Before Uwe Boll there was Edward D. Wood Jr., a director so hapless that his greatest work, Plan 9 From Outer Space, is also the worst movie ever made. The sets seem permanently [-remove] on the verge of collapse, the flying saucers don't so much fly as wobble, and the dialogue makes no sense whatsoever ("Why's it so important you contact the governments of our earth?"; "Because of death!!"). Needless to say, Burton loved it. "When you watch his movies, yeah, they're bad, but they're special," he insists. The director was drawn to his first biopic like one of Wood's shonky tractor beams: by Wood's defiant hopefulness; by the parallels between his own surrogate father/son relationship with Vincent Price and Wood's bond with B�la Lugosi; and, presumably, by the chance to clad one of Hollywood's heartthrobs in angora. "I understand it too", he says of Wood's cross-dressing, "women's clothes are more comfortable".