18. Plan 9 From Outer Space

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ukRYsYPmo&w=584&h=390]

Glen or Glenda might be more grueling to watch, but the experience is numbing rather than exhilarating. For all of its otherworldly failures, Plan 9 reminds you why people are inspired to make movies, the sort of messianic passion that causes Werner Herzog to drag boats up mountains or Ed Wood to hang spaceships from wire.

The movie is riddled with bizarre rookie mistakes that show what a truly inept filmmaker Wood was, but as Tim Burton showed, Wood’s deluded ambitions speak to us in ways normal bad movies don’t. To make a movie as bad as Plan 9, you have to be some sort of genius.