PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1956) ***1/2 This is a perfect film. With a graveyard full of headstones that blow in the wind like the hair of the people that try to avoid knocking them over by accident, overtly political in the galactic manner of director savant Edward D. Wood, Jr. He's on to government coverups, particularly in the military, and has a cast of vampire ladies,cro-magnon cops and Bela Lugosi to prove it. Bela and Vampira, if only they'd reproduced the sequels could still go on. But they must anyway. Some say Lugosi showed good taste by dying during filming, but the reality is that he went out winning big. Yeah it's easy enough to make great films with this kind of cast, but Wood will never receive the credit due for his foamless editing of Bela and the chiropractor stand-in. Easy to make great entertainment anyway, but difficult to stand out--/which makes John Breckinridge's performance, and Gordon Zahler's music all the more impressive. This film is the standard by which all other vampire/UFO/grave robber films must be found wanting, and inconclusive. No other director could ever evoke melodrama of this magnitude, and even fewer would know how to use it properly if they could.
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