The worst film of all time

Moogdroog and I watched the classic 1950s sci-fi stinker Plan 9 from Outer Space recently. I’m sure any science fictions fans will already know it as supposedly the worst film of all time.

It isn’t the worst film of all time. There are plenty of more offensive strips of celluloid than this, such as Richard Curtis’s saccharine shit-storm Love Actually, which seems to divide people of good cinematic taste from everybody else with such efficiency that it might have been invented as a screening device for a genocide aimed specifically at the sort of person who thinks that true love is based on a shared obsession with a certain brand of blended coffee beans.

For example, here is a user review from the New York Times website:

By intertwining the individual love stories into an amazing tapestry of the struggle for true love in the contemporary world, he creates a two-hour long symphony for the heart strings... I find it nearly impossible that anyone but the most cynical of cynics could not be nearly overwhelmed with warm fuzzies by the end of this love-fest.

And here is another:

This movie is deserving of all the loathing a person can muster.

For the record, anyone who mixes metaphors and then uses the expression ‘warm fuzzies’ in a film review deserves to be hanged with fairy lights. Plan 9 is much less objectionable than Love Actually. For a start, it’s just charmingly incompetent, whereas Love Actually is so busy deluding itself that it’s a wonder - and a shame - it doesn’t just sink to the bottom of the ocean of liquid tripe of which it chiefly consists.

Also, Plan 9 makes no sense on the narrative level. Neither the motives nor the actions of any of the characters are intelligible. At no point is it made clear what the aliens actually want, or why they go about raising corpses in order to get it. There isn’t even a central protagonist. Its portrayal of females (human and alien) is chauvinist even for 1959. It feels very much as though it was filmed by someone who had five days, very little money and no talent.

Yet all these flaws just make it even more remarkable that Ed Wood made it at all - there must have been countless people who opposed or were indifferent to his project, but he got it finished regardless. If nothing else, few films express better the sheer amateurish love of cinema.

A great man

Love Actually is a shameless muddle of big names and sentimental hogwash, cynically targeted for the Christmas market. It is the fast food of romantic comedy, and the lazy interweaving of the various plots provides about as much emotional nutrition as a packet of twisted cheese strings.

The opening evocation of 9/11 to provide some slim thematic coherence to the film beyond its smug title is perhaps one of the most offensive moments I’ve ever experienced in a movie:

When the planes hit the Twin Towers, none of the phone calls from people on board were messages of hate or revenge, they were all messages of love.

Fuck off, Curtis. If you wanted to make a worthy film about 9/11, you should have made United 93.

Worse than Stalin

The opening words of Plan 9, meanwhile, are distilled brilliance:

Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you, in the future...

There is, come to think of it, some common ground between the movies: they both involve the undead. That is to say, Plan 9 involves several corpses being risen by mysterious alien electrodes as malevolent zombies, while Love Actually was written and directed by a blood-sucking vampire. The only good thing to say about Love Actually is that by expelling a bunch of half-arsed subplots in one incoherent, rose-scented fart, Curtis spared us the eight feature-length explosions of diarrhoea he would otherwise have made.

Er, this didn’t actually start out as a review of Love Actually, which I watched about five years ago. I made the mistake of mentioning it offhand near the start of this entry and I found I simply couldn’t stop. Clearly I’ve been penting this rant up for a very long time.

Couldn't have said it better myself

It felt good though.

The moral, to end on a positive note, is: just because a film is a bad film doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. Go and watch Plan 9 from Outer Space.