I had an ado­les­cent fas­ci­na­tion with Ed Wood. I mean that lit­er­al­ly: I spent a siz­able chunk of my ado­les­cence watch­ing the films of, read­ing about, and even read­ing the books by writer-direc­tor (and occa­sion­al cross-dress­er) Edward D. Wood Jr. What, I asked, could have dri­ven the man to make, and keep on mak­ing, the films that would ulti­mate­ly define the cat­e­go­ry, quite pop­u­lar dur­ing my teen years, of “so bad it’s good” cin­e­ma? None of his numer­ous, all unabashed­ly low-bud­get pic­tures have done more for that form than 1959’s Plan 9 from Out­er Space, a breath­less, near­ly bud­get­less tale in which Wood throws togeth­er aliens, zom­bies, loom­ing nuclear anni­hi­la­tion, and Bela Lugosi. Well, he almost throws in Bela Lugosi: as depict­ed in Tim Bur­ton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood, he char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly spliced in exist­ing footage of the by-then deceased icon of hor­ror film, cast his wife’s chi­ro­prac­tor (instruct­ed to hold a cape over his face) as a dou­ble, billed Lugosi as the star, and hoped for the best.

You can watch the fruit of that and oth­er high­ly unortho­dox film­mak­ing efforts on the part of Wood and his faith­ful bunch of long-suf­fer­ing col­lab­o­ra­tors at the top of the post. Just below, we have a clip from Ed Wood, which in large part deals with how its inde­fati­ga­ble pro­tag­o­nist, played by a whole­some­ly gung-ho John­ny Depp, came to make Plan 9 in the first place. This mon­tage recre­ates the shoot­ing of sequences Wood’s fans will have long since burned into their visu­al mem­o­ry: George “The Ani­mal” Steele as Swedish ex-wrestler Tor John­son ris­ing inept­ly from the grave, Bill Mur­ray as would-be trans­sex­u­al Bun­ny Breck­en­ridge affect­less­ly giv­ing his hench­man orders to exe­cute the title plan, a trio of toy fly­ing saucers low­ered on fish­ing wire into a mod­el Hol­ly­wood. In 1980, Michael and Har­ry Medved dubbed Plan 9 “worst movie ever made,” ini­ti­at­ing its ascent from decades of obscu­ri­ty to the sta­tus of, as John Wirt puts it, “the ulti­mate cult flick.” Crit­ics tend to regard Ed Wood as a “good” movie, and Wood’s projects, espe­cial­ly Plan 9, as “bad” movies, yet both enter­tain at very high lev­els indeed, mak­ing us ask an impor­tant ques­tion, anoth­er one I asked myself in the thick of my Wood peri­od: what makes a movie “good” or “bad,” any­way?

Plan 9 from Out­er Space can always be found in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tro­ma Enter­tain­ment, the Mak­er of Acclaimed B‑Movies, Puts 150 Free Films on YouTube

Six Ear­ly Short Films By Tim Bur­ton

Tim Bur­ton Shoots Two Music Videos for The Killers

Bela Lugosi Dis­cuss­es His Drug Habit as He Leaves the Hos­pi­tal in 1955

Tim Burton’s The World of Stain­boy: Watch the Com­plete Ani­mat­ed Series

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Face­book page.

“The fol­low­ing film describes an unusu­al motion pic­ture now being pro­duced in Lon­don for release all over the world start­ing in 1967.” We hear and see this announce­ment, which pre­cedes A Look Behind the Future, the pro­mo­tion­al doc­u­men­tary above, deliv­ered by a pomade-haired, horn-rimmed mid­dle-aged fel­low. He has much else to say about our need to pre­pare our­selves through edi­fy­ing enter­tain­ment for the “rad­i­cal revi­sions in our total soci­ety” fast ush­ered in by the Space Age. Anoth­er, even more offi­cial-sound­ing announc­er intro­duces this man as “the pub­lish­er of Look mag­a­zine, Mr. Ver­non Myers.” This could hap­pen at no time but the mid-1960s, and Myers could refer to no oth­er “unusu­al motion pic­ture” than Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Mod­ern-day exam­i­na­tions of 2001 usu­al­ly cel­e­brate the film’s still-strik­ing artis­tic vision and its influ­ence on so much of the sci­ence fic­tion that fol­lowed. But when this short appeared, not only did the year 2001 lay far in the future, so did the movie itself. Con­tem­po­rary with Kubrick­’s pro­duc­tion, it touts how thor­ough­ly researchers have root­ed the spec­u­la­tive devices of the sto­ry in the thrilling tech­nolo­gies then in real-life devel­op­ment (whether ulti­mate­ly fruit­ful or oth­er­wise), and how the pic­ture thus offers the most accu­rate pre­dic­tion of mankind’s high-tech future yet. It even brings in co-author Arthur C. Clarke him­self to com­ment upon the NASA lunar explo­ration gear under con­struc­tion. The Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing would, of course, come just three years lat­er. A Look Behind the Future reflects the enter­pris­ing if square tech­no­log­i­cal opti­mism of that era, a tone that per­haps has­n’t aged quite as well as the haunt­ing, bot­tom­less­ly ambigu­ous film it pitch­es.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Related Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Very First Films: Three Short Doc­u­men­taries

Rare 1960s Audio: Stan­ley Kubrick’s Big Inter­view with The New York­er

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Flop­ping in 1982 but ulti­mate­ly accru­ing more crit­i­cal acclaim and cinephile esteem than per­haps any oth­er sci­ence-fic­tion film, Blade Run­ner, star­ring Har­ri­son Ford and Sean Young, has become the quin­tes­sen­tial mod­ern exam­ple of a work of art before its time. Direc­tor Rid­ley Scott, a true cin­e­mat­ic prag­ma­tist, had his sus­pi­cions about the film’s box-office fate even dur­ing pro­duc­tion: “The fact is, if you are ahead of your time, that’s as bad as being behind the times, near­ly.” “You’ve still got the same prob­lem. I’m all about try­ing to fix the prob­lem.” He and his team decid­ed they could fix one “prob­lem” in par­tic­u­lar: the film’s ambigu­ous end­ing, which appar­ent­ly left cold those who saw it. So cast and crew went to Big Bear Lake, where they shot a new sequence of Ford and Young escap­ing into the moun­tains. “I did­n’t know how long we’d have togeth­er,” says Ford’s pro­tag­o­nist Rick Deck­er, in the final words of his faux-hard boiled explana­to­ry voice-over. “Who does?”

The tight shots inside Deck­er’s fly­ing car, built to soar across a dark, dense, neon-lined post-Japan­i­fi­ca­tion Los Ange­les but now cruis­ing incon­gru­ous­ly through a lush for­est, came out okay. Alas, cloudy weath­er ruined all the wide-angle footage cap­tured at greater dis­tances. Scott remem­bered that Stan­ley Kubrick­’s The Shin­ing, a cou­ple years before, had opened with just the sort of over­head moun­tain dri­ving imagery he need­ed.

This gave him an idea: Kubrick “must’ve done a blan­ket shoot of every peak in Mon­tana for The Shin­ing using the best heli­copter crew. I’ll bet you he’s got weeks of heli­copter footage.” He did indeed have plen­ti­ful out­takes and a will­ing­ness to hand them over, which meant the first ver­sion of Blade Run­ner in wide release end­ed with shots from the very same pho­tog­ra­phy ses­sions that pro­duced the begin­ning of The Shin­ing. For all the inge­nu­ity that went into it, this rel­a­tive­ly hap­py end­ing still, in a sense, wound up on the cut­ting room floor. Excised along with that wide­ly dis­liked voice-over as new cuts and releas­es restored the pic­ture to its orig­i­nal form, it gave way to the orig­i­nal­ly script­ed end­ing, with its much more suit­able (and mem­o­rable) final line deliv­ered by Edward James Olmos as Deckard’s col­league Gaff: “It’s too bad she won’t live, but then again, who does?”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mak­ing of Blade Run­ner

Blade Run­ner is a Waste of Time: Siskel & Ebert in 1982

Philip K. Dick Pre­views Blade Run­ner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Over­whelm­ing” (1981)

The Blade Run­ner Sketch­book: The Orig­i­nal Art of Syd Mead and Rid­ley Scott Online

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.