Cables

First cabled scarf - was tons of fun to make. Not sure who its for though....

Plan 9.2

I looked the movie up on wikipedia to see if they had some info on why its the worst movie ever made. Now that I've read about all the mistakes - which I did notice some of - I'm starting to agree that maybe its the worst...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space

My favorite oops which I noticed but didn't really grasp is that the resurrected old man is actually played by someone other than Bela Lugosi for most of the film and that's why he walks around with a Dracula cape raised over his arm and covering his face half the time!

Plan 9

So...last night I watched Plan Nine from Outer Space. It's a movie whose description on netflix includes the following: "one of the most popular cult classics of the 20th century, a two-time winner of the Golden Turkey Award for Worst Film and Worst Director of all time." So, I was really excited for something awesomely terrible...instead it was just random and rather boring. I'm not sure why this is a cult classic or why its considered one of the worst films ever. Sure its pretty bad in many many ways - script, acting, screen composition - but I'm actually surprised that people give it as much notice as it gets. To me its the kind of movie that would just fade away into obscurity, bad enough to be forgotten, but the bad wasn't really interesting enough to be remembered. But hey, that's just my thought on the matter. Maybe there are some special reasons why this one has been remembered.

I'm sitting here trying to think of the worst or most random scene in the movie and I'm not coming up with anything too vividly. I did spend most of the movie wondering why the supposed corpse of the old man's bride is so young compared to him...also, why were they buried in vampire clothes? And why do the corpses, who are not vampires, move around like vampires. (The answer to this one is probably because two of the corpses are played by Bela Lugosi and Vampira who usually did play vampires - but still, they aren't vampires in this one and shouldn't have moved like them.) So, yes, it really is bad, nothing works quite right. Ed Wood really was not meant to write or direct or produce.

SFX

I think the reason that I love old scifi and b-horror movies is the special effects. It's amazing what they were able to do without the aid of computers in the decades before computer generated effects and characters became the norm. Tonight I watched the Invisible Man which was based on H.G. Well's novel. It was made in 1933 and the effects are simply amazing. How do they turn a man invisible? Not with the aid of a computer which I think often results in an effect too perfect, not gritty enough to be real, but by erasing the head and hands of an actor wearing pajamas. I suppose that it involved a green screen etc. The effects certainly weren't state of the art, but I find them more realistic in the end.

One of my favorite movies of this old scifi/fantasy/mythic genre is Clash of the Titans. The stop-motion claymation monsters that special effects wiz Ray Harryhausen was able to conjure up for this and many other movies of the period are simly amazing. Sure they aren't smooth and perfect, but the fact that its clay and someone spent that much time painstakingly making it work is amazing. One of the things that I strongly believe made LOTR work as well as it did is that so many of the effects are either not done with CGI or are based on the work of real actors who are then translated into CGI characters. Gollum works because he was based on a real actor who acted out the scenes while his motions were captured for the computer. Pans over scenery like the tower of orthanc work because its actually a big model with intricate detail not computer generated scenery.

I do appreciate a lot of what modern technology can give to the realm of movies, but am certainly attracted to the way that things used to be done. It's so much more fun to be amazed by the sophistication of effects that were created without the aid of computers and try to figure out exactly how they were accomplished. And yes, sometimes the effects are quite terrible and that makes the experience of watching these kinds of movies even more fun. You can shake your head at the sheer campiness of the monsters and the acting. So whether the stories are great and the acting good, or the stories mediocre with laugh-out-loud "scary" monsters, I declare my love for pre-computer scifi movies!