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| Ed Wood was one of the filmmakers lampooned in The MST3K Colossal Episode Guide. |
God, I loved mall bookstores.
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| My idea of a perfect Sunday. |
In retrospect, mall bookstores played a fairly significant role in my life. Some of the last real quality time I had with my father was spent at a large shopping center in northeastern Indiana. While visiting my sister, who lives with her family in a small town near Fort Wayne, my dad and I would always find a few hours to sneak off to the local mall and see what it had to offer. Our first stop would always be Barnes & Noble, which sold a wide variety of books and magazines, plus music, movies, and various tchotchkes. I'm not a coffee drinker, but I came to love the smell of the coffee brewing at the in-store café. And I loved the light classical music playing on the overhead speakers, too. To this day, hearing Beethoven's "Rondo a Capriccio" transports me back to those very pleasant times.
I'm convinced there are a great many books that owe their entire existence to mall bookstores, particularly those books with humorous gimmicks or pop culture connections as their main selling points. A perfect example is The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide (1996) from Bantam Books. It was typical of the TV-based books of the era: detailed descriptions of the MST3K episodes that had aired up to that time, augmented by reminiscences of the actors, writers, and crew members who worked on the show. Though not exactly essential, the ACEG is a fun souvenir for fans of the long-running comedy series, which at the time was just ending its seven-season run on Comedy Central before moving to the Sci-Fi Channel.
When this book came out, I remember eagerly thumbing through its pages a few times at the mall before finally spending $16.95 (a not-inconsiderable amount) on my own copy. Just my luck, the binding proved extremely fragile, forcing me to transfer the pages of the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide to a Trapper Keeper. At the time, I was just becoming a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan and there were many episodes I had not yet seen. It blew my mind to think that they'd covered both Kitten with a Whip (1964) and Monster a Go-Go (1965), two obscure cult films whose titles I only knew from the writings of John Waters. I realized from reading the ACEG that I had many hours of entertainment ahead of me.
Today, though, I'd like to focus on the Ed Wood content in this book. There's a fair amount of it, too. After all, at least three of Ed's movies—Bride of the Monster (1955), The Violent Years (1956), and The Sinister Urge (1960)—were used on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in its early seasons. For all I know, MST3K may even have been many viewers' first exposure to Ed's work. It's very possible that the comments of the MST writers and performers in the ACEG helped shape my opinions of these movies. I'd already seen Bride by the time this book came out, but I hadn't yet seen Violent or Sinister.
Before they ever did a proper Ed Wood movie, MST3K riffed what I'd call a Wood-adjacent movie: Boris Petroff's creepy thriller The Unearthly (1957). It was the twentieth episode of the show's third season on Comedy Central, originally airing on December 14, 1991. Eddie had no direct involvement in this movie, but Petroff was an occasional collaborator of his, and the movie features Wood regular Tor Johnson as Lobo. So what did the MST gang think of it? Well, here's a plot summary by Mary Jo Pehl (aka Pearl Forrester) and reflections by Kevin Murphy (aka Tom Servo #2).
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| Kevin Murphy on The Unearthly: "So bad, so hurtful, and difficult to watch." |
It's clear from this writeup that The Unearthly was an especially unpopular film in the MST3K writing room. Murphy even jokes that its sheer awfulness caused him to go mad and attack fellow writer-performer Paul Chaplin. He specifically calls out Tor Johnson's "rumpled skull" as a complaint. Nevertheless, the episode proved to be a favorite among fans and even got its own VHS release from Rhino Video. That was how I first saw it.
By the way, in the lower left corner of the page, you can see one of the monster reviews that appear sporadically throughout the ACEG. These are written by Trace Beaulieu (aka Crow T. Robot and Dr. Forrester). In this instance, Trace admits that Lobo is "not really a monster but, hey look at the guy."
The very next season, MST3K finally got around to riffing a genuine Ed Wood movie. Their take on Bride of the Monster first aired on January 23, 1993. Airing as the twenty-third (and penultimate) episode of the show's fourth season, it's been somewhat overshadowed by the episode that immediately followed: their treatment of Hal Warren's inexplicable "Manos": The Hands of Fate (1966).
Nevertheless, MST3K's take on Bride of the Monster holds a special place in my heart, since it's the first episode of the series I ever saw. We didn't get Comedy Central at home (thanks, Comcast), so I didn't watch MST until I was living in the dorms. I was particularly entertained by the final host segment in which Joel Hodgson and his robot sidekicks recreate the disjointed ending of Bride. In the ACEG, Mary Jo Pehl writes both the summary and the reflections for this episode.
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| "He peppered God's lo mein." A classic MST3K running joke. |
It's interesting to remember that the ACEG was written four years after Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992) first hit bookstores. By then, the anecdote about Ed Wood "borrowing" the fake rubber octopus from Republic's The Wake of the Red Witch had already appeared in Grey's book and had been dramatized in Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994). I'm not sure, though, where Pehl got the idea that Bride of the Monster was Eddie's favorite film. In Nightmare of Ecstasy, artist Phil Cambridge says that Eddie's "pride and joy" was Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).
As it did with The Unearthly, the ACEG again designates Lobo as the "monster" of the film and gives him his own little sidebar written by Trace Beaulieu. The film itself, however, goes out of its way to explain that Lobo is "quite human" and that the "monster" of the title is actually the octopus belonging to Dr. Eric Vornoff (Bela Lugosi). The octopus does not get its own sidebar. This strikes me as a missed opportunity. Bonus points to Beaulieu, however, for citing "angora" as Lobo's weakness.
After tackling Bride of the Monster, MST3K did not return to the Ed Wood filmography for a year and a half. Their take on the Wood-scripted, William Morgan-directed juvenile crime thriller The Violent Years first aired on October 8, 1994. In the interim, MST had changed hosts, with Joel Hodgson leaving the series and being replaced by head writer Mike Nelson. The tone of the show hadn't really changed much, thanks to the efforts of writers like the aforementioned Paul Chaplin. It's Paul who writes both the summary and the reflections for The Violent Years. Interestingly, this is the only Wood film to receive a two-page spread in the ACEG.
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| The Violent Years merits a two-page spread in The Amazing Colossal Episode Guide. |
Okay, that's a little tricky to read, so here are the pages one at a time.
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| "The feature is less lighthearted," warns Paul Chaplin. |
And here's the second page, complete with a large (if blurry) photo:
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| The writers of MST3K fixated on one scene in particular from The Violent Years. |
Curiously, the ACEG does not even mention Ed Wood's involvement in The Violent Years, though Eddie is duly namechecked in the episode itself. Paul Chaplin's writeup largely focuses on one particular scene from the film in which Paula (Jean Moorhead) and her all-female gang apparently rape a male victim by ganging up on him and forcing him to have sex with them. Something about this particular scenario must have resonated deeply with Ed Wood, since the same basic thing happens in Fugitive Girls (1974), which he wrote for director Steve Apostolof.
I stated earlier that the ACEG shaped my opinion of Eddie's movies before I even saw them. The book's entry for The Violent Years is a perfect example of what I mean. To this day, when I think of this movie, I also think of Paul Chaplin's comments. In particular, I have been haunted by this passage for decades: "Do not think about this scene. Put it out of your mind. Work at your studies. Concentrate on your prayer life."
Fans did not have to wait long for another Ed Wood-themed episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Their version of Eddie's anti-porn screed, The Sinister Urge, premiered on November 5, 1994, mere weeks after their lampooning of The Violent Years. Why so much Wood at once? Frank Conniff, a writer-performer who played TV's Frank on MST3K, was the staff member in charge of scouting movies for the show. Since Frank is a confirmed Ed Wood fan, it's likely that he was the one who suggested both Sinister and Violent in Season 6, which was also his last as a series regular. The ACEG writeup, however, is again by Paul Chaplin.
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| The MST3K writers were clearly smitten by Jean Fontaine as Gloria. |
This is another ACEG entry that made a strong impression on me and affected the way I viewed the film years later. After reading Paul Chaplin's reflections, I was especially keen to track down The Sinister Urge so I could see the "terrifying" Gloria (played by one-film wonder Jean Fontaine) with my own eyes and hear her "hard, raspy, and shrill" voice with my own ears. Happily, when I finally screened the movie, Gloria did not disappoint. Far from it! To this day, when I revisit Sinister, Jean Fontaine's performance still manages to shock, alarm, and delight me. Eddie never used her in another movie, but she said all she needed to say with this one performance.
And that just about does it for the Ed Wood content in The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide. But it's hardly the end of the love affair, if that's what you want to call it, between MST3K and our Eddie. In the decades since MST3K originally aired on Comedy Central, such MST spinoff projects as The Mads Are Back and Rifftrax have covered additional Wood movies, including The Revenge of Dr. X (1970), The Bride and the Beast (1958), Glen or Glenda (1953), Night of the Ghouls (1959), and Plan 9 itself.
Is there any gold left to mine here? I'd say so. The troubling blackface sequence in Jail Bait (1954) makes that film a tricky proposition for comedians to riff, but the offending scene could easily be edited out or replaced without affecting the plot one whit. I'd say the Wood westerns, including Crossroad Avenger (1953) and The Lawless Rider (1954) would make good cannon fodder for the MST3K crowd as well. While we're at it, the ACEG itself is now badly out of date. How about an updated and expanded edition? I'd buy a copy.