Friday, August 21, 2009
Plan 9 From Outer Space - Live (Kinda)
I've felt a little sympathy over the years for the legendarily bad Hollywood director Ed Wood, ever since seeing the Tim Burton movie starring Johnny Depp and Martin Landau. Maybe it's because I sometimes fear that I may be the "Ed Wood" of videogames. Er, I mean the zealous-but-cluelessly-incompetent part, not the cross-dressing part.
However, I'd never seen his "magnum opus," Plan 9 From Outer Space, in its entirety. I've seen a number of clips from it which added up to about ten minutes of the film. What I didn't realize was that ten minutes was pretty much the entire film - the rest of it being pointlessly meandering and often contradictory dialog, stock footage, repeated footage, and a lot of scenes of people walking or running back and forth along the same 40-foot section of graveyard or driving a police car up the same dirt road.
Thursday night, we rectified this apparently glaring omission in my "bad cinema" experience. Like the total geeks we are, we attended the Live Rifftrax event at a local theater. This was a nationwide broadcast of the three principle riffers of Rifftrax (and, not coincidentally, alumni of Mystery Science Theater 3000) riffing live from Nashville on Plan 9 From Outer Space, as well as a very amusing short training film from the 1950s called Flying Stewardess. Jonathan Coulton was also a special guest, who sang The Future Soon and - appropriate for a movie featuring zombies - Re: Your Brains. With audience participation. He also joined in a song with Michael Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy called "Plan 9", which outlined plans 1 through 8 from outer space, and why they failed.
Lowtax of SomethingAwful.com was also there, and provided a couple of fairly entertaining mock-commercials. And the evening was MCed by Veronica Belmont, who did a competent if not particularly noteworthy job.
Of course, the main event was Plan 9 From Outer Space. With riffing. My wife told me her sides hurt at the end of the movie from laughing so hard. I don't know if it was the funniest Rifftrax ever, or even the absolute worst movie ever, but it's definitely in same elite league. We did have a great time, the movie was truly, truly horrible, and the jokes were fast, furious and funny.
But this was definitely one of those off-beat geeky fun events, and I'm glad we went.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:37 AM (Permalink)
