Why are bad films often so much fun to watch?

Rewatching Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) when you haven’t seen it for a number of years is a deeply reassuring experience. It is every bit as bad as you remember it, in fact perhaps just a little bit worse. This is Wood’s low-budget, largely incomprehensible sci-fi horror picture in which flying saucers appear over LA and Washington and cause some of the recently deceased to lurch back to life. 

The film features an eccentric cameo from an addled-looking Bela Lugosi, Hollywood’s most famous Dracula, shot days before he died. There is an equally odd performance from 1950s horror star Maila Nurmi, better known as Vampiria, who used to put on her vampire make-up at home and then take the bus to the studio to film her scenes. The monumental former Swedish professional wrestler Tor Johnson co-stars as the slow-witted, slow-moving police inspector who joins the ranks of the undead without any noticeable difference to his demeanour.

Plan 9, which has been re-released on VOD in a restored and colourised version, has stilted dialogue and a baffling plot, but that is only a small part of its attraction. Its visual effects and production design are laughably crude. The scenes set in an aeroplane cockpit appear to have been shot in somebody’s bathroom. The corpses of the two gravediggers look as if they are made of straw. The flying saucers themselves were probably improvised out of abandoned pieces of tin cutlery.

In 1980, Plan 9 was anointed the “worst movie ever made” in The Golden Turkey Awards: Nominees and Winners, the Worst Achievements in Hollywood History, the 1980 book by film historians, Harry and Michael Medved.

But the man the Medveds mocked and reviled wasn’t from a gilded Hollywood background. Wood started near the bottom in Hollywood, making tiny budget movies for strange patrons (Plan 9 was supported by Baptist ministers). Then, as his films all failed, he sunk yet lower. The lower he sank, the grubbier his work became; he ended up in a twilight world of pornography and exploitation. He was as eccentric as his own movies, a womanising, alcoholic, cross-dressing transvestite with a fetish for angora and ladies’ underwear. 

The former US marine was indeed a truly terrible filmmaker. His films are riddled with continuity errors, non sequiturs, and moments in which you expect the scenery to come tumbling down. Always affable, he hated to tell off actors or indeed to direct them in any meaningful way at all. They loved working with him but tended to give terrible performances. He never had enough money, another reason why his pictures turned out so badly.

Nonetheless, it’s very hard not to find enjoyment in the Wood oeuvre. There is a magical innocence about the work and, most importantly, a complete lack of cynicism. He was versatile, making dreadful movies in many different genres – crime and horror, as well as sci-fi. His naive idealism is caught in Tim Burton’s 1994 film about him with Johnny Depp in the leading role.

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Wood’s failures also added to the seedy pathos that remains a crucial part of his appeal. He always kept on trying. He is the patron saint of underdogs in Hollywood, a director who has been rescued from obscurity and is now cherished for his perseverance as much as his achievements. In spite of its wildly outlandish themes, his work was often autobiographical and deeply personal. As the narrator of Look Back in Angora, an affectionate 1994 documentary about him, puts it, “whatever the merits of his art, Ed Wood reached into his own soul to create it”.

Audiences can tell instantly when filmmakers are trying to rip them off. They never had quite that sensation with Wood. “Eddie was sometimes so serious about what he wrote but it didn’t come out that way in his movies,” his wife Kathy later reflected on the gaping chasm between his artistic aspirations and his actual achievements.

Trying to argue that good bad films, like those made by Wood, are better than bad good ones will quickly lead you down the rabbit hole. Nonetheless, there is considerable joy to be had in bad movies, or, at least, in some of them. It’s that Snakes on a Plane feeling you get when everything is awful but in an endearing way. It’s that galvanising thrill of anticipation found in a creaky, low-budget exploitation picture like William Castle’s The Tingler (1959) when the director arranged for seats to be wired and audiences to be given mild electric shocks during the screenings. 

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You can’t help but feel a smidgen of admiration for British B-movie producer EJ Fancey, described by film historian Matthew Sweet as “the Cecil B DeMille of cheap British rubbish”. Fancey, an English home counties answer to Wood, made British exploitation films in the 1950s and 1960s that were blatant rip-offs of US equivalents. For example, Hollywood gave audiences Rock Around the Clock (1956), and so Fancey countered with Rock You Sinners (1958).

His glamorous daughter Adrienne often starred in the films as she was less expensive than a more established star. His wife Beatrice, also a producer, often wrote them. Fancey was notorious for re-using the same sets and cheating on locations, once trying to pass off East Grinstead as Alpine Switzerland. His films aren’t necessarily very good but, like Wood, he was an underdog who had chutzpah in abundance. You admire his defiance in trying to gatecrash the film industry.

It’s hard not to be reminded of Wood’s enthusiasm or Fancey’s opportunism when watching the recent British documentary, Alien on Stage, which premiered at the SXSW Film Festival last month. This is about an amateur stage production of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror film Alien, mounted in the local town hall by a group of bus drivers from Wimborne in Dorset. The production was a disaster but the documentary’s directors Danielle Kummer and Lucy Harvey, who had travelled up from London to see it, saw something special in it.

Harvey arranged for the show to be performed in a West End theatre. The big city audience loved it. This wasn’t because it was slick, well-acted or well-staged but because they recognised the effort behind it. The production was also, inadvertently, very funny in its own Wood-like way. The bus drivers hadn’t intended the production to be a comedy but were glad that people liked it.

“I think they were also just happy to know the audience was enjoying itself. They took it in a way that, ‘well, we’re just here to entertain people and people are having a great time. That’s the most important thing’,” Kummer said of the laughter in the aisles.

Recent Hollywood history has plentiful examples of films like Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls (1995) or Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001) that were savaged by critics on their initial release but later acquired cult status. Such late bloomers, though, don’t bear comparison with Plan 9 from Outer Space. They were shot in focus and without obvious continuity errors or scenes in which you can see the strings holding the flying saucers.

Wood’s most egregious efforts are in a different register altogether. They are, objectively, very bad movies. Their director hasn’t mastered even the basics of filmmaking. If you go to the theatre to see a live play, there might be occasions when actors forget their lines or the scenery collapses. If you go to the cinema, you expect all the technical wrinkles to have been ironed out beforehand. That’s why filmmakers do retakes, spend months on post-production and try to make sure you can’t see the microphone boom at the top of the frame.

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After the Medved brothers first labelled Plan 9 from Outer Space the “worst film” in history and dubbed Wood “the worst director”, it was hard at first to mount much of a case for the defence. However, the Medveds put Wood back in the public eye and lured viewers back to his pictures, which have been in constant circulation ever since. 

When Orson Welles embarked on Citizen Kane (1941), he described directing a movie as being like getting hold of “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had”. The phrase perfectly sums up Wood’s philosophy about filmmaking too. He may not have had as big a train set as Welles, or any idea at all how to operate it, but his childlike pleasure in his medium is self-evident. That is why his films remain so joyful to watch. It’s not that they’re so bad they’re good, but that they have some other quality that goes beyond mere competence. The feelings of incredulity and bewilderment that they induce eventually turn to pleasure. You soon realise that it takes some kind of genius to make films quite as inept and unusual as this. Only Wood could pull it off.

‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’ is available on MUBI and Amazon Prime