Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) on Netflix
In California, an old man dies soon after his wife is buried. Eros and Tanna raise the dead, and pilot Jeff Trent and his wife Paula live beside the cemetery.
- Netflix2.6/5
- IMDb3.9/1042,715 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes66%
Trailer
Plot summary
In California, an old man grieves at his wife's grave and dies the next day. Aboard an airliner bound for Burbank, Jeff Trent and his co-pilot Danny spot a bright light, and a flying saucer sets down in the cemetery next to Jeff's house, where two gravediggers are at work. The dead wife walks the graveyard, and Inspector Clay brings his officers to the cemetery. Jeff tells his wife Paula that the Army made him keep his saucer sighting quiet. Saucers appear over Hollywood and over Washington, D.C., where missiles fired at them do nothing. On their space station, the aliens Eros and Tanna report to their ruler, who hears their plan to raise the recently dead.
Cast
- Joanna Leeas Tanna
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Plan 9 was financed under a contract with a Baptist organization, and as a condition many cast and crew members were baptized in a Beverly Hills swimming pool. The Baptist backers found the original title, Grave Robbers from Outer Space, blasphemous; producers J. Edward Reynolds and Hugh Thomas Jr. played gravediggers in the film.
- Bela Lugosi died in August 1956, before Plan 9 was made, but the film bills him posthumously: Ed Wood had shot silent footage of Lugosi for another, unfinished film and inserted it into Plan 9.
- The flying saucers are not paper plates or hubcaps but plastic model kits from Paul Lindberg's Lindberg Line, first issued in 1952 and the first science fiction plastic model kit produced, catalogued as product #517.
- In 1980 Harry and Michael Medved's book The Golden Turkey Awards dubbed Plan 9 the worst film ever made and gave Wood and the film posthumous Golden Turkey Awards for Worst Director Ever and Worst Film Ever; it has since gained a cult following as so-bad-it's-good cinema.
- Wood shot the film in 1.85:1 widescreen so that props, boom microphones and set edges outside the frame were cropped in cinemas; full-frame television and video prints revealed all of it, giving viewers the false impression he was hilariously inept at framing his shots.
- Makeup man Harry Thomas made rubber chin appliances, "cat's eyes" contact lenses and green wigs for the aliens, but Wood told him there was no time for them; Thomas was so angry he withdrew his name from the film's credits.
- Bell Labs named its successor to the Unix operating system after the film: Plan 9 from Bell Labs, developed over several years starting in the mid-1980s and released to the general public in 1995.
