Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 235: "The Mads Are Back: Bride of the Monster" (2022)

Some lovely artwork by Carmen Cerra for Bride of the Monster.

Much like Dracula, Mystery Science Theater 3000 will never die.

Sure, the long-running comedy series seems to be in limbo for now, with no new "official" episodes produced since December 2022. But the comedians and writers who worked on MST3K have launched similar series of their own and are still wisecracking their way through a wide variety of movies and shorts. In 2020, for example, MST3K veterans Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff launched a pay-per-view web series called The Mads Are Back. It started as a way for Trace and Frank to continue their touring act during the global pandemic, but they've kept the web series going to this very day, amassing four seasons and half a dozen specials so far.

You'd probably expect the films of Edward D. Wood, Jr. to be a part of any series like this, and, true to form, Beaulieu and Conniff have riffed both Glen or Glenda (1953) and Night of the Ghouls (1959) for The Mads Are Back. I was especially interested in screening those episodes because neither film had ever been covered on MST3K proper. On the other hand, I was aware of the fact that Beaulieu and Conniff had also riffed Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster (1955) in 2022. That movie had already been used on MST3K—way back in January 1993, during the show's fourth season on Comedy Central—so I was not as keen to see Bride of the Monster riffed on The Mads Are Back. I mean, what else is there to say about this film?

Podcast Tuesday: "Attractive Female"

Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.

As my cohost and I have made our way through the films of Garry Marshall, I've been reminded time and again of just how different media consumption was in the 1980s and '90s. For one thing, I saw a lot more movies in the theater back then, at least three or four each month. These days, I'll see maybe two or three movies a year on the big screen.

Another big difference was that, in the days before streaming, we were reliant on VHS tapes if we wanted to screen a film at home. Most we rented, a few we owned. This system wasn't all bad. My sister and I had our own VHS copy of Garry Marshall's smash romcom Pretty Woman (1990) and watched it dozens of times. That film simply became part of our consciousness, and we quoted it frequently.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we talk about Pretty Woman. The film was extremely popular in its own time, but how does it hold up in ours? Well, click below to find out.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 234: Something Weird Video Catalog #1 (1995-1996)

If you needed some Ed Wood movies in the '90s, SWV could hook you up.

In the 1990s, there was a tremendous resurgence of interest in Edward D. Wood, Jr. and his films, spurred by the release of Rudolph Grey's oral history Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) and Tim Burton's biopic Ed Wood (1994). Naturally, people wanted to see Eddie's infamous movies for themselves, but the films weren't always easily accessible for on-demand viewing—certainly not to the extent that they are today. This was still the golden age of physical media, so fans were reliant on VHS tapes and, later, DVDs. If you wanted to watch something, you had to own or rent a copy of it.

Wanna watch some weird movies?

Numerous companies stepped in to distribute Ed's movies on home video during this time. In the past, I've argued that Los Angeles' Rhino Home Video was the most significant of these companies. Their Ed Wood releases, complete with faux-retro "Ed Wood Collection" stickers, seemed to occupy the most shelf space at retail outlets like Suncoast, Best Buy, and Sam Goody. My personal Ed Wood indoctrination came through Rhino releases, and I'm positive that the first feature-length Wood documentary I ever saw was Rhino's charmingly kitschy Look Back in Angora (1994). So the company has a special place in my heart. This series of articles might not exist without it. 

But, through years of researching this column, I've learned that there was another quirky home video company in the '90s that played a significant role in finding and releasing Ed Wood's movies. I'm referring to Seattle's legendary Something Weird Video. 

If you're a cult movie fan of any caliber whatsoever, then it's a near-certainty that SWV has been an important part of your movie education. The company specializes in preserving movies that were previously considered worthless, bottom-of-the-barrel junk: low-budget horror, exploitation, and sexploitation films, mainly from the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. Thanks to SWV, the films of Doris Wishman, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Harry Novak, Barry Mahon, Coffin Joe, and more found a new audience among '90s film freaks. And the company has never given up on that mission, even after the death of founder Mike Vraney in 2014. In 2025, conceding to the times, SWV relaunched as a streaming service on the Cultpix website.

In the company's earliest days, long before its "Special Edition" DVDs were available in stores, Something Weird Video was basically a mail-order company. Recently, in the Ed Wood Jr. Facebook forum, Jordan Rapoza posted an excerpt from SWV's first-ever catalog from 1995. After a little digging, I found that the entire catalog had been uploaded to the Internet Archive. To say the least, it's a pretty incredible document, one that instantly transported me back to the days when I was scouring Usenet forums and fanzines for any information I could get about these bizarre, "forbidden" films. I wish I'd held onto more of the catalogs and advertising flyers from those days. Luckily, others did!

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Ed Wood Polo Shirt Odyssey (Guest Author: W. Paul Apel)

What does this humble garment have to do with Ed Wood? Let's find out!

As long as he’s been infamous, Ed Wood has always been linked with clothing. The "worst director of all time" bit has gone hand in hand with the cross-dressing bit since the beginning of his rediscovery in the '80s, almost as if one is a bonus added punchline to the other. Not only did this guy direct Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), goes the legend, but he did it in an angora sweater.

Much has been written about Eddie's passion for women's clothing, including a lot by Eddie himself. He started his career with the semi-autobiographical plea for tolerance, Glen or Glenda (1953), and ended it with stacks of adult paperbacks filled with cross-dressing and gender-bending characters, each clad in outfits Eddie never failed to describe in loving, microscopic detail.

Very little, by comparison, has been written, whether about or by Eddie, concerning men's clothing. And that's the corner of Eddie's closet I’d like to get into today. Let's push aside Eddie's alter ego Shirley's sizable wardrobe and look at what he wore by day. Specifically, his polo shirts.

This odyssey all began with one of the aforementioned adult paperbacks, an adaptation of the Wood-scripted Steven Apostolof flick Orgy of the Dead (1965). Ever since I first read in Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) that this feature length series of striptease acts had been improbably adapted into a piece of literature by Wood himself, and saw the striking cover art by Robert Bonfils, I knew I had to own my own copy someday.

When that day finally came, decades later, I was struck by an oddity among the many photo illustrations. I had heard the tale of how Eddie had absconded with publicity stills taken on the set of Orgy by Robert Charles Wilson for use in this publication, but I wasn't expecting to see, inexplicably, a photo of Eddie himself right there on page 107.

Podcast Tuesday: "TRUE STORY: I'm in a Happy Days Documentary"

Am I an official Cunningham now? No, but I can dream.

I've been putting original content on the internet for over 30 years now, most of it totally for free. I started posting on Usenet newsgroups and AOL forums in the mid-1990s, and I've never stopped creating material (songs, scripts, stories, etc.)  and trying to get it out to the world somehow. It's really just an evolution of what I was doing in junior high and high school. In my pre-internet days, I made little hand-drawn comics and passed them around class. I also wrote for the school newspaper. You'd think the internet would connect me with a much larger audience than I had back then, but so far that's not really been the case. My appeal has always been extremely limited, bordering on nonexistent.

I suppose I hoped that, eventually, something I made would catch on and I'd garner some kind of following. It just never happened for me, though, at least not on any grand scale. Whatever the zeitgeist is, I've never captured it. About a decade ago, I briefly made an attempt at being a professional freelance writer. I got some things published, but again success eluded me. Then, the work dried up altogether and I had to give it up. Still in all, I've been doing this blog since 2009 and These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast since 2018, and I have no plans to stop either one of them any time soon. I'll keep creating and releasing this stuff for as long as I can, even if my only audience is myself.

These days, I'm always surprised and grateful when anyone reads anything I've written, listens to anything I've recorded, or watches anything I've filmed. It's not often that people find my work, but I'm happy when they do. Recently, I was contacted by a production company that was making a documentary about Happy Days for CBS. I'm not exactly sure how they found me, but they did, and they asked me to be a part of their show. This was pretty extraordinary. This week on the podcast, I talk about that experience and what I learned from it. If you're interested in hearing it, just press the play button on the episode below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 233: Let's endure Ed Wood's 'Devil Cult' (1973)

This young lady is either having a great time or a terrible one in Ed Wood's Devil Cult.

I don't know sometimes, you guys.

Since my colleague Greg Javer died last December, I've occasionally found myself wondering what kind of articles he would have written for this series if he had lived. It's impossible to say, since Greg's interests went in so many different directions. There was no aspect of Ed Wood's life or career that escaped his attention. At any given time, Greg might have been pursuing a dozen different threads simultaneously. Occasionally, I'd nag him into turning something he was exploring into an article that I could actually publish on my blog. And he would.

Quite a few of Greg's articles dealt with the loops, i.e. the short, usually silent 8mm pornographic films (both gay and straight), that Ed Wood made in the 1970s. Eddie wrote and/or directed many of these films himself, and especially "hot" scenes from his features like The Young Marrieds (1972) and The Only House in Town (1970) were also marketed separately as loops. These short films were generally sold through mail-order—and none too cheaply, either—so that viewers with their own projectors and screens could watch them in privacy at home. Hey, this was life before the internet, folks.