I love watching strange science fiction movies from the fifties and sixties, especially the B+ movies with outlandish costuming, strange set design, and bizarre characters. Ed Woods’ Plan 9 from Outer Space delivered all those in spades, along with genre confusion (we have aliens, but let’s add some vampires, too!), transparent physical effects, and some of the worst line deliveries in human history. For those who have somehow missed this cinematic misasterpiece, the movie involves a group of aliens attempting to contact the Earth to tell them not to weaponize a new element, because it will lead to the entire universe blowing up. Because Earthers don’t seem to be hearing their messages, the aliens are now resurrecting the dead to force Earth governments to acknowledge them. Plan 9 from Outer Space is Bret Nelson’s attempt to turn the convoluted plot into a coherent story, while at the same time papering over the movie’s visual inconsistencies and general weirdness. To this end, he’s largely successful, though given the raw materials there’s not a great deal he could do. This book is aimed at fans of the movie, who love its campy awfulness and who will take special pleasure in spotting the parts of the novel that are doing their damnest to make the story work. The stilted dialogue between the aliens and humans, for instance, is explained by the fact that there are multiple layers of translation involved, and that the human translation machine is a rickety prototype: similarly, dramatic changes in the time of day between scenes is handwaved by characters losing track of time, or things simply becoming mysteriously darker in the presence of an alien spacecraft. This isn’t a real explanation, more of a handwave, but if this story were completely rewritten to be sensible, it wouldn’t be fun at all. Of course, the switch in mediums does some work by itself: human dialogue that sounds dreadful on screen because of its delivery can be prettied up in the mind of the reader: in our heads, the intonation and cadence are up to us! I enjoyed Nelson’s treatment of Plan 9: it covers up some of the worst seams of the original while not completely transforming it into something unrecognizable. I would definitely recommend watching the movie first to most appreciate Nelson’s glow-up work.

Disclosure: I was provided a copy of this via Booksirens in exchange for a fair review. The book will be released in October. Will you be prepared for…..Grave Robbers from Outer Space?!

Related:
Before Plan 9: Plans 1-8 from Outer Space, various authors