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."

Comments

Ed Wood redefines "genius"

[Allen Varney]

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."

We need a new CC score for IAWL

[tepples]

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.

Re:Glen or Glenda

[stwrtpj]

I have to agree with the MST3K crew that there are several others even worse, like Manos.

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:

• The Thing That Couldn't Die
• I Was A Teenage Werewolf
• Prince Of Space
• Invasion of the Neptune Men

Maybe those movies were not as intrinsically bad as Manos, but the provided much more joke material.