October is here meaning Halloween is just around the corner, and this month on Movie Matinee we figured we’d get you in the spirit of the holiday by presenting a Monstrous collection of trailers and clips gleaned from the internet. Rather than test your patience and embed the entire feature in these entries, I’ll offer the trailers and provide links to where you’ll be able to view or download most of these movies for free.
So follow me to the fright flicks if you dare!
Edward D. Wood, Jr., via Wikimedia Commons
Thanks to the Medved brothers’ Golden Turkey Awards and the subsequent Tim Burton movie, Ed Wood had more fame and acclaim in death than he ever had in life. His crowning achievement in film is Plan 9 From Outer Space. If you can get past the amateur acting and the bizarre dialogue, you’ll get to plot of the movie. Humanoid extraterrestrials arrive on Earth to test a scheme for conquest known as Plan 9. Plan 9 involves a ray that will reanimate corpses thus creating a remote control zombie army. The zombies will sweep the globe, and once it’s swept clean of resistance, the aliens will shut off the ray de-animating the zombie army and set up house on the newly emptied Earth. It’s a great, Trojan Horse sort of plan. The soldiers are already situated behind enemy lines. Zombie armies are cheap. They don’t complain, and zombies in the 1950s didn’t eat much. Certainly less expensive than building and shipping an army of robots. Just haul the ray to the planet of your choice; raise the dead and sit back and wait for the zombies to clean house.
Well, it would have worked if the aliens had their crap together, and the people of Earth weren’t so darn stubborn.
Less well remembered, but a movie in the same vein as Plan 9 with a number of similar plot points is Invisible Invaders which also came out in 1959. Invisible Invaders also had alien invaders with a plan for reanimating the dead, but unlike the numb-nuts from outer space in Plan 9, the Invisible Invaders succeed. They create a zombie army of fifth columnists in every country that sabotage and kill. The living are being routed by the living dead. Scientists go into hiding in secret bases trying to devise a plan to get out of this zombie jam.
Although Invisible Invaders is not a great movie, it had the advantage over Plan 9 of a better script, better actors and a budget that Ed Wood could only dream of.
You can see how Invisible Invaders with its army of shambling, well-dressed corpses may have influenced George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I remember seeing Invaders as a little kid, and it scared the crap out of me. That’s probably why I always remembered it.
You can watch or download Plan 9 From Outer Space for free HERE on the Internet Archive.
Sadly, Invisible Invaders is not available for free, but it is available on Netflix’s streaming service, and it’s worth a look.
Xenomorphs and zombies – two great tastes that taste great together!
Note to Hollywood:
With so many ill-advised remakes of classics being rushed into production, why not consider remaking these? Remaking a classic is a bad idea. Why not remake a bad and/or forgotten film. In a lot of cases, the material can only be improved upon.
