Plan 10 From Outer Space (1995)

Director: Trent Harris

Screenplay: Trent Harris

Cast: Stefene Russell as Lucinda; Karen Black as Nehor; Patrick Michael Collins as Larsen; Curtis James as Talmage; Deva Cantrell as Guy; Gyll Huff as Rockwell; Jeff Price as Sanders; Karen Nielsen as Jazell; Burnadette Leroi as Burnadette

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

The title is a reference to Ed Wood Jr's most notorious film, Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), the film above many which people referred to when they both talked of bad cinema but also so-bad-its-good. There have been possible challenges to it in pop culture memory, The Room (2003) springing to mind as possibly taking its crown in the modern day, but the notoriously shambolic sci-fi tale is synonymous with cult cinema. Plan 10 From Outer Space for me always sounded like a modern pastiche, which did exist especially in an era where Ed Wood managed to get a 1994 biopic from Tim Burton from a major Hollywood studio. The actual film, my first Trent Harris work, is not this but about Mormons. That is the first interesting surprise, and it gets more peculiar from there.

Trent Harris is a filmmaker who has had a few notches in cult circles of immense interest. Rubin and Ed (1991) with Crispin Glover is from this same era where we once had these wonderfully idiosyncratic productions bankrolled. The Beaver Trilogy (2001), spawning three films between 1979 and 1985 based on a figure Harris met called "Groovin' Gary, is his most well known work including the notoriety that it was long unavailable and that the middle one has a young Sean Penn playing Groovin' Gary. Here, the Utah raised filmmaker takes a look at a huge cultural aspect of his local culture, that Utah is famously of historical important for Mormonism, a controversial religion in terms of Christianity and where Harris turns this into a sci-fi tale of their beliefs with more aliens than in their actual writings.

The premise is that a young Mormon woman Lucinda (Stefene Russell) wants to write about Utah's history, only to find a tablet in the wilderness, connected to a controversial work by a Mormon founder which posited an alien influence on Mormonism. Now, Mormonism is a divisive belief system, and Harris' work tackles as much its beliefs as it uses it for artistic inspiration, taking into consideration that this faith grew in the 19th century, a potted history involved, but also bringing in some of its more idiosyncratic beliefs, such as Mormonism's reference to the cosmos and the other planets which is translated in this film as outer space being part of its form of heaven, here the dead gaining their own planet if they are good Mormons. As Lucinda herself will eventually say though, this only applies to her male brethren, whilst Mormons' most known practice of polygamy, in which men can have many wives, becomes a huge plot point which involves Karen Black, the cult and acclaimed actress, as a scorned woman in the midst of this conspiracy.

Plan 10 is also a film from knee deep into the nineties, and whilst it would take a precise discourse on aesthetic and fashion to explain this, the sense of this being a nineties production is felt in its colour and especially its eccentricity. "Eccentric" is the best way to describe the film as well as charming. Plan 10, whilst it is dealing with sexy saucer people who invite women on midnight "motorbike rides", is almost chaste, pleasingly so in a narrative structure which, baring a few tangents, is wholly devoted to its story of Lucinda uncovering this conspiracy and following it to the end. Barring her very crude Freudian slips, finding herself attracted to the next door neighbour who twerks in his undies at night through an open window, Lucinda is a very likeable and affirmative figure, taking in her stride a conspiracy that naturally makes her male seniors uncomfortable. Particular, as much a joke, because they fear it would make them worse off in the public view as a laughing stock, but becoming more suspicious as she digs further, even to the point of getting a cousin to help translate a Mormon created language to decipher old text.   

Baring the fact her brother is likely to be picking up transmissions, unwell as he eventually stands proud in front of a founder's statue in the nude, it is Stefene Russell's film and she is charming. Never demeaned, and the only explicit sexuality depicted through an outer space motorbike ride or two. The story is her growth, not just through her sexuality, but a general sense of growth from a nerdy figure who, be it struggling to get into a secret hideout unless she wears a costume or even getting shoved into a mental health asylum and having to escape, grows stronger in general by the conclusion.

And it does touch upon some problematic content about Mormonism. Not in a superior attitude either, but calmly critiquing points, such as Mormonism's struggle with racism, depicted in the difference between the "Nephites", light skinned population of Israelite origin who came to the Americas, and the "Lamanites", people who are seen as wicked but, as film tells the version, are depicted as dark skinned people, a nod to this problem within the Church. That and the gender politics, as this ultimately revolves around Karen Black wanting to create a gender war against Utah, which does happen in the most subversive aspect of Plan 10. She even gets to sing, which is admittedly awesome as I did not know Karen Black could sing.

The result was a very pleasant surprise, again an introduction to this very idiosyncratic director, and a great beginning at that.