This time it's just Plan 9, but you get the idea...

I watched the trailer for the remake of Plan 9 from Outer Space, if only because I wrote about what a ridiculous idea it seemed like in the waning days of the blogorium at Myspace.

After watching the trailer, I'm pretty sure my snap judgment was spot on. But don't take my word for it, watch it yourself:

Plan 9 Teaser Trailer from Darkstone Entertainment on Vimeo.

at the time, the Cap'n said:

So maybe this is exactly what Plan 9 from Outer Space needs to be in order not to be the punching bag it has been for the last 50 years. There's only one problem, really: no one was ever asking for a "serious" take on Plan 9 from Outer Space.

There are (literally) hundreds of awful to unwatchable movies released every year, so it takes a special kind of bad to make history. Ed Wood has the distinction of at least three movies so bad they transcend the crap you can find in cut out bins everywhere.Along with Plan 9, I'd put Bride of the Monster and Glen... Or Glenda? in that category. Why? Because Wood brought a special kind of ineptitude to his films.

There's a sense of trying for epic scope and "spectacle" in the story and failing on every possible level. Plan 9 from Outer Space is the culmination of this, where Wood finally captures lightning in a bottle for all the wrong reasons.It isn't just the pie-tin UFO's with visible strings, or the amateur acting and cardboard sets. It's also the stock footage of Bela Lugosi and his "looks nothing like him" double, the boneheaded narration; everything you saw in Tim Burton's Ed Wood about Plan 9 is true, and yet, it's compellingly bad.

Strip all of that away, and try to make a serious story about aliens coming to Earth and raising the dead in order to conquer humanity, and you have every zombie movie ever, but with UFO's. It's kind of like saying "Ghoulies would be better if we just got rid of the stupid jokes and made it a straight horror movie"; the premise just doesn't float.

Now I don't know about you folks, but when I watched that trailer, there was nothing that said "This is Plan 9 from Outer Space", aside from the lifted audio from the original film. The only thing I saw was another low budgeted zombie movie and some kind of space rock thing near the very end.

Apparently the latest attempt to sell this movie is to say that Plan 9 from Outer Space was one of the first "zombie" movies, although you could really debate that. Yes, technically the aliens are raising the dead to attack the police, but I don't recall Vampira, Tor Johnson, or Bela Lugosi's stand-in doing much more than rigidly walking around and grabbing people.

But okay, let's accept the premise that this Plan 9 from Outer Space is a zombie movie. A serious, not campy zombie movie with some aliens that is "character driven", as the film's website insists Plan 9 will be. I ask again, does anybody want to see that? I don't honestly know how many people actually watch the Ed Wood original (most probably just watch Ed Wood), but I can't think of any of you that would be interested in that. It's like Tommy Wiseau deciding that he should remake Beastmaster, but this time remove any of the accidentally campy elements and take everything seriously. I mean, the last time I checked, those were the reasons I watch Beastmaster.

Actually, Tommy Wiseau, if you're still reading this blog: please remake Beastmaster. Please.