PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (Wood, 1959)

So somehow I went to see GWAR and only got one splotch of the good red stuff on me. What the fuck is up with that. But regardless, it was a great night, all set to a mixtape including "The Number of the Beast", "Friday the 13th Part 2" by Frightmare, and "Thriller". I got extremely drunk in the car ride there and when we stopped on the PA turnpike for an ATM tap, I drank a shot of Cabo Wabo in a turnpike stall. While in there, I discovered that some dastardly kids had taped a Chick Tract up in the stall, so I ripped it off and then proceeded to tear hate literature down from the rest of the stall doors. The enterprising little bastards thought they covered the entire truckstop, but I showed them, didn't I? There was a group standing outside around a couple of vans who had the awkward teenaged boringness that suggested they were a youth group going on a retreat for the weekend, so we theorized that it was them who put the tracts up. We drove by them blasting "Angel of Death" and Brossman screeched like a banshee into the night air. Anyway, the Red Chord fucking blazed. Third time seeing them live and fuckin' A they rule. GWAR of course brought down the house by beheading George Bush and doing all sorts of unspeakable acts upon that stage. Municipal Waste we missed.

Oh, but the movie. We hit the bar when we got home and did a bunch of shots, then hung out with some cats for a while before heading home. Brandie and I watched this drunk on Rob Zombie's TCM underground thing, which was actually really cool. Anytime you get Roger Corman and Sid Haig on TV talking about campy horror flicks is a good time. PLAN 9 I have on DVD but watching it on a late night shlock show seemed like the best way to experience it for the first time. But like I said...really, really fucking drunk. I seem to remember something about vampires from outer space? There were swaying tombstones, too, right? And Bela Lugosi is replaced mid-scene and you're not supposed to notice or something. Again, really drunk. But something tells me that a sober viewing of this wouldn't be much more coherent than the hazy one I had, huh?

You know, Ed Wood was deliciously inept as a filmmaker, but there is a campy energy and fucking fun in his pictures that's oh-so-absent in modern horror cinema. The differences between Uwe Boll and Ed Wood are: one, that Wood worked on shoestring budgets and had to use imagination to create his pictures, whereas Boll scams government funding and has modern effects to fall back on; and, more importantly, two, that Wood's films have a completely fun nature alive inside of them, whereas Boll indulges in non-sense like boxing net geek critics and saying things like his next movie (gasp, not a video game adaptation) will redefine the horror genre in terms of extreme gore. Yes, that sentence did just have both a colon and a semi-colon in it.

The point is, the world (not just the horror world, but the World world) needs more Ed Woods and less Uwe Bolls.

(Real analysis tomorrow, I promise. I need something meaty to sink my teeth into. It'll be fun.)