The Screengrab

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

At last, it’s Ed Wood! For months I’ve been dutifully trudging my way up this list of the 100 worst movies of all time, and somehow made it a third of the way through without encountering a single work by the man celebrated far and wide as the worst filmmaker ever. I suppose that makes sense, in that the most notorious Wood works – the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda – must be lurking near the top of the chart. It so happens that I’d never seen Wood’s second feature, Jail Bait, so this promised to be quite a treat. We’re huge jailbait fans here at the Screengrab…er, in the cinematic sense, that is.

Wood’s work is tough to rank on the Unwatchable scale, just because he’s usually at his most watchable when he’s at his worst. That is, his bizarre mix of enthusiasm and incompetence only soars when he goes completely off the deep end, as in Plan 9 or Bela Lugosi’s infamous “Home? I have no home” monologue from Bride of the Monster. Jail Bait is as shoddily constructed as you’d expect, but the goofy juice doesn’t really get flowing until the last ten minutes or so.

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Bela Lugosi, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)



Depending who you ask (specifically if one of the people you ask is Bela Lugosi’s son, and the other is Tim Burton), Ed Wood, Jr. was either a talentless, exploitive vulture or a scrappy independent filmmaker who befriended Lugosi late in life and (inadvertently) made him relevant to a whole new audience of younger fans through cult classics like Glen or Glenda? and Bride of the Monster, climaxing with Martin Landau’s Oscar-winning portrayal of the actor in 1994’s Ed Wood. Either way, though, Plan 9 From Outer Space was hardly the most dignified send-off for a Hungarian film and theater legend and one of the best known international movie stars of the 1930s. For one thing, Lugosi only appears onscreen for a few minutes of the so-called “worst movie of all time” (a designation Screengrab’s own Scott Von Doviak would undoubtedly challenge), but the posthumous “performance” (culled from stock footage) isn’t even listed as an official film performance on the actor’s Internet Movie Database page, possibly because it was completed by a chiropractor.

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Greetings, my friend!  We are 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.  But what if were were to tell you that someone plans to remake the worst movie of all time?  Would that be a future worth living in?

Yes, folks, someone is remaking Plan 9 from Outer Space.  It's come to this:  apparently having exhausted the entire supply of old sit-coms, action movies, and low-budget horror flicks, some group of misguided maniacs has decided to remake the Ed Wood flick that is famous for being the most incompetent, incomprehensible, and poorly acted in motion picture history.  Worse still, they seem to be intent on taking out the only good things in the movie and replacing them with things aren't there in the first place:   according to the website, the makers of the retitled Plan 9 intend for their movie to be "serious-minded", without "camp or parody", and will focus on the sci-fi aspects of the Wood original but will be "character-driven".   It's not clear what character will be driving it -- Tor Johnson's? -- but we'll take their word for it.

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The news that Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, best known as the "Ask a Ninja" guys, are working on a remake of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, is confounding on many levels. It's not that the guys in question are overreaching, God knows. They have proven their ability to be amusing for thirty-second bursts, which is more than can be said for the makers of their source material. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, which came out as drive-in fodder (made on a budget of less than $100,000) back in 1978, has already spawned three sequels (the first of which, the 1988 Return of the Killer Tomatoes, is semi-infamous for featuring a young, deeply humiliated George Clooney), an animated TV show, and a video game based on the cartoon series. Why does this unfortunate creation refuse to die? A clue can be found in this remark about the original by Nichols (who is co-writing the script of the remake with Sarine, who is set to direct): "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! is the masterwork of a generation. We can only aspire to recapture that magic." Since it is not possible for a sentient being to think that Tomatoes is in some way good, he must be making a nudge-nudge, wink-wink allusion to how bad it is, the idea being that it's so bad it's good. This is really at the core of the cult reputation that Tomatoes has built up over the years: many people are under the impression that it's one of those rare examples of a serious movie so freakishly bad that it's surreal and hilarious.

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Maila Nurmi has died, at the age of 86. A Finnish-born model — she worked for Man Ray and the pin-up artist Alberto Vargas — and sometime actress, Nurmi was best-known as her alter ago, Vampira, the "beatnik ghoul-girl" with the long black tresses and long talon-like fingernails who began hosting movies on late night television in 1954.

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