Orgy of the Dead (1965)

Orgy of the Dead, released in 1965, is promoted as an Ed Wood Jr movie. He did not direct it but he did write the screenplay, based on his own novel.

While he has a huge cult following it has to be admitted that Wood’s reputation as a staggeringly incompetent director is richly deserved. The movies he directed are not just shambolic but all too often boring. On the other hand he really did write some very cool very entertaining screenplays. The Violent Years (1956) is a totally crazed juvenile delinquent movie which has to be seen to be believed. So the fact that Orgy of the Dead was written by Wood but directed by someone else makes it quite enticing.

And this movie plays to Wood’s strengths as a screenwriter - his talent for excruciatingly awful dialogue, his total inability to construct an even moderately coherent plot and his tendency to waft off into delirious lunacy.

This movie was in fact directed by Stephen C. Apostolof using the pseudonym A. C. Stephen.

The movie opens with young couple Bob and Shirley heading down the highway in search of a cemetery. Bob writes horror stories and cemeteries provide him with inspiration. They crash their car and do indeed end up in a graveyard, but a very lively one.

Bob and Shirley find themselves prisoners of the Emperor of the Night, his beautiful but sinister consort (the Black Ghoul) and his army of ghouls.The ghouls are beautiful girls who have earned eternal damnation for greed or lust or other assorted sins. What fiendish tortures await Bob and Shirley? In fact all that happens to them is that they have to watch almost-naked pretty girls dancing. The Black Ghoul threatens them with dire fates which never eventuate.

Technically the film is quite polished considering the minuscule budget. The camera remains in focus, the lighting is handled competently and it looks like it was made by someone who understood at least the basics of filmmaking.

The Emperor of the Night is played by Criswell, a fascinating character in his on right. He was a popular TV personality (even a semi-regular on the Johnny Carson Show) famous for his predictions which were of course simply outrageous jokes. He knows this movie is intended to be jokey and goofy and he has a lot of fun.

If you want to appreciate this movie you have to understand what it isn’t. It isn’t a low-budget horror B-movie. That’s not what it’s trying to do so there’s no point in complaining that as a horror movie it just does’t work. It’s best not to compare it to movies Ed Wood directed in the 50s, like Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space. Those movies were trying to be very low-budget horror or sci-fi movies.

There’s no point in getting impatient about all the nude dancing and wondering when the horror content is going to kick in. It isn’t going to kick in. Nude dancing girls is what Orgy of the Dead is all about.

Orgy of the Dead is a very typical mid-60s American sexploitation movie of the nudie-cutie type - a lighthearted feel, quite a bit of goofiness and plenty of female flesh. This being 1965 there is no frontal nudity but there’s an abundance of bare breasts.

And Orgy of the Dead belongs to a sexploitation sub-sub-genre that enjoyed a certain vogue in the 60s - nudie-cuties with some tongue-in-cheek horror movie trappings. It belongs with movies like The Joys of Jezebel (1970) and Harry Novak’s Kiss Me Quick! (1964) and House on Bare Mountain (1962).

You have to judge Orgy of the Dead as a nudie-cutie. And as nudie-cuties go it’s not great but it’s OK. It doesn’t have the charm of Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr Teas (1959) or Doris Wishman’s Nude on the Moon (1961) or Hideout in the Sun (1960). It doesn’t have the madcap inventiveness of The Girl from S.I.N. (1966) or the cheerful goofiness of Henry’s Night In (1969).

But it does have lots of bare-breasted dancing lovelies.

Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-Ray release looks fabulous and includes quite a few extras.

The Bride and the Beast (1958)

The Bride and the Beast was scripted by Ed Wood and that today is its main selling point. The movies that Wood actually directed are absolutely terrible (although fascinating and entertaining in their own way). On the other hand an Ed Wood script in the hands of a relatively competent director could produce extremely interesting results, the girl juvenile delinquent classic The Violent Years (1956) being a prime example. As a director Wood didn’t have a clue. As a scriptwriter he was pretty good, if you like movies that are weird, fun, totally incoherent and sexually perverse.

Laura (Charlotte Austin) and Dan (Lance Fuller) have just been married and they’re off to Dan’s isolated but palatial house. He’s sent the servants home so they can be alone together. Well, alone except for Spanky.

Spanky is Dan’s pet gorilla. He keeps Spanky caged in the cellar. Laura naturally wants to meet Spanky. It’s obvious that Laura and the gorilla find each other pretty interesting. Spanky has probably never seen a woman before, and he seems to like what he sees. Laura is fascinated by the gorilla, and perhaps just a tiny bit excited. 

Maybe she's even a tiny bit sexually excited.

The gorilla gets loose and then we get a great scene in which he comes up behind Laura and lifts up the back of her nightie. This seems to get him very excited and he then rips off her nightie completely. This is too much for Dan. He goes for his gun.

As a result of this incident Dan decides that Laura needs to see a friend of his, a psychiatrist. Dr Reiner is an unconventional psychiatrist who thinks that the secrets to our problems lie in our past lives.

Dr Reiner decides to regress Laura to one of her past lives, with startling results.

It seems that in one of her past lives Laura was a lady gorilla. Dan is sceptical but Dr Reiner is a scientist after all.

You’d think that if you find out that your wife was once a gorilla you might think twice about taking her into the African jungle, but Dan is a big game hunter and he’s sure that Laura will love it.

Thanks to the miracle of stock footage the action switches to Africa.

The local authorities need Dan’s help desperately. They have two man-eating tigers to deal with. Yes, I know, tigers don’t live in Africa but the movie deals with that - these are tigers that escaped from a wrecked cargo ship.

After Dan and his gun-bearers have fired about a hundred rounds of ammunition at the tigers without hitting them once I found myself losing faith in Dan’s prowess as a big game hunter.

Worse is to follow. Laura decides to take a walk in the jungle, on her own. And yes, you guessed it, she runs into some gorillas. At this point what was already a bizarre movie becomes really bizarre in a manner that only Ed Wood could have managed.

It’s obviously a bad movie and structurally it’s a complete mess. The tiger hunt sub-plot is irrelevant and it goes on and on. But the first and last quarters are full of prime Ed Wood weirdness and lunacy. And the ending is, well you’ll just have to watch it.

The Bride and the Beast comes to us on DVD paired with The White Gorilla. And there’s a commentary track for The Bride and the Beast, featuring (among others) the movie’s star, Charlotte Austin, who recalls her horror when she first read the script.

The great thing about the movies that were written by Ed Wood but directed by others is that they end up being totally Ed Wood movies, except that they’re technically competent. They’re loaded to overflowing with Ed Wood’s many and varied obsessions. In this case there’s even an angora sweater reference (Ed loved angora sweaters). This movie has Wood’s fingerprints all over it. And the Ed Wood weirdness really does make this one worth watching. Recommended.

The Revenge of Dr X (1970)

The Revenge of Dr X (AKA Body of the Prey, AKA Venus Flytrap) is a 1970 US-Japanese co-production, based on a script by the legendary Ed Wood, Jr.

It starts out with the launch of a space mission, but this has nothing whatever to do with the movie. Rocket scientist Dr Bragan (James Craig) has been working too hard and his doctor recommends a complete rest. His assistant, Dr Nakamura, suggests a trip to Japan, a suggestion the workaholic Dr Bragan surprisingly accepts.

On arrival in Japan Dr Bragan is met by Dr Nakamura’s beautiful cousin, Noriko Hanamura. Her family owns several resort hotels, including one in the mountains that has been deserted for several years. It was too remote and the roads were too bad, as well as being rather too close to an active volcano. Its remoteness is just what Dr Bragan craves.

Dr Bragan now turns to his first love, botany. He has a venus flytrap with him and he clearly has a fascination with carnivorous plants. His objective now is to find a rare Japanese aquatic carnivorous plant. To do this he calls on the help of the famous Japanese female ama divers, which offers the opportunity for some gratuitous topless scenes.

By grafting the two species together he will create a super plant carnivore. He does so, and the resulting hybrid is not only carnivorous, it moves. Since it moves it must be basically human and have intelligence. This proves that humans evolved from plants. No, I don’t follow that reasoning either but hey, it’s a horror movie. Of course to bring his new plant to life he needs lightning, and a convenient electrical storm does the trick.

Of course you know that playing around with man-sized walking carnivorous plants is not going to turn out to be a good idea.

Dr Bragan as played by James Craig is clearly paranoid and somewhat unhinged right from the start. He flies off the handle if anyone questions him or takes any undue interest in his work. Craig’s jumpy performance is the highlight of the movie. You know right away you’re dealing with a mad scientist. It’s not good acting but at least it’s entertaining. That’s more than can be said of the other actors in this film.

The actress who plays Noriko is unbelievably dull. Luckily the deserted hotel which becomes Dr Bragan’s laboratory has a caretaker, a hunchback who plays the organ, which offers the opportunity for some gratuitous organ music.

This is something of a mystery movie. No-one knows who directed it (the opening credits on the only surviving print are from a different movie). No-one is even absolutely sure that Ed Wood wrote the screenplay but it’s so typically Ed Wood that there’s not much doubt on that score.

The monster itself is gloriously goofy. You can’t seriously dislike a movie that has a guy in a rubber suit playing a killer plant.

This is a very bad movie indeed but like everything that Ed Wood touched it’s perversely fascinating. Recommended for Ed Wood fans.

Synergy’s DVD release is absolutely atrocious. It’s fullframe and looks like a very inferior VHS copy.