Plan 9 from Outer Space is probably not the worst movie, but the most underrated movie of all time. Aliens visit the Earth and tell mankind that it must be stopped from blowing up the planet one day because of the destructive behaviour of the human race. The people the Aliens meet confirm that by killing the visitors. The script cleverly combines Gothic horror (the Aliens revive the dead to form an army) with Science Fiction with a moral concept. To an open-minded viewer it's obvious that Wood had talent and just lacked money, system and polish. There are dozens of big budget movies produced by Hollywood every day that more more boring, pointless and trashy than this movie - but they have high production values. Anyway, the gripping music for Plan 9 was taken from music libraries that allowed low-budget directors to use high-quality scores for little money. The first release on CD was by Performance Records, the second by Retrosonic Records. (In 1996 the producer of the Retrosonic CD, Paul Mandell, also wrote an article about Plan 9's score for the American magazine Film Score Monthly. Although he did such a great job he doesn't seem to get what the movie is about. Anyway, you can find the article here.)

Stay far away from the Performance disc. It's just all the sound from the movie transferred to disc. Supposedly the last release of Performance Records, if all their releases were as crappy as this one it's no wonder. The Retrosonic release is the one you should get. It contains nearly all of the cues used for the movie. In fact it also contains some nice cues that where not used because of budgetary reasons. The soundquality is very good considering the age of the material, but the volume is rather low and the left channel is a little bit louder than the right one. The liner notes are quite interesting, but it's frustrating that they don't tell us how the mystery of the whereabouts of the music for Plan 9 from Outer Space was actually solved. Two or three cues are missing, for example the cue for the "The old one must be sacrificed!" scene, as is strangely the ending of the "There is something out there" cue, too. Still, this is the only release of the music you can get. It seems like this is the only CD the obscure Retrosonic Records ever released. I could find no information on them. The CD pops up at Ebay now and then (that's where I got it), but don't buy it from a seller called "sfcsu" (aka "The Science Fiction Continuum"), he is a fraud.

Performance Records PERF 391CD, released in Canada in 1989

Retrosonic Records RR-1001, released in the USA in 1995