Metacritic reviews

It is so bad that it’s flawless.

Shockingly nonlinear, boasting a cast of the once great (Lugosi), the never-even-good (Lyle Talbot, Tor Johnson), and the unbelievably motley (”psychic” Criswell, cinch-waisted Vampira), its 79 minutes are jam-packed with insanity, and those tin plates on strings that Wood tries to pass off as flying saucers are the least of its delights.

Plan 9 from Outer Space may not be pure bliss to watch, but you certainly can feel the bliss that writer-director Edward D. Wood Jr. must have experienced while making it.

Plan 9 stands as a testament to sincerity run amok, and as a passionate display of artistic limitations, it’s as glorious as it is flabbergasting.

Wood is notorious for his 1952 transvestite saga Glen or Glenda? (aka I Changed My Sex), but for my money this 1959 effort is twice as strange and appealing in its undisguised incompetence.

Wood lacked both the dramatic sense to unfold his speculations in action and the technique (as well as the money) to embody, in any plausible way, his spectacular fancies, but their crude approximations vibrate with his stifled exaltation.

Crowned 'The Worst Film Ever Made' at New York's Worst Film Festival in 1980, this deserves its niche in history for featuring the last screen performance of Bela Lugosi, as a ghoul resurrected by space visitors for use against scientists destroying the world with their nuclear tests.

Don't get me wrong. Plan 9 from Outer Space is a terrible film. A dreadful film. An atrocious film. But it does have some elements that are halfway decent, and it's unlikely that it would have a cult following without them.

Taken as a whole, it’s excruciating in ways that few would consider enjoyable.

Brilliantly terrible or terribly terrible depending on your viewpoint.