This morning, without much in the news....I ended up watching Plan 9 From Outer Space (1956). Well....I attempted to watch it. After about 45 minutes of it....I started to flick it a minute ahead for every eight minutes.
So for the basic story....there's some aliens who are concerned about Earth folks creating a doomsday bomb. They've come to Earth with some plan (fairly marginal if you view their advance society) to halt the whole thing. Some of this involves use of dead bodies.....which makes little sense.
Script-wise? It's like you hired four doped-up guys to write some 3 x 5 inch index cards, and just hand them out to the actors....to fake their way to a 80-minute movie.
Why I went and watched it? There's talk that Hollywood wants to take the movie....redesign it, and make a 2022 version of it.
So here's thing....in the 1950s....drive-in movies were fairly popular, and some studios saw a great moment when you'd go and hire some folks to make a double-header. With this concept, you had two movies announced for the weekend (back to back)....making people think they got tremendous value (one entry ticket) for two cheapo movies.
Total cost for the movie? Wiki says $80,000. That would be $770k today.
Could you rewrite the whole thing to make sense, without it being a comedy or come off as fairly fake? I'm not sure about this.
The thing is....from the 1950s/1960s....there are just a ton of bad movies....all designed for drive-in theaters, and people of that era have a fond memory. You can go back and ask a 75-year old guy about his evening of watching 'Plan 9', and he start to grin.....to talk over 'Wanda' or 'Betty' and the lusty evening he had. He remembers her bra size, her use of the word 'tantalizing', and the memory of that Saturday evening. He remembers literally nothing about the movie, or the aliens.
Kind of funny, if you think about it.
