood’s budgetary limitations). One of the characters revived by the aliens’ technology after he’s been killed is Inspector Clay of the Los Angeles Police Department, played by ex-wrestler Tor Johnson, who was a frequent house guest of the Woods even though Mrs. Wood got upset when Johnson tried to use their toilet and his sheer weight cracked the bowl.

Johnson was actually in some quite good movies, including The Man on the Flying Trapeze with W. C. Fields in 1935 (in which Johnson played Tosoff, one of the wrestlers Fields’ character tries to get away from work to see), Lost in a Harem and In the Foreign Legion with Abbott and Costello, and The Lemon Drop Kid with Bob Hope. Unfortunately, his huge size (the “Rifftrax” crew compared him to a bull elephant), ultra-slow mobility and fractured delivery of English dialogue (he was Swedish and, like Lugosi, never learned much English) make him more pitiable than frightening. The other two recently dead humans revived by Eros and Tanna are “The Ghoul Man” (Bela Lugosi, hilariously doubled by Tom Mason even though Mason was six inches taller than Lugosi and considerably thinner; he was either Wood’s or Wood’s wife’s chiropractor – the sources differ and maybe he was treating both of them – and he agreed to forgive some of the money they owed him professionally if he could be in the movie) and “The Vampire Woman” (Maila Nurmi, professionally known as “Vampira,” hostess of a TV show aired in the L.A. area in 1954; in the 1980’s she unsuccessfully sued Elvira for stealing her act), who were supposed to have been husband and wife, with her dying and then him.

“I had to kill off his character earlier than I’d planned because he really died,” Wood told Robert Cremer in an interview for Cremer’s Lugosi biography (which he gave partly because Arthur Lennig’s Lugosi book had called Wood the worst director of all time and partly because Cremer agreed to pay him) that was extensively used in Rudolph Grey’s book on Wood, Nightmare of Ecstasy, the prime source for the Scott Alexander-Larry Karaszewski script for Tim Burton’s Ed Wood biopic, in which Johnny Depp played him and Martin Landau won an Academy Award for playing Lugosi. (Ironically, Depp bought Bela Lugosi’s old house.) I remember seeing Plan Nine for the first time in 1976 on the old “Creature Features” show on local TV in the San Francisco Bay Area (which means I saw it when Ed Wood was still alive; he died in 1978), and I’ve seen it many times since; it’s a film I’ve long had an affection for as a sort of camp classic, a so-bad-it’s-good movie that mixes up a relatively serious sci-fi premise with a lot of milling around in a cemetery (where the grave markers and the mausoleum were obviously made of plywood or cardboard), and some pretty good cinematography (by William C. Thompson, who like Lugosi and supporting player Lyle Talbot – who had once made movies with Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis – had worked at major studios; Thompson’s career with big companies ended when he went blind in one eye, though he could still light effectively with the other) marred by one of the chronic problems with Wood’s work: his inability to pay for the conversion of so-called “day-for-night” shots, so the film cuts willy-nilly from darkness to light and back again. Despite the crudity and ineptitude of his films, Ed Wood had real talent as a director – which I learned when I watched The Violent Years and Orgy of the Dead, both written by Wood but directed by others. His films have a rough, crude energy to them that actually makes them entertaining, while the ones he merely wrote and others directed are deadly dull.

“Rifftrax” was a project of the last cast of the popular TV show Mystery Science Theatre 3000 after their series ended on the Sci-Fi Channel. It consisted of lousy movies the cast – impersonating a spaceship commander and his two robots – spoofed with a running commentary spoken over the dialogue. (I remember watching an early-1980’s version of the same concept in San Diego called Schlock Theatre, which had even lower production values than Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and which differed in that the snarky comments about the film were delivered as subtitles instead of on top of the dialogue.) The final crew – Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett – decided to record similar commentaries on various films, ranging from the same type they had spoofed on MST3K (as their show had been abbreviated) to major-studio productions they would never have been able to license for their original show. The idea was you would buy the standard DVD of the movie and purchase the “Rifftrax” commentary as a computer download, then hopefully synch them so the snarky comments would play over the movie. They also did live screenings where they appeared in person (and one surprise was that Kevin Murphy, who had done the voice of the scrawny little robot Tom Servo, was a big, heavy-set bear type) and talked over an in-person showing of the film.

The “Rifftrax” version of Plan Nine was genuinely funny but could have been better. I could have lost the flatulence jokes (especially since they don’t relate to anything in the original movie), and thge references to Lugosi's heroin addiction seemed gratuitous and unfair snce Lugosi had actually kicked the habit in the last year os hif life. (The late L:eny Bruce. who himself died of a heroin overdose in 1966, 10 years after Lugosi, joked that Lugosi was the worst advertisement for rehab because he'd been an addict for years, and then "he cleaned up and, boom! He dropped dead.") But the overall ridicule – especially targeting the queeny actors who play the male aliens; when I watched this with my then-girlfriend in the early 1980’s we both fell in love with Dudley Manlove’s lines, explaining why his race has to deal with those pesky Earthlings and stop them from inventing a weapon of universal destruction, “You see? You see? Your stupid minds, stupid, stupid, stupid!” – was reasonably well done.