Film / Plan 9 from Outer Space

Can you prove it didn't happen?

"Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown... the mysterious. The unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you, the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are bringing you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimony, of the miserable souls, who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places. My friend, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?"

— Criswell, opening lines^note Note that this is billed as "Criswell Predicts", and he doesn't predict anything.

Before there was The Room, Troll 2, Birdemic, the collected works of Uwe Boll, Battlefield Earth, or even Manos: The Hands of Fate, this was the golden standard in bad filmmaking.

Plan 9 from Outer Space is a 1959 American black-and-white science fiction horror film written, produced, directed and edited by Ed Wood that was to change the world irrevocably, resurrect Bela Lugosi's ailing film career and be known forever as the greatest motion picture of all time. As it turned out however, Bela Lugosi was dead and Ed Wood was a man of unlimited drive and determination but absolutely no talent as a writer or director, so much so that the end product he made is often considered the worst movie of all time. But hey — in this case, one out of three ain't bad.

A classic tale of Human Aliens creating a Zombie Apocalypse via administering "long distance electrodes shot into the pineal and pituitary gland of the recent dead". The police department investigate the mysterious rising of a dead old man (played alternately by Bela Lugosi and a much taller, younger man pretending to be Bela Lugosi by holding a cape over his face), his suspiciously young wife and Police Inspector Clay, who's "a big boy now, Johnny". Meanwhile, "army brass" battles the aliens with a combination of Stock Footage of artillery and impressive looking-through-binoculars in front of a curtain, only to reveal that the aliens have sent them messages that are often cut off by "atmospheric conditions in outer space".

The aliens land and meet with the police, the pilot and an army colonel and belittle the humans for their "stupid minds! Stupid, stupid!" The head alien, Eros, explains that humanity will "stumble across" a way to explode particles of sunlight, thus eventually destroying the universe. The movie climaxes with a fight between Eros and the pilot, followed by the spaceship taking off and exploding in mid air, leaving the reanimated corpses as skeletons. As they leave, Criswell says:

My friend, you have seen this incident based on sworn testimony. Can you prove that it didn't happen? Perhaps on your way home, you will pass someone in the dark, and you will never know it, for they will be from outer space. Many scientists believe that another world is watching us this moment. We once laughed at the horseless carriage, the aeroplane, the telephone, the electric light, vitamins, radio, and even television! And now some of us laugh at outer space. God help us... in the future.

Every year, at the 24-hour film festival known as B-Fest, this movie is screened at midnight. There are a set of Audience Participation actions a la The Rocky Horror Picture Show that are performed with the film (yelling "DAY!" for day shots, "NIGHT!" for night shots, "NOT BELA!" for Bela's replacement, "BANG" whenever someone displays poor firearm safety, etc.).

Strangely, despite the sort of So Bad, It's Good kitsch the show usually reveled in, this movie was never riffed on by Mystery Science Theater 3000. (There is a RiffTrax of it, though, and they chose it for the first of what became a series of live shows.) Perhaps that's because it didn't really need the help...

Although the film's copyright was eventually registered in 1981 and renewed in 1986, its renewal is considered invalid. You can check the film out in Wikimedia Commons and decide for yourself if this movie deserves its reputation.

Monster Pictures released a Direct-to-DVD remake in 2015 called "Plan 9", with the film taking place in the town of Nilbog.

Due to Small Reference Pools, Plan 9 from Outer Space is frequently used as a shorthand for "really bad movie", especially by film critics. For example, a movie review might read "[Good movie] is Plan 9 compared to [excellent movie]."

Contrast with Citizen Kane, which is often considered the greatest movie of all time by film scholars (though Tim Burton actually dared to compare Plan 9 with Touch of Evil in Ed Wood^note To be fair, he was comparing the same moviemaking difficulties, such as producer-enforced casting decisions.). Not to be confused with the Konami Adventure Game based on the movie. If you're looking for the webcomic about a rock band called Plan9, who named themselves after this film, go here.

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Examples:

• 1-Dimensional Thinking: The reason Detective Clay died.
• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: "I have neeeed for your other ships elsewhere."
• Affably Evil: The Ruler is quite polite and well spoken whilst plotting against Earth. He also laments the actions his people are taking against Earth, but believes that he has no choice after their initially peaceful attempts to reach out were ignored.
• Alien Geometries:
  • Characters go a certain direction, decide to backtrack for no reason and STILL end up in a different location than where they started.
  • Jeff describes the Flying Saucer as "shaped like a huge cigar". One might assume that when this scene was shot, the effects work wasn't done yet so it wasn't clear what the ships were going to look like, but then again, he had already referred to the ship as a "saucer" in that very scene.
  • Later, when the ship is landed — and thus, part of the set, rather than a saucer on a string — it has square corners somehow.
• Alien Invasion: A variation, as the aliens use zombified human corpses to do their dirty work.
• America Saves the Day: Toy flying saucers menacing your world? Defeat it with some California townsfolk and military stock footage. Said saucers only menaced one military company for all of five minutes and seemed most interested in screwing with one specific cemetery in one California town. You can't blame the rest of the world for not wanting to get involved.
• Artistic License – Gun Safety: Lieutenant Harper may have the worst trigger discipline in cinematic history. What makes it especially hilarious is that the actor playing him did this on purpose, up to and including scratching his own head with the barrel just to see if Wood would notice (he either did not notice or, more likely, did not care.)
• Artistic License – Law: As the unarmed not-Lugosi slowly walks up to an officer, the cop panics and opens fire — he skips over the non-lethal options entirely, which would land him in serious trouble in normal circumstances. Since Clay is later taken out with a hit to the head, it's likely this was done to not reveal the undead have glass jaws.
• Artistic License – Nuclear Physics:
  • It says something about the film's grasp of physics that Eros's claim that an H-bomb works by "exploding the very air itself" is probably the least serious science goof on offer.
  • Eros asks, "Can you see or measure an atom?" The answer is yes, Eros. We have already — we are trying to detect quantum particles these days.
  • We are told that the Solaranite bomb works by causing sunlight to explode. For anyone who doesn't understand why this is so absurd, an explosion is essentially just the rapid transformation (and release) of matter into energy; sunlight is already a form of energy (which is why a nuclear explosion releases a blinding flash of light in the first place). It is essentially the same as having a James Bond film where the bad guy's evil plan is to freeze the Antarctic, and everyone treating this as a serious threat.
  • The plot mentions "sunlight molecules", instead of photons.
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • "Atmospheric conditions in outer space"
  • "A ray of sunlight is made up of many atoms!" No, it really isn't. Sunlight is made up of photons, elementary particles consisting of waves of electromagnetic radiation. Some of these photons are in the wavelengths of visible light (2 to 2.75 eV), giving us daylight, while other, high-energy photons are in the wavelengths of UV radiation (3 to 124 eV), which causes sunburns and skin cancer. It also contains some infrared, which is non-ionizing. Even in 1959, photons were known and understood to exist.
• Aspect Ratio Switch: Unintentionally. The film has never been released on video in its proper 1.85:1 aspect ratio, due to the fact that Ed Wood failed to realize neither the glut of 1940s stock footage he incorporated or the Lugosi scenes he shot himself, were framed for widescreen (they actually predate widescreen). As a result, when the film screened theatrically, the stock footage was horribly cropped. Of course, the 1.33:1 ratio used on home video instead means we see more than Wood intended to, like the infamous Visible Boom Mic and various prop edges.
  • Turner Classic Movies has since produced a fully restored print in the original 1.85:1 ratio, with the stock footage elements slightly reframed to fit better.
• Author Appeal: Angora makes its usual appearance.
• Benevolent Alien Invasion: Downplayed; the aliens are not evil, they come to earth to warn humans not to abuse the "solaranite" which could destroy the whole universe. Their methods of doing so, however, are... questionable. Ultimately, it's very hard to say whether Wood intended them to be in the right or not.
• B-Movie: And how!
• Big Bad: Eros, a Well-Intentioned Extremist alien setting zombies on humans to prevent a sunlight bomb.
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head: The aliens try to reason with us Earth people, but quickly become angered, saying we have "Stupid minds! Stupid, stupid!" That'll teach us!
• Camp Gay: The alien leader, played by Bunny Breckinridge, who was in fact openly gay - though today would probably have identified as a trans woman.
  • Camp Straight: Dudley Manlove, who plays Eros, was heterosexual as far as we know, but his performance here is extremely camp. Being named "Manlove" doesn't help.
• Can't Argue with Aliens: Mostly just because they suck at arguing. "No, you hold on!"
• Captain Obvious: Done many, many times throughout, and it is probably the least of this movie's problems!
  "Inspector Clay is dead... murdered. And somebody is responsible!"
  "Visits? Well, that would indicate visitors!"^note Spoken by a character who was wearing US Army Captain's bars, making him a LITERAL Captain Obvious.
  "...and they attacked a town. Not a large town, I must admit, but a town of people: people who died!"
  "Future events such as these will affect you in the future."
• Clown-Car Grave: We can see a lot of people walking out of a very small crypt that only seems to have place for one person.
• Cold Ham: John "Bunny" Breckinridge nails this rare combination as The Ruler. Even though he never raises his voice, he sure talks like a ruler.
• Covers Always Lie: The alien wearing a Fishbowl Helmet on the theatrical release poster — who, oddly enough, appears to have been modelled after Ed Wood himself rather than any of the three actors who play aliens in the actual film — doesn't appear anywhere in the film itself. Likewise, it's the zombie version of Inspector Clay who goes out of control and attacks Eros, rather than the Old Man, and Vampira's dress in the film isn't quite as stripperiffic as the poster implies.
• Creator Cameo: Ed Wood as the No More for Me guy, he is also the man holding the newspaper screaming about flying saucers.
• Cute, but Cacophonic: Mrs. Trent is quite pretty, but she has a rather shrill, nasal voice and she spends most of her scenes in the second and third act screaming her head off, even fainting twice. The most noticeable moment is after they have all gathered in the cemetery to inspect the noises and flashes of light and the men want to leave her in the car, she says, "and stay here all alone?" and you can truly hear how nasal her voice happens to be.
• Damsel in Distress: Mrs. Trent winds up menaced twice; the first time by the old man zombie (Bela's character) wandering into her home after she didn't think to lock the side door and later again in the third act when the men have gone to the cemetery to inspect the noise and flashes of light, and Clay as a zombie kidnaps her after, uh, dispatching the cop left behind to watch her. She is eventually rescued by the two cops who come looking for answers as well in the cemetery.
• Dead Star Walking: Literallyinvoked with Bela Lugosi's character.
• Decoy Protagonist: After the opening narration and credits, we start out at the funeral where Bela Lugosi's character mourns for his wife. While he has no lines, the narration is focused on him, and very shortly afterwards his wife is has been raised from the dead. This could give the impression that this man will be our protagonist facing the previously mentioned grave robbers from outer space, who have taken control of his wife's corpse, creating the opportunity for him to come to terms with his grief while technically facing off against the spouse he's lost. Then in the very next scene, he's hit by a car offscreen before he's even said a line. And then after that he joins his wife as another zombie henchman for the villains.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Damn near everything Criswell says. "Future events such as these will affect you... in the future," among many others.
• Double Think: The aliens come in peace — they just want to reveal themselves to the world by storming world capitals with their undead army. To ensure this works out, anyone who finds out aliens exist has to be eliminated.
• Dull Surprise: Everyone, all the time, in the most utterly hilarious of ways. (Except for Criswell and Eros, who are the exact opposite.)
  (The cloaked man is hit by a beam of light from the aliens' ship that causes him to collapse. When the general lifts his cloak, those present discover that the cloaked man has been reduced to just a skeleton)
  General: What do you make of that?
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: An alien comes to Earth to explain that, since Humans Are Bastards, they will not stop at atom bombs and hydrogen bombs, and will soon produce the solaronite bomb, which, by exploding sunlight and everything it touches, will create a chain reaction destroying the universe.
• Ensemble Cast: The film frequently shifts perspectives to different parties with no one person who can truly fit the bill of being the central character. Jeff Trent is seemingly intended to be our leading man, but he only even gets involved in the plot in the last act.
• Explosive Instrumentation: The aliens set their ship on fire by pulling out a console to use as a club.
• Everything's Deader with Zombies: Zombies that tend to resemble vampires...?
• Failed a Spot Check: A character says "it's getting dark" when it's already pitch black in the cemetery.
• Fake Shemp: One of the most notorious and badly done examples of this trope in the history of film. Bela Lugosi is replaced by a taller and very obvious double (Tom Mason, the chiropractor of Wood's wife) that does not resemble him in any way.
• Fantastic Racism: The aliens view the "earth people" as violent, headstrong, and STUPID, STUPID! ...Though to be fair, the humans in the film do a pretty good job of supporting that view.
• Faux Affably Evil: Eros initially seems to just be putting Plan 9 into play for the good of the universe. And while that may be true, by the climax he shows himself to be a hypocritical, narcissistic, sexist, whining jerk who's seemingly enjoying his actions.
• Fauxlosophic Narration: Criswell's narration throughout.
• Flying Saucer: Not hubcaps-on-strings as is commonly thought; they were, in fact, toys.
  • Though they are plainly saucers, and referred to as such throughout the film, the pilot refers to it as "shaped like a huge cigar," which is another common description of UFOs. Mike Nelson clarifies that it was "A saucer-shaped cigar."
  • And then when they land they have right angles, like a shed.
• George Lucas Altered Version: When the colorized version was produced, the makers of the colorization had a contest where two separate winners got a picture of them added to a scene in the pilot's wife's bedroom, and the other winner got their name added to the headstone seen in the closeup when Inspector Clay is found dead.
• Government Conspiracy: The higher-ups know that aliens are here and are keeping it secret, to the point of somehow covering up the destruction of an entire (admittedly small) town.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Ruler of the aliens. He gives Eros a few orders, but otherwise stays on the sidelines throughout the action, letting his underlings go off on their plan and never interacting with the good guys.
• Handwave: The bizarre setup in which the Old Man is interred in a crypt while his beloved wife is buried away from him is explained as "a family tradition".
• Have a Gay Old Time:
  Soldier: Looks like we've beat them off again, sir.
  Captain: Who are they? Where do they come from? Where are they going?
  • A co-pilot invites the stewardess to "ball it up" in Albuquerque. The intended context is to go to a ball, but Ed Wood's dialog has always had sexual undertones, so perhaps subconsciously...
• Hollywood Darkness: Done erratically, to the point day switches to night and vice versa from shot to shot.
• Human Aliens: Gratuitous with this. All the "alien" antagonists look as human as the rest of the cast.
• Humans Are Morons: Eros comes to this conclusion after he met our heroes.
  Eros: Because all you of earth are idiots!
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: The humans respond to Eros's warnings about the dangers of creating a "solaranite bomb" by starting a fight and destroying his space ship.
• Idiot Ball: Practically everyone:
  • Eros has it the worst, though. For one thing, he spends the entire movie trying to deviously prevent the humans from noticing him, while simultaneously getting frustrated to the point of throwing hissy-fits over the fact that the humans aren't paying attention to him. Also, his plan to destroy all of human civilization was apparently to use three zombies, possibly hoping that they would scare people to death.
  • If it were possible to ignite photons so they become a Weapon of Mass Destruction, Eros would be better off giving humans the secret of Solaranite. After all, if the humans use it, they'll die in eight minutes, while the force of the blast will take at least 4 years to get to Alpha Centauri, and probably thousands of years to reach other habitable planets. By that time, the light could probably be diffused by then.
• Informed Ability: The advanced nature of the aliens. The humans admit that they're "far ahead of us" as their spaceship screams flaming and exploding through the sky, thanks to their own stupidity.
• Insufficiently Advanced Alien: The aliens have the ability to travel light years through space to arrive at Earth. Their plan to wipe out humanity is to resurrect the dead and have them attack the living humans. Over the course of the movie, they only succeed in resurrecting 3 humans, so it's unclear how they plan to wipe out humanity without enacting this plan on a grand scale, which they don't seem to be capable of doing. Moreover, the aliens themselves act very childish, shouting about humans' "stupid, stupid minds!" In the end, the alien agents assigned to this operation are defeated by three armed men.
• It's Always Sunny at Funerals: The opening scene, with the wife of the old man (Bela Lugosi) being buried.
• Juggling Loaded Guns: The actor playing Lieutenant Harper purposely pointed at things (including his own head!) with his revolver to see if Ed Wood would reshoot the scenes. It's Ed Wood, of course he didn't.
• Just Plane Wrong: the movie is infamous for its inept portrayal of airline pilots at work.
  • The "cockpit" is a laughably obvious set. There are no realistic flight instruments or controls, the pilots sit on boxes rather than proper chairs, and they use Army-surplus chest microphones that bear no resemblance to actual aircraft radio equipment.
  • Exterior shots show a Douglas DC-6B or DC-7 airliner, which required a flight engineer for safe operation, but this flight crew member is nowhere in evidence.
• Large-Ham Announcer: The short narration by The Amazing Criswell.
• Left It In: The actor playing Mr. Trent blows his line while revealing to his wife that he saw a flying saucer. The line is supposed to be, "they're here, that's fact" but he says "they here" instead, but he was not asked to do the line over so the mistake made the final cut of the film.
• Lonely Funeral: The old man played by Bela Lugosi attends one for his wife at the start of the film. This is one of the few times Ed Wood's low budget helped a scene, as the low attendance helps emphasize the old man's loss.
• Manchild: Eros. He whines, pouts, and blurts out childish retorts like "No, you hold on!" or "You see?! Your stupid minds! Stupid! STUPID!" One wonders if Tanna is actually his nanny, not his second-in-command.
• May–December Romance: The old man played by Bela Lugosi who was 73 (in the footage he's actually in) and his wife Vampira who was 35 at the time!
• Missing Steps Plan: Apparently Plan 9 goes "Step one: raise three zombies, two of whom think they're vampires, in a small town. Step two: ???? Step three: global humanity discovers aliens exist. Step Four: ???? Step Five: Humans don't destroy the universe."
• Mondegreen: When Mr. Trent is saying goodbye to Mrs. Trent before he's off on his next flight, he likely says, "you know, I do love you, darling" but since the actor doesn't really open his mouth and enunciate and he says the words fairly fast, the Rifftrax guys heard the line as "I'm gon' do Lovey Town" instead. They're not wrong; the line is extremely hard to understand since he basically murmurs it and the boom mic or mic he was possibly wearing does not pick the sound up properly, resulting in unintentional hilarity.
• No More for Me: Played straight.
• No, You:
  Jeff: Now you just hold on, Buster.
  Eros: No, you hold on.
• Nominal Hero: Despite being clearly set up as the main hero, it's not until the last twenty minutes that Jeff Trent does anything with any impact on the plot, and even then, only because a zombie showed up at his house, and then another one kidnapped his wife. If anything, Lt. Harper is probably the nearest thing the film has to an actual protagonist, and even he doesn't do much more than walk around stating the obvious, complaining about the weird situation he's in, and scratching himself with his gun.
• Noodle Incident: The other eight plans. Col. Edwards does mention a previous incident of an alien attack on a small town that was covered up, then goes on to imply that certain natural disasters may have extraterrestrial origins.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: Tor Johnson, as the curiously Swedish-accented Inspector Clay.
  • Only under the direction of the director, which was a common theme among Tor's speaking roles in movies. In reality, he was also a businessman who eventually lost most, if not all, of his accent.
• Oddly Small Organization: The entire alien fleet? Three aliens ships with, seemingly, three or four aliens inside. And the titular plan only succeeds in creating a mere three zombies.
• Offscreen Crash: The explanation for the "old man" dying. Note that the old man's standing shadow is clearly visible and stationary when he's supposed to be getting hit by a car, not to mention that the trees blowing in the wind suddenly freeze.
  (the scene cuts from the old man screaming to an ambulance racing by, with no sound effect indicating a car crash)
• Off-the-Shelf FX: One of the most infamous aspects of this movie; you could practically make a drinking game out of it. The gravestones are clearly cardboard, the UFOs are toys on strings, and so much more.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. David DeMering as Danny in addition to Tor Johnson as Inspector Daniel Clay.
• Our Zombies Are Different: These are corpses made into murderous automatons by alien science. They have no intelligence, not even to differentiate friend from foe, and just attack everything they see. However, they can be turned off with special guns.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Averted; in a scene that could have been quite interesting had it been fleshed out a little, it turns out that the aliens, too, believe in God.
• Pietà Plagiarism: The undead Inspector Clay carrying Paula near the end of the film.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Eros eventually shows himself to be quite the sexist, which is rather odd given we saw no such signs of this before, even though he spends the whole movie working with a woman.
• Please Wake Up: Tanna to Eros (who probably doesn't wake up because she's mispronouncing his name!)
• Poor Communication Kills: Both the military and the aliens insist that they are attempting to establish contact with the other, but are being rebuffed or ignored. It's hard to tell whether either side is being completely honest about this.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Tanna expresses her surprise to Eros that the Ruler is so understanding of the trouble they've been having. Contrast with the human military general, who forces Colonel Edwards to play a weird game of double-talk before telling him what's going on.
• Reckless Gun Usage:
  • The cops seem to be either Too Dumb to Live, suicidal or their characters are really supposed to be carrying toy guns. One cop keeps his finger on the trigger at all times, whips the gun around treating it like his pointer finger, he even scratches his head with it. Reportedly, the actor was doing this on purpose to see if Ed Wood would call him on it. Wood didn't.
  • Jeff fires at Eros' console when he goes over to use it, despite stating before he was going to show them the hostages with it. Jeff has no idea what might happen if he damages ship components randomly.
• Shaped Like Itself: "Visits? That would indicate visitors", among others.
• Shown Their Work: or maybe Truth in Television^note If you want to play fast-and-loose with the definition of "Truth". Jeff describing the sauces as "cigar shaped." Pilots who claimed to have seen UFOs while flying describe them that way because that is what a saucer looks like when viewed from the side.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!:
  • "That's all I'm taking from you." (SLAP!)
  • Also done by Eros to Tanna when she is lecturing the humans... for no real apparent reason other than — according to Kevin Murphy — "'This is my bullshit lecture!'".
• Skewed Priorities: Eros' superior has "neeeed for your other ships elsewhere" for some mission that he apparently considers more important than preventing the destruction of the entire universe.
• Stay in the Kitchen: One of the reasons the aliens are so incompetent is that Eros is willing to shout down Tanna, despite the fact that she has been assigned to his ship, telling her that her gender is for "advancing the race", not engaging in military conflict. It comes out of nowhere, since until that point, she had been treated like an equal and the aliens themselves have been depicted as highly advanced. It could be an invocation of the Mars and Venus Gender Contrast trope, but even so, it comes out of left field and is never brought up again.
• Stealth Pun: If this is Plan 9, it's left for people to wonder what Plan 8 was. Say it phonetically.
• Stock Footage: Lots, most notably the military firing at the flying saucers. Then there was Lugosi's footage, filmed for The Ghoul Goes West (which was planned but abandoned when Gene Autry pulled out) and then awkwardly inserted into Plan 9 after Lugosi's death.
• Strange Salute: The aliens cross their hands in front of their chests to salute.
• Tap on the Head: Since it was the 50s and this was a no budget project, it was probably too hard for them to figure out how to make any hits or blows look real, so most of the hits very obvious don't connect in the brief fight scenes in the movie. The worst example by far is when zombie Clay comes for Mrs. Trent in the car. He basically lifts his arms and kind of mushes the cop to the ground without an obvious slap or punch or bludgeoning motion, so it actually ends up looking unintentionally hilarious when it happens.
• Title Drop: Sort of. Criswell ends his opening narration with "grave robbers from outer space," the film's original title. It was supposedly changed from "Grave Robbers" to "Plan 9" at the request of the Baptist ministers financing the film.
• Too Dumb to Live: Everyone in the entire universe.
  • Especially Eros, who seems to think that the way to convince mankind of the extreme danger a potential scientific discovery holds is to call a group of armed humans stupid. Repeatedly.
  • Not to mention his plan to take revenge for humans ignoring the existence of aliens by killing the few people who do believe in them.
  • And then setting your own ship on fire by using critical instrumentation as a blunt-force weapon. Tanna also qualifies in this regard, as instead of trying to put the fire out or abandoning the ship, she just cries for Eros to wake up until the ship eventually explodes.
• Two of Your Earth Minutes: "Report to me in two Earth days."
• Unit Confusion: Constant references to "sunlight particles", which are apparently "made of many atoms."
• Villainous Breakdown: One of the most bizarrely sudden ones in history. ("You see? YOU SEE? Your stupid minds! STUPID! STUPID!)
• Visible Boom Mic: Ed! Pay attention! Averted if you watch the film in matted widescreen, as it was originally composed for.
• Voodoo Shark: After the old man is killed, two funeralgoers bring up the subject of why he was buried in a crypt while his wife was buried in the ground, and one of them says it has to do with some family superstition. Not only does this draw the viewer's attention to something that's weird but pretty low down on the list of the film's faults, it ends up highlighting that Lugosi's and Vampira's characters are supposed to be husband and wife, despite their respective actors being nothing alike in terms of age. Had it not been for that line (and a bit of Criswell's narration earlier in the same scene), most viewers would probably have assumed Vampira was just playing some other random corpse who got reanimated by the aliens.
• Voodoo Zombie: The zombies caused by the aliens.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Yes, the Ruler resorts to some pretty drastic and violent tactics, but he genuinely believes he's saving the universe from destruction and laments having to use such methods after a more peaceful approach failed.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: What are the crew of the other two saucers doing? Where did they go?
• Writers Cannot Do Math: Apparently, the "Solaranite" would cause the detonation of everything in the universe because the Sun, the single star Sol, has its rays reach every single planet. There is no references to the idea that the work would affect other stars, only Earth's Sun.
• Zombie Gait: The zombies are very slow, looking rather like sleepwalkers.

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