Ed Wood Post-Plan 9
Given the number of myths, legends and simple misinformation that’s been spread about Edward D. Wood, Jr. in everything from Michael Medved’s muttonheaded book The Golden Turkey Awards to Tim Burton’s well-meaning fairy tale of a biopic Ed Wood, it seems people have an awful lot to say concerning a man about whom they know very little.. People who have seen at most one or two of his films know the party line, though, and are happy to repeat it ad nauseum. Ed Wood was the worst director who ever lived, and his 1959 sci fi horror conspiracy film Plan 9 from OUter Space the most incompetent movie ever made. Even if they haven’t seen the whole film, even if they couldn’t tell you what the storyline is (yes, there’s a clear story), they can tell you all the reasons why it’s bad. It doesn’t matter that most of the things they list are incorrect—they’ve read them online and heard them from their smug friends, so they must all be in there someplace. For most, it’s all they know and all they need to know. It seems Plan 9 is the end of the story. Maybe after that no one let him make another movie, or maybe he died or something.
But Plan 9 was only Wood’s fourth film. He continued working regularly for almost 20 years after that, right up to his death in 1978. He would direct five more features (only two of which are considered “legitimate”) and write the screenplays for almost two dozen films directed by others.
Filmed after Plan 9 (as references in the script will attest) but released beforehand, Night of the Ghouls would once again bring together a number of Wood’s regular acting ensemble, including wrestler Tor Johnson, TV psychic Criswell, and Paul Marco, making his third appearance in a Wood film as the hapless Kelton the Cop. Designed as a sequel of sorts to Wood’s first sci fi film, the very good 1955 feature Bride of the Monster, it concerns a fake psychic who has unwittingly been raising the dead from a local cemetery. It’s a bit slow and plodding, and attempts to push itself as more of an intentional comedy than his previous films, but with only limited success. The film would mark the third and last of Wood’s sci fi/horror pictures, as well as the end of his Kelton the Cop trilogy (even though the character only plays a small role in each). After that he returned to crime dramas.
Wood already had two crime dramas under his belt by this time, 1954’s Jail Bait (which he directed) and his screenplay for the 1958 girl gang film The Violent Years, both of which, while not bad films, were constrained by genre cliches. More interesting, especially in terms of presaging Wood’s future career path, was 1960s The Sinister Urge. What begins as a film about a serial killer and rapist preying on young women around Los Angeles takes a sharp left turn when the investigating officers (Wood regulars Kenne Duncan and Duke Moore) determine that all the victims had somehow been connected with a local porn ring. It’s a nasty, gritty little crime drama that deals with the business of porn more bluntly than most directors would have dared at that time. Despite what people say about Wood, there is nothing incompetent about the film. It’s not a bad picture at all considering the genre and the times and its budget. At times it’s even surprisingly brutal. but there is a moment in the picture that leaves me wondering if Wood knew what was coming.
We see a porn director (Carl Anthony) in his office watching dailies. Clearly visible on the wall behind him is a poster for Wood’s provocatively-titled Jail Bait. as he stares despondently at the images on the screen, he mutters, “I watch this slush and remember how I used to make GOOD movies.”
Audiences pre-programmed to snort derisively at anything and everything in a Wood picture always get a chuckle out of that (those few who bother to watch the film anyway), but it’s a profoundly sad line, considering.
In 1965, Wood teamed up with Stephen C. Apostolof, a would-be director who worked under the name A.C. Stevens, and together they made the baffling and almost arty Wood-scripted Orgy of the Dead.
Once again introduced and narrated by Criswell, Wood’s first foray into technicolor is at once interminable and fascinating. The plot is quite simple: a young horror novelist (Wood was also writing pulp novels at the time) decides to seek inspiration by bringing his girlfriend to a graveyard on a spooky moonlit night. There they watch in horror as one attractive young zombie woman after another after another rises from her grave, each in turn telling the story of her downfall and death. Then each one does a striptease among the headstones. That’s it, and it goes on stripper after stripper for nearly two hours. It soon reaches the point at which it ceases to be a nudie horror picture and becomes performance art. And unfortunately like most performance art, it is nearly impossible to watch, an ordeal rescued only by Criswell’s delightful narration.
In 1970 and ‘71, as other scripts were being produced, Wood directed his last three features, which slipped deeper into softcore porn and away from anything that might be shown in a real movie theater. In Take it Out in Trade, for instance (a lost film that exists today only as outtakes), a mother and father hire a detective to find their young daughter. He soon finds that she’s working in a whorehouse. And in Necromania (the second film version of Wood’s novel The Only House), a young couple goes to a voodoo priestess for help with the man’s erectile dysfunction. Again the films are neither incompetent nor laughable, but they aren’t terribly interesting either.
After that he re-teamed with Stevens, for whom he would write scripts until his death. For the most part they were less actual scripts than simple scenarios as Stevens began working in that gray area between soft and hardcore.
1972’s The Snow Bunnies can be easily summarized as “a group of four young women go to a ski resort and have lots of sex with people.” The next year’s Drop-Out Wife concerns a woman who walks out on her abusive husband, goes to a friend’s house, and recounts her sex life both with her husband and as a swinger. The only thing that keeps the films from being hardcore (they have the same set ups and plot development as most hardcore films) is the actual anatomy graphically displayed on the screen.
While porn scripts seemed to be the dominant rule for the last six or seven years of Wood’s life, there were three exceptions to this during his time with Stevens.
1974’s Fugitive Girls is more commonly known as Five Loose Women, a title as deceptive and intentionally provocative as Jail Bait. More than anything it resembles the AIP drive-in fare of the era, and works as a neat bookend with Wood’s earlier script for The Violent Years. Five young female convicts (the tough one, the naive one, the black one, the lesbian, the crazy one) escape from a minimum security women’s prison (more a day camp, it looks like) and go cross country to track down some stashed loot from an earlier robbery. It’s just an action picture with some boobs in it, but it has a real story and real characters and Wood himself has an uncredited major role as a drunken and scraggy old gas station attendant. The film doesn’t look bad at all, it has a few legitimate laughs, and the pacing maintains a snappy clip.. In fact in the end it’s more entertaining than a lot of the women in prison fare AIP was releasing at the time.
The Beach Bunnies from two years later was apparently designed to act as a follow up to the earlier Snow Bunnies. Somehow though Wood ended up including a plot and characters along the way, which complicated matters. It seems rumors are swirling that a popular young actor is undergoing treatments to get a sex change (hearkening back to Wood’s first film, Glen or Glenda). When he returns from a secret trip to Europe and checks into an ocean-side hotel, a reporter from a celebrity gossip magazine is sent on assignment to find out whether or not he still has a penis. To hedge her bets, she recruits some attractive young friends to come along. (Okay, so it’s not much of a plot but it’s something.) While there is certainly plenty of soft-core sex scattered throughout the film, it’s not nearly as graphic as it had been in the earlier collaborations, and here it actually creates a number of intertwining subplots. Again the pacing is good, the dialogue has its moments, and though it may not exactly be art, it again does stand a notch above a lot of the other soft-core comedies of the era.
There remains some debate today whether or not 1978’s Hot Ice (which was released after his death) was written by Wood or not. He receives no screen credit, and Andrews, who is credited as the film’s writer/producer/director insisted to the end that Wood had nothing to do with it. But there is a certain unmistakable quirkiness to Wood’s dialogue which is clearly on display here.
When a famous singer checks into a ski resort hotel, he locks away his world famous diamond collection in a hotel safe. Overhearing this, a husband and wife team of small-time con artists take it upon themselves to steal it. It’s really just a straightforward little indie caper comedy, almost as if, after all the slush of the previous years, Wood was trying to sneak his way back into mainstream filmmaking (well, almost mainstream anyway) when he died.
It’s deeply sad to consider what happened to him, a man who was so enthusiastic, a filmmaker with such inventiveness and imagination and energy, a man who made deeply felt and honestly unique pictures with a zing and a flair (how many directors working today, directors who are given $80 million budgets, could lay claim to any of those adjectives?) was knocked down into making porn in order to get by. He seemed to lose a lot of his enthusiasm during his time with Andrews. He started drinking even more than he had been, and when he was maybe—just maybe—on the brink of getting back to what he wanted to be, he died at age 54 in a little apartment in North Hollywood.
The ironic thing about all this is that while Wood was certainly no Orson Welles or Kurosawa, he was also certainly not the worst director in the world. Taking his entire filmography into account (and not just that one picture), he’s on a par with other low budget filmmakers with a bit of a flair and vision, like W. Lee Wilder. But it’s because Wood was declared by the dummies to be the worst director of all time that his films are still available, still discussed and written about (if snidely) and still watched by far larger audiences than ever saw them during their initial release. If he hadn’t been slapped with that cheap moniker, in all likelihood he would have faced the same fate Lee Wilder has.
by Jim Knipfel