Dana Gould, the quick-talking standup comedian and onetime writer for The Simpsons, does his funnyman thing at Laff Hole at Chop Suey tonight. But he’s sticking around to host a screening of the legendary B film Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood’s endearingly awful sci-fi “thriller,” at SIFF Cinema tomorrow. He’ll be joined by Mystery Science Theater 3000 alums Frank Conniff and Trace Beaulieu to provide a running commentary over all those aliens and zombies and…is that Béla Lugosi? Hopefully Gould will include a story or two about his friendship with Plan 9 star Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira. And, if we’re lucky, a few potshots at Waterworld.

What makes Plan 9 so fun to watch?
What’s amazing—truly amazing—about Plan 9 is that it continues to find new ways to be fucked up. Most bad movies get boring. But with Plan 9, just when you think they’ve run out of tricks, they come up with a whole new batch. And the other thing that’s great is that they really were trying to make a good movie—they just did absolutely everything wrong. It was incompetence aspiring to be greatness, which is charming. It’s not like The Postman or Waterworld, where it’s people with a lot of money and a lot of power thinking they’re geniuses and just screwing it up. It’s people aiming for the fences and coming up short.

I gotta admit, I’ve never seen Plan 9. How ashamed should I be?
Not too ashamed. I’ve never seen The Usual Suspects. It’s like when people ask you if you like Yo La Tengo. You just nod and say, “Yeah, yeah. Sure.”

How did you get to know Maila?
I interviewed her for the Sci-Fi channel in 1995, for this special I was doing about horror movie hosts. She was very reclusive, but we became friends. We’d go to lunch every couple of weeks. And then over the years, we just stayed friends. When I was on a sitcom called Working —with TV’s Fred Savage—she would always call the next day and say stuff like, “They didn’t give you much this week.”

That’s sweet.
It was. But she was no joke. She was a real sort of gum-snapping beatnik chick. She would say stuff like, “Everybody calls Orson Welles a cinematic genius. But to me he’ll always be that guy who gave my roommate the clap in 1948.”

Plan 9 from Outer Space, with live commentary by Dana Gould, Frank Conniff, and Trace Beaulieu, screens Dec 7 at 7 at SIFF Cinema at the Uptown.