This leaves us with the ten films below. As with the previous lists of films in this series—Ten Good Ones, Ten Pretty Good Ones, and Ten Not-So-Good Ones—these are not the only ten films that qualify. For instance, It Conquered the World (1956), the film Zappa describes in the introduction to "Cheepnis," should be on this list: It is memorably bad, with a monster that does need to be seen to be believed; it was produced and directed by Roger Corman; and the cast includes Peter Graves (Mission: Impossible), Beverly Garland (numerous television roles), and Lee Van Cleef (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly [1966]). However, it has been ages since I've seen it, and I could not find a copy to watch as I was writing this, so I cannot comment fairly on it.
That leaves us with the ten films profiled below, science-fiction horrors from the 1950s that remind us with almost every frame how hard it is to make a good movie—and how easy it is to make a bad one. Still, they are to be enjoyed for their glorious incompetence.
Presented in chronological order—and with no spoilers!
Cat-Women of the Moon (1953)
The term "camp" tends to get overused—and misused—almost as often as the notorious term "ironic," and Cat-Women of the Moon tests this premise: Perhaps some will find the dubious storyline unintentionally hilarious or the prosaic performances over the top, but others will find this black and white thriller simply tedious, with no covert mirth hidden within its mercifully short running time.
To its credit, Cat-Women does get down to business immediately: The first rocket to the moon is en route when the film opens, with the five-person crew recovering from the traumatic launch. Commander Laird Grainger (Sonny Tufts) is no-nonsense while his navigator, sole woman Helen Salinger (Marie Windsor), is enigmatic as they approach the moon.
On the moon, the crew discovers a cave that not only has a breathable atmosphere but signs of civilization. At this point, the low-budget Cat-Women, with its nondescript sets and costumes and lackluster performances, conveys no sense of wonder at all—and then we get the Cat-Women. The last of a dying civilization, the eight Cat-Women telepathically manipulated Salinger into leading the crew to them so they can steal the crew's rocket and escape to Earth. Some of the men succumb to their wiles; others resist; and Salinger is caught in the middle.
Cat-Women is a truly bad film: The story, by producers Jack Rabin and Al Zimbalist and written by Roy Hamilton, evinces no excitement, plausibility, or interest. Plodding mediocrity lacking even melodrama does not qualify as camp—this one isn't even worthy of ridicule. The Cat-Women look fetching in their catsuits, but that is as campy as this deathly dull dud gets.
Why this film is notable: Pumping up the sex appeal was hardly an unknown tactic before Cat-Women of the Moon, but its use here seems pretty transparent—there is no story here, so why not make the challenge the Earthlings must overcome comely women in form-fitting outfits?
Sonny Tufts was a career supporting actor with a brief spotlight during World War Two as there was a temporary shortage of handsome leading men; he appeared in such notable films as The Virginian (1946) and The Seven Year Itch (1955). Victor Jory, another of the crewmen, was another Hollywood background fixture who had a minor role in Gone with the Wind (1939). Marie Windsor, a ringer for Agnes Moorehead, became known as the "Queen of the B's" because her career was primarily spent making low-budget films. She appeared in a number of film noirs including a compelling performance in one of the great "little noirs," The Narrow Margin (1952), which influenced The French Connection (1971) among other films.
Cat-Women of the Moon was directed by Arthur Hilton, and although this bomb is hardly a gold star on his résumé, Hilton was better-known as a film editor who garnered an Academy Award nomination for his work on The Killers (1946). Elmer Bernstein composed the film's score—and Cat-Women is hardly a gold star on his résumé. However, Bernstein was embroiled in the anti-communist McCarthyism of the 1950s (actually, he had run afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee) and found himself slumming for a time. Bernstein went on to win an Academy Award for Best Film Score for Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) and would be nominated another 13 times for films such as The Magnificent Seven (1960), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), and True Grit (1969).
Finally, the premise of Cat-Women of the Moon was just so enthralling that it was remade five years later as Missile to the Moon, and that was so brilliant that it too makes our list of ten bad ones. Read on!
Devil Girl from Mars (1954)
This one screams camp: A supercilious fetish queen from Mars, Nyah (Patricia Laffan), crash-lands near a remote Scottish inn, having come to earth to find males with whom to mate because men are dying off back on the Red Planet. This premise got inverted a decade later in the truly awful Mars Needs Women (although it did inspire an amusing, if obscure, song by Peter Wolf), but credit Devil Girl from Mars with the idea first.
What makes Devil Girl from Mars charming is that it is essentially a parlor story—it was originally a radio play—in which the cast tries its best to sell the drama, but, really, nothing much happens here. Nyah's robot companion, Chani, is laughably bad, a bargain-basement Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), but the sight of Laffan in her tight black vinyl outfit is some compensation.
It's almost too easy to lambaste the film, shot in black and white, because it is so sincerely incompetent, with game actors trying—sometimes too hard—to inject life into the thin story and plodding direction. Devil Girl practically broadcasts its schematic: At a remote inn on the Scottish moors, various individuals gather, including Ellen Prestwick (Hazel Court); Robert Justin (Peter Reynolds), an escaped murderer returning to his love, Doris (Adrienne Corri) the barmaid; and reporter Michael Carter (Hugh McDermott) and scientist Arnold Hennessey (Joseph Tomelty), both searching for a meteor reported to have landed near the inn.
However, it's not a meteor—it's the spaceship damaged by the meteor that lands near the inn. Emerging from the spaceship in her tight vinyl outfit is statuesque Nyah, who had planned to land in London before being sidetracked by the meteor. Coolly sneering her superiority as she places a force field around the inn, she contemplates the menfolk for harvesting while the humans try to stop her. Except for a couple of set pieces with the preposterous-looking Chani, the action is largely missing, supplanted by the various human subplots that lapse into melodrama, including plans to "trick" Nyah. On the other hand, even rubber fetishists need a sci-fi flick they can call their own.
Why this film is notable: Devil Girl from Mars does play like the distaff, evil flipside to The Day the Earth Stood Still while offering inspiration for Mars Needs Women a decade later.
Patricia Laffan had a prominent role in the big-budget epic Quo Vadis (1951) although after Devil Girl her film roles began to dry up and she found herself on television instead. Both Hazel Court and Adrienne Corri were mainstays in British film and television as respected character actresses; Corri appeared in Doctor Zhivago (1965) and A Clockwork Orange (1971).
The film score was done by Edwin Astley, who went on to write the distinctive themes for the British television shows Danger Man and The Saint.
Award-winning American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler (Kindred, Lilith's Brood) was inspired to become a writer after watching Devil Girl from Mars: After seeing it, she decided that she could do much better. Proof that roses can bloom from fertilizer.
Bride of the Monster (1955)
Although not as celebrated as his 1959 opus Plan 9 from Outer Space—and "celebrated" should be recognized here as an indication of notoriety—director, producer, and co-writer Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster is technically the better film: more cohesive, better directed, and more effective overall.
Granted, this is a matter of degree: Plan 9 is spectacularly, historically dreadful while Bride is merely deficient in every area of filmmaking. The sets are functional but tacky; the story, by Wood and Alex Gordon, has a semblance of logic but folds under even cursory examination, and Frank Worth's busy, journeyman score cannot buttress every conflict and emotion; the acting, although consonant with the story, cannot thus rise above mediocre; and the execution echoes all these elements—it works for what it's given, but it's given precious little to work with.
In a swamp outside town, exiled scientist Eric Vornoff (Bela Lugosi) and his mute, hulking assistant Lobo (Tor Johnson) try to create a race of atomic supermen from unfortunates who stray onto the swamp. Reporter Janet Lawton (Loretta King) investigates and is promptly captured by Vornoff. Her boyfriend, police detective Dick Craig (Tony McCoy), goes after her. Also pursuing Vornoff is Professor Strowksi (George Becwar) from Vornoff's homeland, eager to put Vornoff's research to nefarious use. And there's your story, filmed in glorious black and white.
More has been done with less, and that was Wood's problem in a nutshell: He wanted audiences to invest in his make-believe as he did himself, but he couldn't produce even one facet to justify his inspiration. Lugosi reaches into his stock repertoire (Dracula [1931], White Zombie[1932]) without descending into parody, but he cannot do much surrounded by amateurs. Too solidly earnest to be camp, Bride of the Monster, not as awful as Plan 9 from Outer Space, languishes in its infamous shadow.
Why this film is notable: Unlike his notorious "appearance" in the later Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bela Lugosi is front and center in Bride of the Monster. For the man who delivered one of filmdom's most iconic characters, Count Dracula, his penultimate performance is here. "Pull the string!" (Lugosi's final performance was in 1956's The Black Sleep. He died that year.)
Bride of the Monster generated retrospective attention following the release of the 1994 Tim Burton biopic Ed Wood as a significant portion of the film covers the making of Bride including its spotlight on Martin Landau, who portrayed Lugosi in Ed Wood, and who won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his performance. After seeing Landau thrash around in a shallow pool with a rubber octopus, seeing that scene in Bride of the Monster can only enhance its specialness (even though Lugosi never actually did the scene himself).
This Island Earth (1955)
You can see why riffers Mystery Science Theater 3000 chose This Island Earth as its target for its 1996 feature film Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie: This splashy science-fiction adventure—This Island Earth—has a strong surface sheen but it doesn't take much to spot its shaky credibility, particularly its glib bad science. Furthermore, lurking beneath that surface is the kind of B-movie melodrama designed to buttress a thin narrative nonetheless burnished with some fairly decent special effects for the period.
Rex Reason—yes, that is his real name—stars as Cal Meacham, a lantern-jawed physicist who, while piloting his on-loan F-80 Shooting Star back to Southern California, encounters strange intervention that keeps his jet fighter from crashing. Hardly fazed, he and assistant Joe Wilson (Robert Nichols) order a kit from a strange catalog and soon build themselves an interocitor, a strange communication device with potentially lethal properties. It's all been a test devised by Exeter (Jeff Morrow), a strange man recruiting top scientists for a secret project. Intrigued, Meacham joins, whereupon he meets fellow scientist and former fling Ruth Adams (Faith Domergue), acting strangely, who, along with scientist Steve Carlson (Russell Johnson), warns him that something strange is going on with Exeter's project, such as a pet cat patrolling the premises and named Neutron because he's "so positive"—wouldn't that be Proton, then?
Don't get charged up because that's not the only factual lapse in Franklin Coen and Edward O'Callaghan's journeyman script, adapting Raymond Jones's novel: More science gets bruised as Adams and Meacham are taken to Exeter's besieged planet Metaluna, at war with Zagon and thus desperate for Earth's help—and more. Reason is reliably bland while Domergue, unlike her scientist in It Came from Beneath the Sea, is mostly eye candy. Filmed in Technicolor, This Island Earth looks deceptively swell, but even cursory engagement reveals the flaws—and the silhouettes of mirthful mockery.
Why this film is notable: Being chosen as the film subject for narrative parody for Mystery Science Theater 3000's first (and only) feature-film release carries with it an honor, even if the MST3K team did shorten This Island Earth for Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (or MST3K: TM, if you prefer). Remarkably, critics at the time of the release of This Island Earth and retrospectively have praised it.
Faith Domergue, who was once a girlfriend of Howard Hughes's, was another studio-system ingénue tapped for stardom, but her career didn't blossom despite roles such as that opposite Robert Mitchum and Claude Rains in the tepid film noir Where Danger Lives (1950). Her appearance here in This Island Earth didn't help, either, although we have seen her act much more effectively in It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), one of our ten that are not-so-good but not yet truly bad. Russell Johnson became famous as the Professor on Gilligan's Island although he too made the ten-not-so-good list in It Came from Outer Space (1953).
The producer of This Island Earth was William Alland, who produced a pair of films that made our previous lists, the aforementioned It Came from Outer Space and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), one of ten good ones. Alland was also an actor, most notably in Citizen Kane (1941): He plays reporter Jerry Thompson, who investigates Kane's life, and whose face is never seen clearly—he is shot from behind and in long shots with his face in shadow. Whether he wanted to hide his face after This Island Earth is not known.
The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
Technically, there are two brains from planet Arous, but two heads are not better than one in The Brain from Planet Arous, a low-budget science-fiction thriller that features passable performances by the leads to try to compensate for the ludicrous effects. The premises in Ray Buffum's skeletal script are shaky enough, but the superimposed images of a giant brain with eyes and a big helium balloon depicting the terror about to conquer the earth are clearly risible and hardly convincing.
Scientists Steve March (John Agar) and Dan Murphy (Robert Fuller) detect unusual radiation readings coming from Mystery Mountain, so they trek to the desert to investigate. Inside the mountain's cave they encounter Gor, a giant floating brain that kills Murphy and inhabits March. Meanwhile, March's fiancée Sally Fallon (Joyce Meadows) grows suspicious of March's behavior and Murphy's disappearance, so she and her father John (Thomas Browne Henry) explore the cave and encounter Vol, another floating brain who explains that he is pursuing Gor, a dangerous fugitive from Arous. Then, to keep tabs on Gor, Vol inhabits . . . Sally's dog. Will they be able to stop Gor/March, who has revealed its power to world representatives and is threatening to unleash it further?
Faced with such preposterousness, Agar still manages to juggle Gor's manic maliciousness with March's hero's goodness along with a sly fillip—inhabiting March, Gor develops a lust for Sally, which only adds to the unintentional mirth. (By the way, "Arous" is pronounced "Eros.") As Sally, Meadows plays it straight, the competent fulcrum of the story. But although veteran director Nathan H. Juran keeps the story on track—despite Walter Greene's generic score—The Brain from Planet Arous is both weak and ridiculous. Scene to see: To alert others to Gor's only weakness in a book on human anatomy, Sally draws an arrow pointing to the cerebral feature the Fissure of Rolando, and then labels it as being Gor's "Achilles heel." From head to toe, The Brain from Planet Arous is woefully brainless.
Why this film is notable: John Agar began with a promising career, appearing in the Westerns Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and the war film Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) (notable as one of the very few films in which John Wayne's character—oops! No spoilers!). He was also married briefly to Shirley Temple. Robert Fuller, whose character is killed off early, survived his association with Brain to become a television fixture, notably on Emergency!.
Director Nathan H. Juran won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction of a Black and White Film for How Green Was My Valley (1941). As a director, his caliber was closer to The Brain from Planet Arous although he did direct Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), which was one of our not-so-good ten.
A snippet of The Brain from Planet Arous can be seen in the montage used in the opening credits for the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle.
It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958)
Two decades before Alien portrayed a powerful, malevolent creature terrorizing an isolated spaceship crew, It! The Terror Beyond Space previewed the idea—although this rocket-ship saga is as much Keystone Kops as then-contemporary science fiction. Despite its appearance, the monster is frightening enough, seemingly indestructible and relentless in its pursuit, and its use of the ship's ventilation system is another key idea used in Alien (1979), but the besieged crew in Alien is a panel of Nobel laureates compared to this bunch.
Noted sci-fi writer Jerome Bixby penned the script, which trims the fat and launches immediately into an escalating story, albeit one laced with some rather improbable elements. A rescue rocket lands on Mars to retrieve Colonel Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), the sole survivor of the previous expedition. However, Carruthers is being returned to Earth for court martial and likely execution, accused of killing his crew to stay alive following their mishap upon arrival. Carruthers insists that a mysterious beast killed his crew, a claim the rescuers greet with scorn, but as they embark upon their four-month journey back to Earth, the crew begins to disappear one by one until the beast indeed shows itself, and the crew must battle it with what it has to hand. That happens to be not only firearms but grenades and even a bazooka, and at one point the crew exposes the creature to the ship's nuclear core. How willing are you to suspend your disbelief?
The spaceship interior is stylish, Edward Cahn directs efficiently, and the cast also includes Ann Doran, Kim Spalding, Dabbs Greer, and Shirley Patterson (as Shawn Smith), but It! The Terror from Beyond Space is essentially an Ed Wood film with more money and screenwriting help. The antecedents to Alien are indeed here—along with some unintended guffaws.
Why this film is notable: The most notable aspect to It! The Terror from Beyond Space is that it indeed must have been lurking in Dan O'Bannon's subconscious when he penned the script for Alien, centered around a powerful, horrible creature stalking a spaceship's crew (although that concept dates back at least to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None).
Ann Doran had a long career as a film and television character actress; she appeared in Rebel without a Cause, The High and the Mighty (both 1954), and The Desperate Hours (uncredited) (1955), as well as an uncredited role in the 1954 sci-fi thriller Them!, which made our list of Ten Good Ones. Marshall Thompson also had a long career as a B-movie and television actor, although his résumé is much more modest than Doran's.
Jerome Bixby was a noted science-fiction writer whose 1953 short story "It's a Good Life" was adapted into a 1961 Twilight Zone episode and was remade in 1983's The Twilight Zone: The Movie. (Scary stuff, too—this is the story of "Anthony," whose terrifying powers include mind-reading, teleportation, and creating and destroying people and things at will.). He also hammered out screenplays for four episodes of the original Star Trek series including 1967's "Mirror, Mirror." Bixby also conceived of and co-wrote (with Otto Klement) the story that became the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage (although that film had similarities to 1951's Unknown World, which made our list of Ten Not-So-Good Ones).
The Blob (1958)
Famous as Steve McQueen's first starring role, The Blob shouldn't even trumpet that as its claim to fame as McQueen, then 27 and playing a teenager, fumbles with his character throughout. You might not notice too much, though, given the sluggish pacing and leaden performances by everyone else as the Filling from Inside a Giant Jelly Donut—oops! sorry, the Scary Amoebic Creature from Outer Space, AKA the Blob—threatens a small town. Then again, the theme song sounds like something the Champs had knocked together after they had been rehearsing "Tequila" too many times.
But here is an indicator of the scintillating quality of The Blob: How many townsfolk have to be consumed by the Blob before the cast realizes that it's in a science-fiction/horror movie? That's the burning question underpinning this celebrated stinker. The wry cha-cha of the title song, which was composed by Burt Bacharach and Mack David (lyricist Hal's brother), only adds to the incongruity as a meteor plunges to Earth outside a Pennsylvania town. Naturally, the old man (Olin Howland) who finds it, then sees it split open, pokes it with a stick, whereupon the gooey occupant affixes itself to his arm.
Fortunately for him, Steve Andrews (McQueen) and girlfriend Jane Martin (Aneta Corsaut) run across him and bring him to the town doctor (Stephen Chase) even as the goo grows by consuming the old man, and thus the Filling from Inside a Giant Jelly Doughnut—sorry, the Blob—begins its creepy crawl through downtown.
So why, after leaving the doctor's to investigate the crash site, do Steve and Jane get sidetracked by high school classmates looking to drag-race? Better ask writers Kate Phillips and Theodore Simonson, adapting Irving Millgate's story, to explain that logical lapse, or ask director Irvin Yeaworth why his actors seem to be oblivious to the narrative's urgency for much of The Blob. The Blob itself isn't bad for a 1950s monster, growing with each human it consumes and turning redder with the blood, and its oozing through vents and under doors is a fright factor. Arguably, it's also a metaphor for "Red Spread"—communist infiltration—ominously implied at the close, although that's likely just part of its uninspired imitation. While it might be campy amusement, The Blob will hardly consume you.
Why this film is notable: Steve McQueen. For those who have seen the iconic actor in classics such as The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), The Sand Pebbles (1966; for which he was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award), Bullitt (1968), and Papillon (1973), to see him in The Blob is . . . amusing, to say the least. The very least. Not surprisingly, McQueen disavowed any association with the film. Aneta Corsaut went on to play schoolteacher Helen Crump on The Andy Griffith Show, becoming Andy's girlfriend and eventual wife.
With lyricist Hal David, Mack's brother, composer Burt Bacharach became a hit factory, writing songs made famous by the Carpenters, Tom Jones, Dusty Springfield, and most notably Dionne Warwick, the singer most associated with Bacharach and David. The title song to The Blob became a Top Forty hit in the US, although Bacharach, like McQueen, may have disassociated himself from it as well.
Missile to the Moon (1958)
When in doubt, bring in a bevy of buxom beauties to spice up a bland film. Why not? It worked—all right, it was done—for 1953's already-awful science-fiction adventure Cat-Women of the Moon, and that must have been the thinking behind Missile to the Moon, which is the terrible remake of Cat-Women.
Here the lovelies are not Cat-Women but minions of the Lido (K.T. Stevens), the ruler of the moon, and they're billed as "International Beauty Contest Winners." They appear in even more scanty outfits than do the Cat-Women as this vaguely familiar story, by H.E. Barrie and Vincent Fotre, ups the wattage from Cat-Women in other narrative areas as well.
Down on Earth, as escaped convicts Gary (Tommy Cook) and Lon (Gary Clarke) take refuge in Dirk Green's (Michael Whalen) homemade rocket, Dirk is itching to cut bureaucratic red tape and ride his rocket to the moon. Catching the convicts stowed aboard, he persuades them to be his crew just as Dirk's partner Steve Dayton (Richard Travis) and Steve's fiancée June Saxton (Cathy Downs) climb aboard to look for Dirk. Soon all are headed moonward, surviving meteorites and Dirk's accidental death. Once on the moon, they encounter lumbering rock monsters and cheesy giant spiders before falling into the Lido's clutches—and a surprise or two once in her grip.
Also surprisingly, Richard Cunha's direction is workmanlike, but this patchwork tale, throwing peril into the path as needed, lacks plausibility as the low-budget effects only enhance the hokeyness. Yep, just check out those giant spiders and the rock monsters. Needless to say, the performances are on that par, but as with Cat-Women, a few of the cast have some previous chops, Downs and Stevens especially, although Nina Bara, as the scheming Alpha, breezily pushes into camp territory every time she opens her mouth. From start to finish, Missile to the Moon is unquestionably poor filmmaking, with only the Lido's curvy "moon maidens'" twin frontal assets making a favorable impression.
Why this film is notable: Cathy Downs graduated from bit parts in films such as 1945's State Fair to larger roles such as Clementine in John Ford's classic western My Darling Clementine, starring Henry Fonda, the following year. Missile to the Moon turned out to be her final film role although she did some television work subsequently. K.T. Stevens also had a career in film and television, notably three guest roles on Perry Mason. Laurie Mitchell did not have even the success of those two, but she has appeared in our lists already, essentially taking the K.T. Stevens role in Queen of Outer Space (1958), one of our Ten Not-So-Good Ones. Finally, those "International Beauty Contest Winners" are not hard on the eyes by a long shot.
The Cosmic Man (1959)
Celebrated character actor John Carradine stars as The Cosmic Man, although his is the kind of "starring" role designed to bolster the credibility of this thoroughly undistinguished science-fiction retread rather than to spotlight its star. The central premise is cribbed from The Day the Earth Stood Still, but it takes an awful lot of pedestrian pipe to approach that aspiration. Add in all the earnest if unremarkable performances that set the stage for Carradine's sonorous voice, and you have the recipe for competent mediocrity: The Cosmic Man isn't dire, but it's just not interesting, let alone engaging.
Blame screenwriter Arthur Pierce, who trots out a passel of shopworn details while providing the accompanying clichés for his cardboard characters to recite. A speeding object lights up radar screens as it enters Earth's atmosphere and nestles in a rocky canyon. It's a small white sphere that levitates above the ground; this puzzles distinguished scientist Karl Sorenson (Bruce Bennett), who of course clashes with resolute Air Force Colonel Matthews (Paul Langton), wary of the alien object. Nearby is the quiet lodge run by Kathy Grant (Angela Greene), while her wheelchair-bound young son Ken (Scotty Morrow) is a science nut whose days are numbered. But can the mysterious stranger help him?
Compounding the hoary story is the lackluster direction by Herbert Greene, a veteran assistant director whose background shows: Greene knows how to stage the shots but has no feel for storytelling. His actors deliver lines crisply but with no sense of reflecting believably the situations before them. Thus it's a matter of ticking off the familiar elements until Carradine delivers his soliloquy to humanity—and Klaatu warning the planet this is not. Perhaps a bigger budget—any budget—would have helped, but originality in The Cosmic Man appears unavailable at any price.
Why this film is notable: John Carradine. He is the Godot whom The Cosmic Man is waiting for. Carradine made more than 200 films, from the 1930s up to the 1980s, and was part of director John Ford's stock company; he appeared in the Ford films Stagecoach (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), in which he portrayed Preacher Casey, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
Bruce Bennett was a studio veteran who filled supporting roles in many films including Sahara (1943), Dark Passage (1947), and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), all with Humphrey Bogart, as well as Mildred Pierce (1945) and Strategic Air Command (1955). Angela Greene had steady work in television from the 1950s through the 1970s.
The Cosmic Man is a bargain-sub-basement The Day the Earth Stood Still, expropriating that classic science-fiction film's narrative wholesale (it was on our list of Ten Good Ones) and rendering it with "Cheepnis."
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
It is a happy accident of chronology that Plan 9 from Outer Space wraps up our look at ten notably bad films—sci-fi aficionados, your patience has been rewarded. Here is the crown jewel (clown jewel?) of our list.
"You didn't actually think you were the only intelligent planet in the universe—how could any race be so stupid?" This earnest contradiction from writer-producer-director Ed Wood exemplifies the enduring appeal of his opus Plan 9 from Outer Space: It doesn't realize how absurdly bungling it is, but it proudly carries on regardless. Widely regarded as "the worst movie of all time," Plan 9 is certainly rife with incompetence—preposterous special effects, glaring continuity errors, painful performances, and unintentionally risible dialog—but because Wood and his company sincerely believe in their project, you can't help but smile at their relentlessly awful effort.
Thus, paradoxically, that summarizes the appeal of Plan 9: It is terrible, but it is sincerely terrible. The impression is that both cast and crew, overseen by their guiding light Wood, made a terrible movie not because they didn't care enough to put any effort into it—it's because their effort is simply, awesomely incompetent. For instance, Wood makes a ludicrous attempt to incorporate deceased Dracula actor Bela Lugosi into the film. Footage of Lugosi filmed before he died, and in contexts unrelated to the story, gets spliced into the narrative while another actor, his face conspicuously hidden, picks up the torch to portray Lugosi's character. (The "actor" was actually Tom Mason, the chiropractor of Wood's wife Kathy.)
Wood's story is actually inspired hokum, an early blending of science fiction and horror: News of Earth's destructive tendencies has traveled throughout the galaxy, bringing alien spaceships to Earth with a plan—Plan 9—to neutralize the planet by reanimating newly-dead corpses to attack the living. With vetting by the Ruler (John Breckinridge), Eros (Dudley Manlove) and Tanna (Joanna Lee) try to implement the plan, but Earthlings including airline pilot Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott), Air Force Colonel Tom Edwards (Tom Keene), and police Lieutenant John Harper (Duke Moore) try to stop them as they are menaced by reanimated "ghouls"—zombies—played by wrestler Tor Johnson and horror-movie hostess Vampira, who chase them through a stage-set cemetery so unconvincing that you can see the burlap on the floor and crosses that wobble as actors run past them.
Throw in the pie-plate flying saucers, the inexplicable shifts from daylight to nighttime, and the lugubrious narration by the charlatan psychic Criswell that bookends the film, and Plan 9 from Outer Space becomes cinematically abysmal. On the other hand, once you've seen it, you will never forget it—no matter how hard you try.
Why this film is notable: Back in the mists of time, Plan 9 from Outer Space was declared to be the "worst movie of all time," which gave it instant notoriety as well as provoking intense curiosity about its awfulness. In a pop culture that has always appreciated camp, Plan 9 became the Citizen Kane of bad films, studied as much as for how not to make a film as much as for how many things can go wrong while making it.
Apart from being known as Bela Lugosi's "final film," Plan 9 features Lyle Talbot (as an Air Force general) and Gregory Walcott, two bit-parters who appeared in several films throughout their careers. Also present is "Vampira," Maila Nurmi, who had hosted a "creature feature" type of television show in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s; her character inspired one Cassandra Peterson to develop her "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark" persona. And Joanna Lee ("Tanna") became a television writer in the 1960s, penning scripts for a passel of classic shows such as the deathless pop-culture icon Gilligan's Island (including the memorable episodes "Beauty Is As Beauty Does" and "All About Eva") before winning an Emmy for the 1972 Thanksgiving episode of The Waltons.
Plan 9 from Outer Space (along with Bride of the Monster) gained further exposure when they were featured prominently in Ed Wood, Tim Burton's 1994 biopic of the intrepid filmmaker as portrayed by Johnny Depp. Burton's affectionate tribute to Wood cast him in a rosy glow, leading to a new-found—if not appreciation, then at least understanding—of a man whose reach far exceeded his grasp even in the relatively modest arena of low-budget filmmaking, thus inspiring countless YouTube contributors if no one else.
The legacy of Plan 9 from Outer Space continues to this day. It has spawned comic books, a video game, and various stage adaptations. (One of my local repertory companies, the Maverick Theater, began a stage version in 2012. I've seen it twice.) Singer Glenn Danzig of the punk-rock band the Misfits—no strangers to horror and sci-fi themes—founded a record label called Plan 9 Records. Plan 9 from Outer Space has become part of the pop-culture fabric.
Fade to Black
Science-fiction films of the 1950s have a special quality about them. The genre itself regardless of medium was hugely popular but critically denigrated, and while a few science-fiction films gained respectability during the decade (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea), most had to content themselves with being popular with audiences. As we have seen with the films on this list and the previous one (Ten Not-So-Good Ones), actors who may have been ascending through the studio system but did not catch on found themselves relegated to doing science-fiction films, and if those were not good films, they fell to doing television or even found themselves out of the industry altogether.And as we have seen with the films on the last two lists, a lot of mediocre and outright bad sci-fi flicks got made to fill the demand for them. These films were cheap thrills (and often "Cheepnis") or quick entertainment, often borrowing storylines wholesale from more successful films, providing exploitation (The Blob) and even a little titillation (Missile to the Moon). But as we saw with the films from the first two lists, Ten Good Ones and Ten Pretty Good Ones, there were larger themes to be explored. Films such as Gojira (Godzilla) and Them! touched on fears of atomic radiation; Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Red Planet Mars explored Cold War anxieties and the fear of being infiltrated by an enemy; and Forbidden Planet and Destination Moon expressed the desire to explore outer space, with the attendant dangers that held, while War of the Worlds and Earth versus the Flying Saucers manifested the terror of visitors coming to Earth with less-than-friendly intent; meanwhile, The Day the Earth Stood Still, a great film in any genre and the model for a few films in our small sample here, outlined a more benign contact—albeit one with ominous undertones stemming from our warlike actions.
Compared to what would be possible in the next two decades, let alone what is possible today, filmmaking in the 1950s, particularly special effects, was rudimentary. Scale models, matte backgrounds, stock footage, papier-mâché monsters—much of what you see in many 1950s science-fiction films looks laughable today. And yet these films laid the foundation for the science-fiction films of the next two decades—2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien—and those films in turn inspired the science-fiction films of the 1980s, 1990s, and into the 21st century. Moreover, films such as Forbidden Planet and War of the Worlds still look pretty impressive today.
That is why sci-fi flicks of the 1950s hold such a special place in my heart. They embody a post-World War Two world filled with possibilities both encouraging and terrifying, and armed with tools that seem primitive in today's environment of computer-generated imagery, they tried to paint those possibilities. With so many factors making an impact on their results—time, talent, money, resources, inspiration—the range of quality veers giddily from a classic such as The Day the Earth Stood Still to a laughingstock such as Plan 9 from Outer Space, and even that can seem endearing because at least its guiding light, Ed Wood, sincerely believed in what he was doing even if he lacked the wherewithal to realize his vision competently.
Over the course of these four installments, we have gone from good to pretty good to not-so-good to bad, and yet each of those installments offers something of interest, even if a film may be a better example of how not to make a science-fiction film. Furthermore, sci-fi films of the 1950s also offer a glimpse into social mores of the decade, for example, the crewwomen in It! The Terror from Beyond Space function as little more than stewardesses (and that was the term of the time) while Gloria Talbott's character in I Married a Monster from Outer Space needs to keep running to men for help. Contrast that with Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley from the Alien movies two decades later. Yet even a certified stinker like Cat-Women of the Moon features Marie Windsor as the crew's navigator, suggesting that there is hope yet.
Reviewing the forty films that compose the four installments of this series, along with the few that didn't make the cut, has been a cinematic pleasure. I hope this series has inspired you to investigate a few of these films from a time gone by, and perhaps prompt you to suggest a few that didn't make these lists.
Klaatu barada nikto.
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