Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 292: The Lascivious World of A.C. Stevens & Ed D. Wood, Jr. (2008)

Of all the Ed Wood sets ever released, this is definitely one of them.

lascivious [las·​civ·​i·​ous, lə-ˈsi-vē-əs] (adj.):

filled with or showing sexual desire; lewd, lustful

Over the decades, Ed Wood's films have been bundled together in various box sets, first on VHS, then DVD, and now Blu-ray. I've definitely purchased my share of them over the years. Maybe you have, too. There's a strange quality in Eddie's movies that makes you want to see more of them right away, so it makes sense to sell them in bulk. They're like potato chips or pretzels, difficult to stop at just one. Let's see now....

The monolith.

• The first such anthology I ever bought was Rhino's The Ed Wood Collection (1995), a three-tape set that came in a faux-angora box and included Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Glen or Glenda (1953), and Bride of the Monster (1955). That pink, fuzzy monolith still sits among my Wood memorabilia today. I vaguely remember a blue version existing, but I can't find it. Did I dream it?

• Then there was Image Entertainment's The Worst of Ed Wood (2000), a four-DVD set. It contained the same films as the previous Rhino set, plus Jail Bait (1954). Its Plan 9 disc also included the documentary Flying Saucers Over Hollywood (1992). When I think of this set, I remember buying it at a Borders in Flint, MI on a freezing cold day, using money I'd made as a customer service rep for General Motors.

• Just a few years later, Image released The Ed Wood Box (2004), a six-disc collection that included everything from The Worst of Ed Wood but added Night of the Ghouls (1959) and The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1996). It handily makes the previous Image set obsolete, but I never bought it because I already had Night and Haunted separately.

• A staple of cutout bins for years was Passport Video's two-disc The Ed Wood Collection: A Salute to Incompetence (2007), which included Plan 9, Glenda, Bride, Ghouls, Jail Bait (in its rare director's cut form) and The Violent Years (1956), plus a bonus featurette called The Ed Wood Story. For some reason, this once-plentiful title has become scarce in recent years. A shame, too, as it contains the longer Rhino cut of Glenda rather than the shortened, censored version included in the Image sets.

• The landmark DVD collection that inspired this series of articles was S'more Entertainment's Big Box of Wood (2011), a six-disc set that included Plan 9, Bride, and Jail Bait, but added The Violent Years (1956), The Sinister Urge (1960), Fugitive Girls (1974), Drop Out Wife (1972), Hot Ice (1978), The Snow Bunnies (1972), The Beach Bunnies (1976), Orgy of the Dead (1965), Trick Shooting with Kenne Duncan (1960), and Crossroad Avenger (1953). The set included new introductions (by Ted Newsom) and various commentary tracks, plus trailers and interviews with Dolores Fuller, Joe Robertson, and Kathy Wood.

• It's not a multi-disc set, but After Hours' Cinema's single-disc Ed Wood's Dirty Movies (2014) contained Eddie's final directorial effort, The Young Marrieds (1972), plus two additional titles: Nympho Cycler (1971) and Shot on Location (1972). Eddie's participation in Nympho is undisputed—he cowrote the script and appears on camera in a supporting role—but whether he worked on Shot is controversial.

• The most significant Wood collection of recent years has been Severin's three-disc Blu-ray set, Hard Wood (2024). It contained The Young Marrieds, plus Necromania (1971), The Only House in Town (1971), and Shotgun Wedding (1963), plus a variety of loops, featurettes, and commentary tracks. 

I think you can agree, that's a lot of Ed Wood collections and box sets. And there are still more I don't own, like The Ed Wood Curiosities Collection (2023), which adds the much-disputed Revenge of the Virgins (1959) to the mix. Then there's The Ed Wood Collection, Volume One (2009); The Ed D. Wood Jr. Collection (year unknown); and Ed Wood: The Dark Collection (unknown). Most of these are simply recycling the same old titles: Plan 9, Bride, Glenda, the usual suspects. But today, I want to talk about a three-disc DVD collection that's been largely ignored by the Ed Wood fan community.

A forgotten release?

Founded in 1986, S'more Entertainment is a boutique California company that specializes in repackaging and rereleasing vintage albums, TV shows, and movies. Think of it as a cousin to Rhino Entertainment or Something Weird Video, though not nearly as well-known as either of those. They're the folks behind Big Box of Wood, which appears to be one of the most ambitious projects they ever undertook. The most recent S'more releases I can find are from 2024, which is also when their social media accounts went dark.

In 2008, three years before Big Box, they tested the Woodian waters with The Lascivious World of A.C. Stevens & Ed D. Wood Jr.  This three-disc collection includes Fugitive Girls and Drop Out Wife, plus Lady Godiva Rides (1968), a film that director Stephen C. Apostolof, under the pseudonym A.C. Stevens, made on his own during his seven-year estrangement from Ed Wood. They'd had a falling out during the making of Orgy of the Dead and did not reunite until 1972. I believe The Lascivious World was the first official DVD release for all three of these feature films, though the set was ultimately overshadowed by Big Box of Wood.

If you've known me for more than a few minutes, you're already aware that I spent several years of my life co-authoring Dad Made Dirty Movies: The Erotic World of Stephen C. Apostolof (2020). In that book, Jordan Todorov and I examined Steve's life and career thoroughly, including the films he made with Ed Wood and the ones he made on his own. Big Box of Wood was a major help during the making of that book. A few more of Steve's films were available as DVD-Rs from Something Weird Video or had been posted to adult sites on the internet. (We should have thanked those sites in the Acknowledgement section.) Jordan and I would occasionally have to send movies back and forth to one another, which sometimes felt like trying to suck a turkey dinner through a bendy straw.

Even though Steve's films dominated my life and my waking thoughts during the writing and editing of Dad Made Dirty Movies, I never actually purchased a copy of The Lascivious World. I didn't feel like I needed it. I had Drop Out Wife and Fugitive Girls elsewhere, and I'd streamed Lady Godiva Rides online. Since Lascivious World boasted no major extras, like commentaries or featurettes, why should I spend good money on it? Still, like a lot of Ed Wood-related media, it gnawed at me. If anyone owned this set, shouldn't it be me? Unfortunately, it went out of print and became a little pricey on the secondary market. It would have to be a dream deferred.

In recent months, however, the redoubtable Bob Blackburn has been auctioning some Ed Wood-related merchandise to raise money for the medical expenses of his friend, attorney Bob Weinberg. The items come from Weinberg's own collection. A great deal of this stuff is out of my price range—through a series of poor life choices and personal failings, I live in perpetual poverty—but I wanted to buy something to support Bob and Bob. When I saw that one of the items was a copy of The Lascivious World of A.C. Stevens & Ed D. Wood, Jr., I decided to pounce. 

An all-color classic!

Now that I have it in hand, what do I think? Well, it was wise of S'more to include two of Steve's more palatable movies, Lady Godiva Rides and Fugitive Girls, in this collection. Drop Out Wife, on the other hand, is probably Steve's roughest, sleaziest movie. It gets my vote, anyway. Definitely an acquired taste, that one. At least they're all in color. And it's always good to have physical copies of movies (and books and songs), because you never know what might happen to digital ones.

In terms of extras, The Lascivious World is very light. You get trailers for Drop Out Wife and Fugitive Girls, both of them narrated by a woozy, wordy Ed Wood and both highly worth watching. Each film gets a brief image gallery of publicity stills and behind-the-scenes photos—nothing revelatory, but still fun. And there are brief, textual biographies of both Steve Apostolof and Ed Wood. What makes Apostolof's bio interesting is that it seems to be written by some anonymous author who knew Steve personally. He talks about Steve's passion for cinema, immaculate grooming, good sense of humor, and "endless" anecdotes about Ed Wood.

What we're left with are the three movies themselves. I have already covered Drop Out Wife and Fugitive Girls in great detail on this blog, so I will not rehash the plots of those films here. What I'll say is that the versions on The Lascivious World seem to be the exact same ones that appeared on Big Box of Wood. I'd judge these transfers to be... fine. They're perfectly adequate, okay? Bright enough, sharp enough, colorful enough. You can see and hear what's supposed to be happening onscreen. That's not always a given with Ed Wood or Steve Apostolof movies. If you want to talk about color grading, black levels, or compression artifacts, you want another blog entirely.

That leaves us with Lady Godiva Rides. While it's true that Ed Wood was not involved in this production, he did (eventually) work with its two major stars, Marsha Jordan and Harvey Shain, on other projects. And he even gave Godiva a shoutout in one of his own books! In A Study in the Motivation of Censorship, Sex & The Movies, Book  2 (1973), he calls it "a real color spectacular of the old west combined with overtones of the English countryside." And this is when he and Steve were on the outs.

Set in the late 1800s, the film stars softcore legend Marcia Jordan as the descendant of the legendary English noblewoman Lady Godiva. The latter-day Godiva, her blond hair twisted into elaborate curls and piled high upon her head, is cheating on her wealthy but cold husband, Lord Betherli (Mark Delmonde), with the amorous dandy Tom Jones (Shain). When Betherli catches his wife with Tom, Godiva ends up shooting but not killing him and is sentenced to be hanged. But she disguises her appearance, changes her name, and escapes to the American West, where she is sold into prostitution. When her boss/owner Dan Kirby (James Myers) tries to assault her, Tom Jones arrives in the nick of time. It all leads to a classic Western showdown between Jones and Kirby during which Godiva saves the day by imitating her famous ancestor's nude horseback ride.

All of what I've just described takes a small eternity to play out. At an hour and three-quarters, Lady Godiva Rides is Steve Apostolof's longest film, and I would have advised him to cut about 20 minutes out of it, maybe more. On the positive side, especially compared to Drop Out Wife and Fugitive Girls, this is a cheerful, colorful film. In terms of sets and costumes, it's likely Apostolof's most lavish production. And it's a rare hybrid of a costume drama and a Western. But the pace is incredibly sluggish, and scenes drag on long after we've gotten the point. Plus, since many or most of the characters are supposed to be English, the actors talk like Eliza Doolittle in an under-rehearsed community theater production of My Fair Lady. It's "blooming" this and "jolly good" that, which grows wearying quickly. Frankly, Ed Wood could have spiced up this script a bit.

So what's my final verdict? Is The Lascivious World of A.C. Stevens & Ed D. Wood, Jr. an essential buy for Ed Wood fans? No, not even close. It's a multi-disc, multi-film collection with Eddie's name (and badly colorized) picture on the cover, so some devoted Woodologists may want to own it simply as a collectible. I bought this thing for sentimental and symbolic reasons, so I don't regret my purchase.