- AKA “Grave Robbers from Outer Space”
- Directed by Edward D. Wood Jr.
- Written by Edward D. Wood Jr.
- Stars Bela Lugosi, Maila Nurmi, Tor Johnson
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 19 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiZp2sXkVUg
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
The effects are bad, the story is bad, the acting is bad, the editing is bad. Yet you can’t look away from watching it. Ed Wood did it all himself as a rush job, and it shows. It’s a fun watch, but it started feeling a little long after a while.
Spoilery Synopsis
We open with “Criswell” doing a prediction. He predicts, “Future events such as these will affect you in the future.” He’s dramatic, that’s for sure. Credits roll.
We cut to a funeral. An old woman has died, and we see Bela Lugosi there, crying as the gravediggers wait. Meanwhile, Danny and Jeff are flying their passenger plane but something strange happens– there’s a flying saucer out their window.
We see the cooking-pot-lid-looking saucer descend over the cemetery as the gravediggers fill in the hole. The two men encounter a creepy looking woman who doesn’t speak. They scream.
The dead woman’s husband leaves his house and looks sad. He picks one of his wife’s flowers. He then gets hit by a car offscreen and dies. His dead wife, the woman from the cemetery, watches him die.
The police come to the cemetery to investigate the mess. The gravediggers have been torn apart.
At Jeff’s house, he talks about the flying saucer to his wife. He’s been sworn to secrecy about it. Then it comes back and flies right over their house toward the cemetery. All the police fall down for a minute, but the sad old dead man from earlier rises from the grave as a cloaked “ghoul man” and follows Inspector Clay. The ghoul man and vampire woman attack Clay.
The police have an immediate funeral for Clay. The vampire woman stands there watching. Not long after, more saucers appear over Hollywood, and everyone sees them. The military shoots at them, and although they can’t hit them, the saucers do fly away. The colonel wonders who they are and what they want.
Meanwhile, on the mothership, the alien captain reports. They haven’t had much luck with the Earth creatures, so they want to use Plan 9, resurrection of the dead. “We have risen two so far; we’ll be just as successful with more.” The commander approves the use of Plan 9.
Jeff and his wife try some dramatic acting, but then the saucer flies over again. That night, after Jeff leaves for work, the ghoul man chases after his wife Paula. She runs outside to the cemetery just as Inspector Clay climbs out of his grave.
The saucers land, and the dead people come to the ship for orders. The police are still wandering in the cemetery and they notice that Clay’s grave is now empty as well.
The general talks to the colonel about their previous attempts to contact the aliens. The general plays the translated audio recordings from Eros, one of the spacemen. They don’t want to conquer Earth; they want to save it. Still, humans are dangerous and stupid, and they might change their minds. Colonel Edwards is ordered to contact the aliens and find out what they want.
Up on the mothership, the commander tells off Eros. The plan is not going well; so far, there are only three resurrected dead. Clay comes in, something goes wrong, and the dead man almost kills Eros. The commander insists that they deactivate the oldest dead man.
The colonel goes to see Jeff and Paula. They all hear something out there as the old man walks past the cop outside. He approaches the group, and Lieutenant Harper shoots him. Just then, the aliens turn off their beam and the old man becomes a skeleton.
Eros opens the spaceship door and lets Jeff, the colonel, and the police lieutenant inside. Tanna asks Eros, ”Do we have to kill them?” Jeff talks to Eros, “You fiend!” Eros explains that they came with friendly intentions, but the governments of Earth won’t even acknowledge that they exist. Earthmen have minds that always develop bigger and bigger weapons. Eros just calls him “Stupid!” repeatedly. There’s a whole monologue about making sunlight explode, which is much worse than the nuclear bombs. Since sunlight goes everywhere, they can destroy every world in the universe.
Jeff attacks Eros, and things get crazy aboard the ship. The ship is on fire, and the Earthmen get out. The flaming ship takes off and explodes with Eros and Tanna on board. Clay turns to skeleton, and they all assume the vampire woman has died as well.
Criswell reappears and asks “Can you prove it didn’t happen?”
Commentary
There’s no blood, no gore, and very little acting here. It’s obviously just a bunch of scenes stitched together to make a loose story. Bela Lugosi died after filming maybe two minutes of stuff, but since he was their big star, they used the footage anyway, only they substituted a man hiding his face with a cloak for some scenes.
The narration by Criswell is just atrocious and over-melodramatic. He wrote it himself because he found Ed Wood’s script too boring. It’s just so over the top as to be cringeworthy. The rest of the dialogue really is just as bad.
Actually, it’s not all that awful. If this were released today, it’d be a fun, straight-to-streaming, low-budget movie. The only reason this is really considered so awful is in comparison to the studio-based films of that age. There are a lot of recent streaming films that are far worse.
Still, it’s hilariously cringey in places.