Ever since my sophomore year of high school, when I first got interested in film, my dad has just thrown movie titles at me to watch. This can end up going two ways: he actually sits me down to watch the movie with me or I end up forgetting the title and never watching it. So, when I initially thought, “Hey, why don’t I review bad movies my dad has told me to watch!”, I ended up forgetting every single thing my dad has ever told me to watch.
A few days later, I asked him if he had any bad movies to recommend. He was having some trouble thinking of one, so I broadened the prompt to any movie—even though I really only wanted to watch a bad one. He ended up giving me four good ones and one bad one, a movie called The Mole People. Unfortunately, I could not find it on a single streaming service, and I didn’t look elsewhere since a month ago I decided to stop searching elsewhere for movies and TV after my email got hacked.
Then, I decided I’d rewatch one we’d watched together last year: Plan 9 From Outer Space. The description on Amazon Prime was this:
“Aliens resurrect dead humans as zombies and vampires to stop human kind from creating the Solaranite (a sort of sun-driven bomb).”
Respectfully, that’s not what this movie is about. When my dad and I first watched this together, I was half asleep and not fully paying attention (not because the movie sucked or I didn’t want to, I think I just physically shut down). So rewatching this while only remembering vague bits and pieces was quite the adventure.
There are a total of 2 vampires and 1 zombie, who is referred to by the aliens as “the big one”. They do kill like a few background gravediggers and maybe someone else, but if you asked me if they posed a bigger threat than the blinding lights and huge gusts of wind from the UFOs, I’d say no. You’d also think the reasoning behind why they’re trying to prevent the human race from creating a universe ending bomb would be further explored on both the humans’ end and the aliens’ end. It was brought up 2 whole times: in the middle and at the very end. It didn’t seem very urgent to me. Kinda seemed like they just did that for shits and giggles.
One thing I really appreciated about this movie was the wardrobe of the aliens. First off, I should say that there was no attempt to make the aliens look like aliens. They were just some people in funky outfits—but since the outfits were shiny, you could tell they were aliens, duh. The most important alien wore a shiny green outfit with some cowboy boots that I didn’t notice until my second watch. Really an interesting choice, but I appreciated it a lot. The two other aliens basically wore the same thing except their outfits were purple and their boots less cowboy-ish.
You don’t get much information about the aliens until the very end, where the humans and aliens meet and confront each other. It’s not very interesting until the male alien tells the humans something along the lines of “Women, for us, are only used to advance society” and to that I say, what movie isn’t complete without a little alien misogyny? No movie is good without it, which is why I’ll argue that The Godfather isn’t much to write home about.
**HELLO FILMBROS. THE PREVIOUS SENTENCE IS A JOKE. PLEASE DO NOT DOXX ME. THE GODFATHER IS GOOD. LEAVE ME ALONE.**
One thing I refuse to stop thinking about (besides everything in this fucking movie) would be something that happened with the misogynistic alien man once and was never explained or shown again. In the final scene, the main character punches him for having “the big one” harm his wife. The alien’s skin turns green for a moment, and reverts back to the actor’s skin tone moments later after he calms down. This is never addressed again. You’d think a few minutes later, when the two get into a fist fight, he’d be green. He was not. It came and went just like that. For no reason. Really an interesting filmmaking decision.
Overall, I’d say that the acting was about as dry as the cardboard the sets were made out of. My one roommate joined me for the last half and said she felt like she watched the whole thing, which I feel says a lot about the movie’s story. It is a lot of fun to laugh at, it’s not one of those bad movies that is genuinely unwatchable. It’s one of those you feel you have to keep watching because there’s no way they actually decided to make a movie like this. Boy, am I glad they did make a movie like this.
Well, dad, I actually paid attention this time. Thanks for showing me this disaster, I certainly won’t forget it now.
