Mad, Bad, but Heckuva Lotta Fun to Watch

When planning my Film Analysis class, the decision was not whether to show an excerpt from one of Ed Wood's movies, but when to show one. His movies are so thoroughly rotten that every aspect oozes failure. The scene that I use comes from (what else?) Plan 9 from Outer Space, known as Grave Robbers from Outer Space until the Baptists whom Ed got to finance it complained about the blasphemy of the title--as is pointed out in Tim Burton's lovingly told Ed Wood, itself proof that the right kind of manure can produce a beautiful flower.

The scene involves the intrepid heroes--a cop, a military officer, and a pilot-- venturing into a flying saucer. There they meet the aliens Eros and Tanna, who will explain to them why they are resurrecting corpses. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, a similar scene does not occur until the end of the movie, when Klaatu tells the Earth's scientists why they cannot export atomic warfare into space. This speech in Plan 9 is given to the sublimely named Dudley Manlove (his "real" stage name apparently) as Eros babbles about "solarurbanite" (at least that's what it sounds like to me) and why humans cannot be allowed to discover it. So what's particularly putrid about this scene?

Everything.

1) The production "design" and set. The wall of the room the aliens are in looks like it was cannibalized from the exterior of the saucer, since it replicates the same ladder, which is mounted flush against the cabin wall three feet off the ground. It is unusable. (And how does a flying saucer suddenly sprout an exterior wall with a 90-degree angle?) The table contains the expected hodge-podge of vaguely scientific equipment, including an oscilloscope and an arc-generator, but so few of them that their lack of numbers and sophistication are noticeable.

2) The writing. Every science-fiction cliche appears in Eros's speech, from the "we're persecuted aliens" of It Came from Outer Space to the aforementioned admonitions of The Day the Earth Stood Still. There's actually one nice touch in it, where Eros explains how light could be used as a source of explosions, but it only serves to highlight the grotesqueries of the rest of the speech.

3) The directing and editing. During Eros's ramblings, the camera cuts to a shot of Tanna, who seems to be attempting a "come-hither" look at the policeman, who proceeds to look at her as if she had just offered him an invitation to a glue-sniffing party. A few minutes later, she gives a slightly more provocative look (or perhaps just thrusts her chest out a little more) at the hunky pilot, who does not even notice her. The purpose of these shots seems to be to break up the boredom of looking at Eros's face, but since he is shamelessly overacting (see #4), all the shots do is once again remind us we are watching an extremely bad movie.

4) The "acting." Three of the actors--the pilot, the officer, and Eros--seem to be professional actors (Manlove was more known for his voice than his looks). Tanna and the cop seem to be part of Wood's "stock company," either investors in the picture or unique creatures (such as wrestler Tor Johnson) that Wood befriended and put in front of the camera. All give truly malodorous performances, none more so than Manlove, whose hysterical cries of "stupid, STUPID" never fail to elicit howls from even the most somnolent student.

I end up showing this to students at the beginning of the section on Acting, but not until I had taught the course a couple of times did I realize why Wood's pictures are so bad, so characteristically bad. When we see a movie, it is usually an honest attempt to make us employ our "willing suspension of disbelief" and watch something that is trying to be something else--a story, a drama, a recreation, whatever. Everything in an Ed Wood movie--and I mean EVERYTHING--prods, tickles, and kicks our disbelief and shouts: "This is a movie--and IT STINKS." It's a weird sort of alienation effect; even when we are ready to luxuriate in the badness, the movie veers off in a new misdirection.

And the glory that Burton reveals in his depiction of this Midas-in-reverse is that Wood didn't have a clue he was doing it.