Plan Nine From Outer Space~Brilliant socio-political commentary or just crap

Ed Wood’s 1959 Sci-Fi- classic, Plan Nine From Outer Space , carried more social and political commentary than any movies made by serious film-makers, he got away with murder in the late 50’s with this movie, it was so crappy that people just ignored his deeper hidden agenda !!!!! What a brilliant anti-war message he was able to convey.

Jeff Trent: Why is it so important that you want to contact the governments of our earth?
Eros: Because of death. Because all you of Earth are idiots.
Jeff Trent: Now you just hold on, Buster.
Eros: No, you hold on. First was your firecracker, a harmless explosive. Then your hand grenade: you began to kill your own people, a few at a time. Then the bomb. Then a larger bomb: many people are killed at one time. Then your scientists stumbled upon the atom bomb, split the atom. Then the hydrogen bomb, where you actually explode the air itself. Now you can arrange the total destruction of the entire universe served by our sun: The only explosion left is the Solaranite.
Colonel Tom Edwards: Why, there's no such thing.

Jeff Trent: Why, a particle of sunlight can't even be seen or measured.
Eros: Can you see or measure an atom? Yet you can *explode* one. A ray of sunlight is made up of *many* atoms!
Jeff Trent: So what if we *do* develop this Solanite bomb? We'd be even a stronger nation than now.
Eros: [with disgust] Stronger. You see? You see? You're stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Jeff Trent: That's all I'm taking from you!
[pistol-whips Eros upside the head]

Lieutenant John Harper: You speak of Solaranite. But just what is it?
Eros: Take a can of your gasoline. Say this can of gasoline is the sun. Now, you spread a thin line of it to a ball, representing the earth. Now, the gasoline represents the sunlight, the sun particles. Here we saturate the ball with the gasoline, the sunlight. Then we put a flame to the ball. The flame will speedily travel around the earth, back along the line of gasoline to the can, or the sun itself. It will explode this source and spread to every place that gasoline, our sunlight, touches. Explode the sunlight here, gentlemen, you explode the universe. Explode the sunlight here and a chain reaction will occur direct to the sun itself and to all the planets that sunlight touches, to every planet in the universe. This is why you must be stopped. This is why any means must be used to stop you. In a friendly manner or as (it seems) you want it.
Lieutenant John Harper: He's mad.
Tanna: Mad? Is it mad that you destroy other people to save yourselves? You have done this. Is it mad that one country must destroy another to save themselves? You have also done this. How then is it "mad" that one planet must destroy another who threatens the very existence-...


The Ruler: With your ancient, juvenile minds you have developed explosives too fast for your minds to conceive what you are doing. You are on the verge of destroying the entire universe. We are a part of that universe.

Just crap.

Nah! He was a terrible director..the film is crap..but laughably enjoyable crap..and he nicked the concept from the far superior 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' from eight years earlier

Synopsis of TDTESS from IMDb
"An alien lands and tells the people of Earth that we must live peacefully or be destroyed as a danger to other planets."

Besides..that one peace of anti war/social commentary is just a very small part of a much. much larger steaming pile of dingos kidneys...

I think he is a misunderstood genius...it is my favorite piece of crap movie ever !!!! The only person that can even hold a candle next to him is John Waters... :D

Radical left-wing subtext is pretty standard in most 50s and 60s sci-fi, isn't it? Charlie already mentioned TDTESS, but there's also Planet of the Apes, Forbidden Planet, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The X-Box game "Destroy All Humans" has the entire Plan 9 movie in it as an Easter egg! You have to beat the game to watch it, but it's great! In fact the game itself is a great amalgamation of everything from Plan 9 to Earth VS. The Flying Saucers.

Anyway, as far as the DVD of Plan 9 goes...does anyone here have the disc with the Ed Wood story on it? If you see a part in the story where there's an animated scene of a hand with 6 fingers coming out of the ground, and spelling the word "Chiller"? That's the opening for the East coast Chiller Theatre that ran on TV years ago when I was a kid. They ran all sorts of B-movies at night on Fridays and Saturdays.

Radical left-wing subtext is pretty standard in most 50s and 60s sci-fi, isn't it? Charlie already mentioned TDTESS, but there's also Planet of the Apes, Forbidden Planet, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Yeah and sadly radicalism has become the norm today for such irrepsponsible louts like Michael Moore, and Hollywood as always continuing to think they're America's politicians and lawmakers...you can't go anywhere today and sit down to a movie w\o some sort of politics being attached to it.

But anyhow....Planet Of The Apes was a great piece of work for the incredible connotations of the civil rights struggles going on at the time in America,and the decison to use evolution gone in reverse to the point of primate superiority was sort of their way of addressing a very specific racial struggle going on at that time in the 60's, as well as circumventing an even bigger conflict by doing so, as you couldn't come right out and paint the picture in black and white, if you get me.

Also,no matter how much FX improve, I will ALWAYS love seeing the actors in the original movies and series talking thru their makeup, and Roddy MacDowall and Marc Lenard always had the best ape roles as Cornelius and General Ursus.

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers?

That couldn't have been any more Cold War paranoid if they got actual Russians to do the part of the monsters. Kevin McCarthy trying to warn everyone that THEY were here and THEY were going to get you. And trying to stay awake, that was the reference to eternal vigilance if we were going to be free. The films were the perfect vehicle to portray the intention w\o getting anyone in an uproar, but there again, when it come to promoting fear, it seems that Orson Welles was able to do the job better than anyone else the night he made his infamous broadcast...

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers?

That couldn't have been any more Cold War paranoid if they got actual Russians to do the part of the monsters. Kevin McCarthy trying to warn everyone that THEY were here and THEY were going to get you. And trying to stay awake, that was the reference to eternal vigilance if we were going to be free. The films were the perfect vehicle to portray the intention w\o getting anyone in an uproar, but there again, when it come to promoting fear, it seems that Orson Welles was able to do the job better than anyone else the night he made his infamous broadcast...Oh War of the Worlds, what a great example of mass hysteria.
Mercy we seemed to touch on a subject you are quite passionate about Jack... ;)

Yeah and sadly radicalism has become the norm today for such irrepsponsible louts like Michael Moore, and Hollywood as always continuing to think they're America's politicians and lawmakers...you can't go anywhere today and sit down to a movie w\o some sort of politics being attached to it.


Well, what can you do? The whole McCarthyism thing didn't really work out. :p

Incidentally, it should be noted that La Planète des Singes, the novel Planet of the Apes was based on, was written by Pierre Boulle, who was French, so it's certainly debatable that is was inspired by anything that was going on here in America at the time.

Fair enough, but it seems unlikely that the film-makers would have been completely unaware of the way their film could be seen as being some kind of allegory or parable. And even if it's not a direct attack on racism, the movie is undoubtedly about the idiocy of believing oneself superior to another, an idea which is obviously relevant to arguments about race and equality.

Fair enough, but it seems unlikely that the film-makers would have been completely unaware of the way their film could be seen as being some kind of allegory or parable. And even if it's not a direct attack on racism, the movie is undoubtedly about the idiocy of believing oneself superior to another, an idea which is obviously relevant to arguments about race and equality.
Absolutely. The potential for controversy is probably the reason that Blake Edwards, the director originally attached to the project, pulled out. But I don't think the allegory is as specific to American race relations as Contract Jack is suggesting. It could just as easily be read as a critique of French-Algerian relations (the Algerian War of Independence had just ended in 1962, the year before Boulle's novel was published).

Absolutely. The potential for controversy is probably the reason that Blake Edwards, the director originally attached to the project, pulled out. But I don't think the allegory is as specific to American race relations as Contract Jack is suggesting. It could just as easily be read as a critique of French-Algerian relations (the Algerian War of Independence had just ended in 1962, the year before Boulle's novel was published).

Well, with regards to what I was suggesting, the American civil rights movement was in full swing the year Planet Of The Apes came out, and as a certain race is often referred to in slang, in the same manner of the simians of POTA, this is what I was suggesting, as well as an allegorical stab at slavery, and what it would have been like if the shoe were on the other foot, the issue of reverse slavery was given with evolution adding insult to injury.

The human victims were replaced with simians, although, in more definite terms, this could be applied to the one film where they were all slaves, shackeld up and controlled by humans..."Battle For The Panet of The Apes".

It was even introduced in the remake, in one scene where a black man refers to a human slave of the same race as a "house human." So there were some specific references, and now that I know that there was an Algerian Independence War, I'll have to look that one up and see what the deal was.

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers?

That couldn't have been any more Cold War paranoid if they got actual Russians to do the part of the monsters. Kevin McCarthy trying to warn everyone that THEY were here and THEY were going to get you. And trying to stay awake, that was the reference to eternal vigilance if we were going to be free. The films were the perfect vehicle to portray the intention w\o getting anyone in an uproar, but there again, when it come to promoting fear, it seems that Orson Welles was able to do the job better than anyone else the night he made his infamous broadcast...


Oh War of the Worlds, what a great example of mass hysteria. Mercy we seemed to touch on a subject you are quite passionate about Jack... ;)



Well not passionate about, but familiar with.. In the recent remake, as well as the short lived TV series in the 1980's..it was established the aliens were always on Earth, for millions of years.

Compare this to the "sleeper agents" of the Cold War..agents waiting activation upon zero hour command...always there, biding their time...this
is what McCarthy was saying, "they're among us."

Hollywood using aliens as allegorical replacements of enemy soldiers. Seems to have worked quite well.