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Public Domain from Outer Space
Black_by_Pubic_Deman writes "It is a work of art that truly represents the nadir of film making; a movie so bad that it's good. It has been labelled 'The Worst Movie Ever' by the Golden Turkey Awards and is also the winner of two notable Razzies. Ed Wood's classic and every Slashdot reader's favorite movie Plan 9 from Outer Space is now in the Public Domain and available as a free download thanks to the fine folks over at Archive.org."
...Gayniggers from Outer Space?
Anyways, it couldn't be any worse than Battlefield Earth, could it? Or am I about to have to give up my geek card?
Now, if it is as bad as you say, there should be an MST3K of it somewhere. THAT I would like to see.
#define CLUE 0
True, and often it's not the money. I'd gladly give $1 to have the movie here and now. But it's the overhead. Register, confirm by email, give details, enter billing information, confirm, etc, etc. Purchasing registration of a program online takes half a hour. Downloading a crack takes 5 minutes. It's not about the price in money, it's about the price in your time and effort the sellers demand.
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I see everyone claiming this movie is in the public domain, but I don't see any evidence that it really IS. Just how did this copyrighted work become no-longer copyrighted? AFAIK it's not old enough for the copyright to have expired.
On another note, I don't think this movie truly qualifies as bad. Sure it's crap, but is it bad? I remember an interesting film essay that said for a movie to be truly bad, it had to have a grand concept that was so arrogant or so ham-handedly executed that it turned on itself and became bad. Sort of hard to explain the whole essay in a couple of sentences, but to give you an example of the movies considered truly bad, he used the examples of "Pay It Forward" and "Grand Canyon."
Now to me, nothing surpasses the horror of what I consider the worst film ever made, by Robert Altman, starring Karen Black, Cher, Sandy Dennis, and Kathy Bates.. that horror is: "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean." This film even fulfills that essayist's ideas, the concept is "high theatre" (it's a film of a 1-room 1 act broadway play) and it is so stridently, shriekingly feminist that it is like being trapped in a room for two hours with a bunch of suicidal women that just won't shut up.
I'm getting good speeds from their FTP.
Everyone talks about Ed Wood, Jr. being a totally incompetent filmmaker, but that is incorrect. Wood was selectively incompetent, which is far more interesting.
Genuinely incompetent films are incomprehensible; they're so badly written, filmed, lit, recorded, and edited you can't tell what's supposed to be happening moment to moment. They're dull. Ed Wood's films are interesting because he so weirdly mixes okay technical competence -- in the sense that you can follow the storytelling from scene to scene, because he tells it with acceptable narrative cohesion -- with utterly whacked-out, surreally incompetent plotting. He couches nonsensical ideas in the most portentous yet tone-deaf language. He displays a glorious ignorance of taste -- not "bad taste" in the too-conscious John-Waters sense, but a genuine vacuity of any informed sensibility at all.
Ed Wood is, in fact, an interesting filmmaker. This is true. If you've ever sat with an audience watching Glen or Glenda?, they stay all the way through, and the final scene has them cheering. Wood disastrously fails to engage his audience on the emotional level he intended, but he nonetheless engages them. A genuine incompetent couldn't do this.
I think Ed Wood is a telling case study that illuminates what we really mean when we talk about "genius."
Theoretically, anyone could play it if they replaced the music (or cut the scenes which contain copyrighted music.)
How hard would it be to remove the music from the sound track of It's a Wonderful Life and leave the dialogue and foley? Then you could have a Creative Commons contest for best film score, much as one of the old movie channels (TCM? AMC?) is having for silent films.
Unfortunately, archive.org seems to be slashdotted at the moment, so I can't figure out what I really want to know -- How is it that this film is now in the public domain? Are there people that keep track of this sort of thing?
not really appropriate to this discussion... but... at the same time it is... i love old movies and i love archive.org, but there is something very lacking in the world today... i grayscale video codec! what's the deal?
You are deluding yourself if you believe that the Plan 9 licence is the reason nobody uses it.
The real problem with Plan 9 is that it's a pile of experimental early-90s tech that's never appealed to anyone enough to build a business model around.
Unless Bell Labs moves to Canada, no real way to get around this considering they are distributing crypto stuff.
My wife and I are big fans of MST3K, and we kept hearing how Manos was a classic episode because of how bad the movie was. Well, we were disappointed at the MST3K's performance in this one. We think it was because the movie was TOO bad. There was not enough story in the movie for making jokes. The main problem was that incredibly long travelogue near the start of the movie. There were only so many jokes that could be made about watching someone drive down the road.
Some better treatments by the MST3K crew:
Maybe those movies were not as intrinsically bad as Manos, but the provided much more joke material.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
I don't know if Plan 9 is truly the worst movie ever. I have to agree with the MST3K crew that there are several others even worse, like Manos.
What I hear is that 'Manos' - The Hand of Faith is scoring below its level because of MST3K. One reviewer in IMDb claims that the MST3K version was hevily edited so the movie appears worse than it is. Is he right? I don't know, and will never find out as I have no intention to watch two different versions of a crappy movie.
Anyway, the point remains: people should undeline that they are speaking of "MST3K: 'Manos' - The Hand of Faith" not "'Manos' - The Hand of Faith". Thay are two different movies like "Blade Runner" and "Blade Runner - Director's Cut" are two different movies.