While many films carry the title of worst movie ever made, any Ed Wood production would be a valid winner.

Today, we will dissect the most bewildering of the bunch, the infamous anti-classic, “Plan 9 From Outer Space.”

Edward Davis Wood Jr., the director of “Plan 9,” is widely remembered as the worst director in history. Tim Burton even made the 1994 biopic “Ed Wood” about him, in which he portrays Wood as an overly earnest bumbling fool of a director.

While most movies attempt to have at least a shadow of a plot, Wood’s magnum opus throws this idea out the window. The movie makes an earnest attempt to convey a plot about both aliens and zombies, but this ultimately becomes futile. Wood constantly gets in his own way, repeatedly introducing and tossing away new plot threads.

Wood’s masterpiece instead seems to jolt to a new direction every couple of minutes and say, “No, wait! Something else is happening now!”

One example of this comes at the beginning of the movie. The first thing the viewer sees is a man sitting at a desk, reciting a monologue written so poorly it’s laughable. The nonsensical line, “future events such as these will affect you in the future,” from the monologue sets the tone of ineptitude to come.

After a brief credit sequence, the movie suddenly leaps into the plot, and somehow transitioning from the weird monologue to a funeral. Two additional funerals follow the first. The only context comes from the echoing voiceover from the narrator. But calling the narration context is like calling “Crash” the best movie of 2005 — technically true, but woefully misleading.

Keep in mind, at the third funeral, the movie’s runtime has barely eclipsed 15 minutes. If you are confused reading this review, imagine watching the actual movie itself.

Another bewildering transition in the film comes at about the halfway point, when we suddenly meet a couple, of what can generously be called, aliens. These aliens don’t even attempt to look inhuman, they are just actors speaking in an overly stilted tone while wearing shiny costumes. These aliens join the roster of main characters — a list that will grow absurdly longer throughout the pitifully brief runtime.

These transitions indicate the lack of narrative —and there is no bigger red flag for a movie than the absence of a cohesive plot. 

The laundry list of problems in this film somehow extends past its plot woes and writing, as there are many notably terrible performances throughout this film. Famous classical movie villain Bela Lugosi’s performance seems a good place to start in this regard.

Lugosi died in 1956, but astute readers may remember that “Plan 9” was not released until 1959. The credits refer to him simply as “Old Man” and he never speaks. Instead, Wood breaks the first rule of screenwriting by telling instead of showing, and the narrator incessantly spouts off the thoughts of the Old Man.

But the patched-together nature of the Lugosi sequences cannot hold a candle to the spectacular failure that was the casting of Tor Johnson as the major roles of Inspector Clay and Anonymous Zombie Number 12. Johnson actually had a quarter-century long film career, but there’s a good reason the word “uncredited” sits next to many of his roles.

His grasp of the English language is slim at best, and his Swedish accent is so thick and the sound mixing so awful that much of his dialogue is completely incomprehensible. He sounds like an indiscriminate European baby struggling to say his first words, which is not exactly a desirable trait for one of your main characters.

Add the laughable characters to the mountainous amounts of mind-bogglingly terrible decisions made in the creation of this travesty. While viewing “Plan 9,” it’s pretty clear how Ed Wood earned the moniker of the worst director in history.

Perhaps “Plan 9” is the most valuable as a guide on how not to make a film. If you learned from the complete lack of narrative, incoherent characters and a haphazard screenplay, you would be off to an excellent start in Hollywood.

FINAL RATING: One/One. Most unintentionally hilarious line ever: “Inspector Clay is dead. Murdered. And somebody’s responsible.”

This public domain atrocity can be found in full length here. Best of luck.