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| "Are You Heterosexual...?" - Orgy of the Dead (1965) had one of the great taglines of all time. |
"Eddie would go home and tell Kathy everything that happened during the day. She started calling Steve, 'That Bulgarian Bastard! That no good piece of shit!' And just go on and on. If it wasn't for Steve employing Eddie, I don't know what the hell they would have done."
-Actor John Andrews on Ed Wood's relationship with Stephen Apostolof
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| Morticia Addams: sexual archetype. |
Let's get right down to it: sex with dead people. I'm about to discuss a movie called Orgy of the Dead, so there's no getting around the issue. Necrophilia is one of society's most famous and widely agreed-upon sexual taboos. It is, along with bestiality and pedophilia, one of the three fetishes of which Dan Savage officially and unequivocally disapproves. The famed sex columnist's objection to all three is basically the same: a lack of consent on behalf of all involved parties. Simply put, a corpse has no say in the matter. Anything you do to one is essentially rape. But if there's one thing I know about human nature, it's this: the more "taboo" a particular predilection is, the more we become fascinated with it.
As far as necrophilia is concerned, we have found arguably tasteful/acceptable ways of indulging this collective fantasy in the realm of fiction through the creation of characters who are not "living" in a traditional sense but who can talk, move, and think for themselves. Can there be any doubt that this is the underlying appeal of vampires, who were romantic antiheroes long before Stephenie Meyer ever started writing about them? Conceived by novelist Bram Stoker in 1897 and indelibly depicted onscreen by Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in 1931, Count Dracula is far from a passive corpse at the mercy of mortal humans. In fact, he is an aggressor and an instigator... at least during nighttime hours.
In 1938, seven years after Lugosi's performance as the Count in Tod Browning's Dracula, cartoonist Charles Addams introduced, via one of his morbidly funny New Yorker cartoons, a character who would eventually come to be known as Morticia Addams and in so doing popularized a sexual archetype which has been used as as the basic template for any number of similar characters, from Lily Munster and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark to Vampirella and, of course, our very own Vampira. These women, with their pitch-black hair and pale, corpse-like complexions, are vivid manifestations of our erotic fixation with the dead -- sex and death at once!
Ed Wood pretty much lived at the intersection of Sex & Death for his entire career. Take his most famous creation, 1959's Plan 9 from Outer Space. At the nexus of the film's truly convoluted plot is a married couple: an old man (Lugosi) and his much-younger, recently deceased wife (Vampira). Overcome with grief for his wife to the point that he dangerously disregards his own safety and dies in an traffic accident, Lugosi is reminiscent of the brooding, lovestruck characters created by Edgar Allan Poe, an author whose work was also marked by morbid eroticism. It is not coincidental that the old man and his wife are played by performers whose careers hinged on the combination of sex and death. Necrophilia is in the DNA of Plan 9 from Outer Space, as it is with so much of horror culture. It's a theme Eddie would return to again and again in his own films, plus his novels, short stories, and the screenplays he wrote for other directors.
Perhaps the most outstanding example of this tendency in his writing is a 1965 production which would be the first of many collaborations between Wood and an eccentric Bulgarian filmmaker who was nearly as extraordinary a character as Eddie himself.
ORGY OF THE DEAD (1965)
Alternate titles: Nudie Ghoulies, Ghouls & Dolls, Orgy of the Damned
Availability: The film is available as a standalone DVD (Rhino Video, 2004), though this disc is now out-of-print and getting rather pricey. Rhino's edition, with a sharp-looking digital transfer supervised by director Stephen Apostolof, includes the film's theatrical trailer and an exclusive interview with Apostolof. Thankfully, like many of the films discussed in this series, Orgy of the Dead is now also available as part of the Big Box of Wood DVD collection (S'more Entertainment 2011). Supplements there include an introduction by filmmaker Ted Newsom and some silent behind-the-scenes footage from the set of the film.
The backstory: Stephen C. Apostolof (1928-2005) lived one hell of a life. Born in Bulgaria during a time of great political tumult, he saw a Communist regime come to power during his youth and by the tender age of 17 had joined a guerrilla resistance force in a futile effort to curb the Red Menace. (In the first of many parallels, Eddie Wood was about 17 when he joined the Marines to fight in WWII.) Stephen ultimately succumbed to the inevitable and hopped a Finnish freighter to escape his now-shackled homeland just three years later, only to be thrown into a Turkish jail for several months on suspicion of being a spy. From there, within a span of just a few years, he leapfrogged from country to country and lifestyle to lifestyle: Istanbul! Then Paris! A stint in the French Foreign Legion! Westward to Canada! And finally, the promised land.... Los Angeles, USA!
Finding work initially as a bank clerk, Stephen used his newly-acquired financial acumen to gain employment as a production accountant at 20th Century Fox. At the age of 25, only five years after departing Bulgaria, Stephen C. Apostolof was part of the motion picture industry. Interestingly, Apostolof toiled at Fox during roughly the same period that Ed Wood was working as a night production coordinator at Universal. These two men would take vaguely similar career paths. Eddie's debut as a writer/director/actor, Glen or Glenda? (1953), was a highly personal and autobiographical film.
So, too, was Journey to Freedom (1957), an independent film written and produced by Apostolof and based somewhat on his own incredible life story. The cast of Journey included at least one prominent member of the Ed Wood repertory company, Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson, but the true link between Apostolof and Wood was a member of the film's crew, namely our old pal William C. "Bill" Thompson, the one-eyed colorblind cameraman for Glenda, Plan 9, Bride of the Monster, Final Curtain, and The Violent Years.
By the 1960s, Apostolof had adopted the more American-sounding pseudonym A.C. Stephen (sometimes A.C. Stephens) and had transitioned from writing to directing. Like Ed Wood, Steve saw where the film business was going and wanted to take advantage of it. The advent of television hit the motion picture business hard in the 1950s and Hollywood was still scrambling to recover in the next decade. Gimmicks like 3D and Cinerama had lured Americans away from their BarcaLoungers and into the theaters, but only temporarily. (Note the recent revival of 3D and the expansion of IMAX technology as modern-day cognates of the historical phenomenon.) Producers and backers wanted to know: what could movies offer viewers that television couldn't?
The answer, obviously, was sex -- and by "sex," I mean nudity. And by "nudity," I mean topless women. Ed Wood writes a lot about this transition towards sex and nudity in the movie business as part of his semi-autobiographical book, Hollywood Rat Race. Of course, so-called "stag" films and filmed burlesque routines had been around for decades. But in 1959, a photographer turned director named Russ Meyer had given (male) audiences a new kind of diversion with The Immoral Mr. Teas, which was termed a "nudie cutie," i.e. a feature-length narrative with a hint of female nudity (bare breasts and bottoms) but no actual onscreen intercourse.
Nudie cuties became the standard in adult entertainment for a few years in the 1960s, and Meyer was at the forefront of the movement. Mr. Teas may not actually have been the very first of its type*, but it defined the "nudie cutie" subgenre. It wouldn't be long before both Ed and Steve were following Russ Meyer's siren song. While such movies could not necessarily play alongside mainstream fare, they could at least be exhibited more widely and freely than the truly seedy porn films of the past, thanks in some part to lenient rulings on obscenity by the Supreme Court of the United States.
In 1965, Ed was 41 years old, and his directing and producing careers were essentially finished as far as theatrical features were concerned. His principal sources of income were his paperback novels and the very occasional sale of screenplays to low-budget, independent producers. But he had a property he felt was salable: a 19-page script called Nudie Ghoulies which would incorporate topless dancing into a vaguely Gothic, Universal-esque horror scenario. As it happened, Stephen Apostolof was in the market for just such a property. It was Bill Thompson (not long before his passing in 1963) who had first introduced Steve to Eddie and had convinced Apostolof that a partnership with Wood would be mutually beneficial. Ed and Steve's first meeting occurred at -- where else? -- the Brown Derby in Hollywood. Nudie Ghoulies aka Ghouls and Dolls had been moldering in Ed's filing cabinet for a while before Steve agreed to find the financing to turn it into a motion picture.
While the script was entirely Eddie's, Steve (like Donald McCoy before him) had some requests for revisions. The James Bond film Goldfinger (1964) had been a pop culture sensation, and Apostolof wanted to include the image of a woman painted entirely gold somewhere in the movie. Likewise, the Bulgarian filmmaker had been very impressed by some Hawaiian dancers he had seen and requested that Eddie add at least one such performer to the film. Eddie complied eagerly, and he became Apostolof's production manager and assistant casting director on the film as well.
For the central role of the Emperor, a spectral ruler who presides over the dead from his throne in a graveyard, Eddie recruited one of his old cronies: the eccentric TV psychic Criswell, whose delirious presence had previously graced Plan 9 from Outer Space and Night of the Ghouls. Director Apostolof agreed to hire the infamous Indiana-born prognosticator, perhaps because Criswell had gained national fame through talk show appearances and could thus attract attention to a small, independent film. Steve ultimately regretted this decision, as he found working with the dotty, absent-minded "son of a bitch" Criswell -- who never knew his lines (his cue-card reading is obvious throughout Orgy) and would occasionally fall asleep in his coffin -- quite a chore. Still in all, Cris did his part for the film, promoting it enthusiastically during his appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and even helping to name the picture.
Since Steve declared Ed's original titles (Nudie Ghoulies and Ghouls and Dolls) unsatisfactory for his film, Criswell suggested Orgy of the Damned. Apostolof refined this to Orgy of the Dead, the title under which it was released and is still known today.
Ed Wood himself was on set for at least part of the making of Orgy of the Dead, though his drinking was getting the best of him by 1965. Stephen Apostolof later told Rudolph Grey that he had to send Eddie home one day because he was too drunk on Old Crow bourbon to work . But there are still-existent photographs and 8mm home movies which show a smiling Ed as part of the Orgy crew, which also included Ted V. Mikels, who in a few years' time would be directing cult films of his own, like The Astro-Zombies (1968) and The Corpse Grinders (1971).
For his part, Eddie was thrilled to be a member of the Orgy team. In Hollywood Rat Race, which was written around the same time this movie was released (but not published for several decades), he wrote about the production with modest enthusiasm, commenting along the way about his writing career and the changing face of motion pictures:
As for the nudity issue, topless dancing accounts for about 75% of the movie's running time. The script's threadbare plot does not make a great attempt to justify the nudity or incorporate it into the story. It's just sort of there. Finally, while I agree with Ed that the film looks magnificent, I would give the credit to ace cinematographer Robert Caramico (Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive; an astonishing 123 episodes of TV's Dallas) and the design team of Robert Lathrop and Ernest Bouvenkamp (neither of whom ever worked on a movie again), as much as the film's director. In the supplemental material on the Orgy DVD, Apostolof admitted that he knew little about the technical aspects of filmmaking and said he was happy to delegate those responsibilities to others. What did he bring to the production, then? "Feeling," he said, something which one cannot learn in film school.
As befits an Ed Wood movie, the making of Orgy of the Dead was typically scattershot and chaotic, mostly due to the personalities of its cast members. The film's loose plot follows a horror author named Bob (producer William Bates) who drags his skeptical girlfriend, Shirley (Pat Barringer), along with him when he visits an old cemetery to get inspiration for his next scary story. After a vaguely-implied car crash, the couple find themselves on the outskirts of a mysterious, fog-shrouded graveyard from which odd music is emanating.
Following this sound, they happen upon a bizarre, cult-like ritual in which the Emperor of the Dead (Criswell) and his assistant, the Princess of Darkness (Fawn Silver -- an exciting new discovery in the Vampira tradition), sit in judgment over the souls of those hovering between life and death. These unfortunate beings, all female, must dance topless for the Emperor to gain his approval. Watching the proceedings from a distance, Bob and Shirley are captured by the Emperor's henchmen, the Mummy (Lou Ojena) and the Werewolf (John Andrews). The two are tied to twin monuments in the cemetery and forced to watch the rest of the ritual, escaping doom only when the morning sun reduces the Emperor and his ilk to lifeless skeletons.
The topless dance routines, ten in all, take up the vast majority of Orgy's running time and were performed by models and go-go dancers from the Los Angeles entertainment scene. One such neophyte actress, pin-up girl and topless dancer Pat Barringer (who can also be seen in Russ Meyer's 1966 film Mondo Topless), did double duty in this film, playing not only the romantic lead character of Shirley (which was Ed Wood's drag name), but also one of the poor women who dance for Criswell. In fact, she ended up being the gold-painted girl that Apostolof had requested. Fellow cast member John Andrews was not a fan of this would-be diva. "Poor Pat Barringer," he told Rudy Grey. "She had the Lou Ojena syndrome. She thought she was going to be a big fucking star. And she couldn't even scream and make it convincing. She couldn't do shit. And those tits are plastic, by the way." While Ms. Barringer worked steadily in low-budget films throughout the mid-to-late 1960s, her screen career evaporated before the dawn of the 1970s. Big fucking stardom eluded her, as it did everyone else in the cast. Several of the dancers, though, did reemerge in a subsequent Apostolof film, The Bachelor's Dreams (1967). And, of course, Eddie and Steve's professional association would continue for over a decade.
Perhaps the most outstanding example of this tendency in his writing is a 1965 production which would be the first of many collaborations between Wood and an eccentric Bulgarian filmmaker who was nearly as extraordinary a character as Eddie himself.
ORGY OF THE DEAD (1965)
Alternate titles: Nudie Ghoulies, Ghouls & Dolls, Orgy of the Damned
Availability: The film is available as a standalone DVD (Rhino Video, 2004), though this disc is now out-of-print and getting rather pricey. Rhino's edition, with a sharp-looking digital transfer supervised by director Stephen Apostolof, includes the film's theatrical trailer and an exclusive interview with Apostolof. Thankfully, like many of the films discussed in this series, Orgy of the Dead is now also available as part of the Big Box of Wood DVD collection (S'more Entertainment 2011). Supplements there include an introduction by filmmaker Ted Newsom and some silent behind-the-scenes footage from the set of the film.
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| The film that brought Ed & Steve together. |
Finding work initially as a bank clerk, Stephen used his newly-acquired financial acumen to gain employment as a production accountant at 20th Century Fox. At the age of 25, only five years after departing Bulgaria, Stephen C. Apostolof was part of the motion picture industry. Interestingly, Apostolof toiled at Fox during roughly the same period that Ed Wood was working as a night production coordinator at Universal. These two men would take vaguely similar career paths. Eddie's debut as a writer/director/actor, Glen or Glenda? (1953), was a highly personal and autobiographical film.
So, too, was Journey to Freedom (1957), an independent film written and produced by Apostolof and based somewhat on his own incredible life story. The cast of Journey included at least one prominent member of the Ed Wood repertory company, Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson, but the true link between Apostolof and Wood was a member of the film's crew, namely our old pal William C. "Bill" Thompson, the one-eyed colorblind cameraman for Glenda, Plan 9, Bride of the Monster, Final Curtain, and The Violent Years.
"I am tired of this usual type of entertainment. I want a decided change."
-Criswell in Orgy of the Dead (1965)
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| Apostolof saw where movies were headed in the '60s. |
The answer, obviously, was sex -- and by "sex," I mean nudity. And by "nudity," I mean topless women. Ed Wood writes a lot about this transition towards sex and nudity in the movie business as part of his semi-autobiographical book, Hollywood Rat Race. Of course, so-called "stag" films and filmed burlesque routines had been around for decades. But in 1959, a photographer turned director named Russ Meyer had given (male) audiences a new kind of diversion with The Immoral Mr. Teas, which was termed a "nudie cutie," i.e. a feature-length narrative with a hint of female nudity (bare breasts and bottoms) but no actual onscreen intercourse.
Nudie cuties became the standard in adult entertainment for a few years in the 1960s, and Meyer was at the forefront of the movement. Mr. Teas may not actually have been the very first of its type*, but it defined the "nudie cutie" subgenre. It wouldn't be long before both Ed and Steve were following Russ Meyer's siren song. While such movies could not necessarily play alongside mainstream fare, they could at least be exhibited more widely and freely than the truly seedy porn films of the past, thanks in some part to lenient rulings on obscenity by the Supreme Court of the United States.
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| Goldfinger (1964) inspired one of Orgy's scenes. |
While the script was entirely Eddie's, Steve (like Donald McCoy before him) had some requests for revisions. The James Bond film Goldfinger (1964) had been a pop culture sensation, and Apostolof wanted to include the image of a woman painted entirely gold somewhere in the movie. Likewise, the Bulgarian filmmaker had been very impressed by some Hawaiian dancers he had seen and requested that Eddie add at least one such performer to the film. Eddie complied eagerly, and he became Apostolof's production manager and assistant casting director on the film as well.
For the central role of the Emperor, a spectral ruler who presides over the dead from his throne in a graveyard, Eddie recruited one of his old cronies: the eccentric TV psychic Criswell, whose delirious presence had previously graced Plan 9 from Outer Space and Night of the Ghouls. Director Apostolof agreed to hire the infamous Indiana-born prognosticator, perhaps because Criswell had gained national fame through talk show appearances and could thus attract attention to a small, independent film. Steve ultimately regretted this decision, as he found working with the dotty, absent-minded "son of a bitch" Criswell -- who never knew his lines (his cue-card reading is obvious throughout Orgy) and would occasionally fall asleep in his coffin -- quite a chore. Still in all, Cris did his part for the film, promoting it enthusiastically during his appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and even helping to name the picture.
Since Steve declared Ed's original titles (Nudie Ghoulies and Ghouls and Dolls) unsatisfactory for his film, Criswell suggested Orgy of the Damned. Apostolof refined this to Orgy of the Dead, the title under which it was released and is still known today.
Ed Wood himself was on set for at least part of the making of Orgy of the Dead, though his drinking was getting the best of him by 1965. Stephen Apostolof later told Rudolph Grey that he had to send Eddie home one day because he was too drunk on Old Crow bourbon to work . But there are still-existent photographs and 8mm home movies which show a smiling Ed as part of the Orgy crew, which also included Ted V. Mikels, who in a few years' time would be directing cult films of his own, like The Astro-Zombies (1968) and The Corpse Grinders (1971).
For his part, Eddie was thrilled to be a member of the Orgy team. In Hollywood Rat Race, which was written around the same time this movie was released (but not published for several decades), he wrote about the production with modest enthusiasm, commenting along the way about his writing career and the changing face of motion pictures:
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| Ed's tie-in novel from 1966. |
Perhaps none of our films have, so far, been up for awards, But they are entertaining pictures. Our newly released Orgy of the Dead will be a pleasant surprise; it was filmed using a wide screen process and exciting color. It could well become a classic in its field. As well as enjoying the film, you might like to read my novel from which the screenplay was written. (It, too, is entitled Orgy of the Dead.)
Of course, the legitimate, independent producer has been forced to change with the times also. We've had to use a certain amount of nudity along with realistic violence in our pictures. However, we try not to put in nudity for nudity's sake. If nudity is used for ultraviolence, it has to mean something to the progression of the story. This is the same reasoning by which the major studios arrive at their decisions.
And it is not always an easy decision to come by. What may look excellent on paper may look pretty crummy on the screen. By the same token, the reverse is true. From where I stood beside the camera, watching a director with a series of dancers, they looked pretty bad, but when the film was shown, it turned out to be a classic of beauty and grace -- a credit to the director, certainly not to the writer: me! (pgs. 115-116)Those who have already seen Orgy of the Dead will find some points of interest in Ed's account of the film's prodction. First, the tie-in paperback appeared in 1966, a year after the movie's debut. It incorporated several of Ed's already-existing short stories, including "Final Curtain," "The Day the Mummy Danced," and "The Night the Banshee Cried." Second, although this book and the Orgy of the Dead trailer both describe the film as being in widescreen, all of the transfers I've ever seen (one on VHS; two on DVD) have been 1.33:1.
As for the nudity issue, topless dancing accounts for about 75% of the movie's running time. The script's threadbare plot does not make a great attempt to justify the nudity or incorporate it into the story. It's just sort of there. Finally, while I agree with Ed that the film looks magnificent, I would give the credit to ace cinematographer Robert Caramico (Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive; an astonishing 123 episodes of TV's Dallas) and the design team of Robert Lathrop and Ernest Bouvenkamp (neither of whom ever worked on a movie again), as much as the film's director. In the supplemental material on the Orgy DVD, Apostolof admitted that he knew little about the technical aspects of filmmaking and said he was happy to delegate those responsibilities to others. What did he bring to the production, then? "Feeling," he said, something which one cannot learn in film school.
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| Pat Barringer wanted to be "a big fucking star." |
Following this sound, they happen upon a bizarre, cult-like ritual in which the Emperor of the Dead (Criswell) and his assistant, the Princess of Darkness (Fawn Silver -- an exciting new discovery in the Vampira tradition), sit in judgment over the souls of those hovering between life and death. These unfortunate beings, all female, must dance topless for the Emperor to gain his approval. Watching the proceedings from a distance, Bob and Shirley are captured by the Emperor's henchmen, the Mummy (Lou Ojena) and the Werewolf (John Andrews). The two are tied to twin monuments in the cemetery and forced to watch the rest of the ritual, escaping doom only when the morning sun reduces the Emperor and his ilk to lifeless skeletons.
The topless dance routines, ten in all, take up the vast majority of Orgy's running time and were performed by models and go-go dancers from the Los Angeles entertainment scene. One such neophyte actress, pin-up girl and topless dancer Pat Barringer (who can also be seen in Russ Meyer's 1966 film Mondo Topless), did double duty in this film, playing not only the romantic lead character of Shirley (which was Ed Wood's drag name), but also one of the poor women who dance for Criswell. In fact, she ended up being the gold-painted girl that Apostolof had requested. Fellow cast member John Andrews was not a fan of this would-be diva. "Poor Pat Barringer," he told Rudy Grey. "She had the Lou Ojena syndrome. She thought she was going to be a big fucking star. And she couldn't even scream and make it convincing. She couldn't do shit. And those tits are plastic, by the way." While Ms. Barringer worked steadily in low-budget films throughout the mid-to-late 1960s, her screen career evaporated before the dawn of the 1970s. Big fucking stardom eluded her, as it did everyone else in the cast. Several of the dancers, though, did reemerge in a subsequent Apostolof film, The Bachelor's Dreams (1967). And, of course, Eddie and Steve's professional association would continue for over a decade.
* Fascinatingly, Ed Wood might have been the pseudonymous author of a slightly earlier nudie cutie, an oddball topless western called Revenge of the Virgins (1959), directed by Peter Perry, Jr. Time permitting, I may eventually cover this film as part of an article on the Ed Wood apocrypha.
The viewing experience: Sort of like eating an entire wedding cake in one sitting. A delight when savored in small portions, Orgy of the Dead can be excruciating when consumed in its entirety without a break. Rob Craig, author of the incredibly thorough guidebook Ed Wood, Mad Genius: A Study of the Films, declares that this film inspires both intense love and fierce hatred among viewers. I'd suggest that those who fall into the latter category have made the fatal mistake of trying to watch all of Orgy of the Dead in a single session with the expectation that the film's story will eventually pick up.
At roughly 90 minutes, this film is substantially longer than Plan 9 from Outer Space or Glen or Glenda?, yet it takes place almost entirely in one setting and is extremely repetitive and slow-moving. Therefore, many viewers will find the film utterly maddening and almost perversely tedious. Craig astutely points out that, for most of the film, the characters of Bob and Shirley are tied up and forced to watch the proceedings against their will and thus act as surrogates for the tortured audience.
So why should one bother with Orgy of the Dead at all? Because it is a magnificent, one-of-a-kind film which could only have come from Ed Wood. In its utter strangeness, Orgy rivals even the unclassifiable Glenda. I have already written an article for the Zed Word Zombie Blog in which I semi-seriously suggest that the movie's strange structure is based on the format of a late night talk show. We have all the essentials: a host (Criswell) who starts the proceedings with a monologue, a subservient sidekick (the Princess of Darkness), numerous guests (the dancers), and an audience (Bob and Shirley).
In addition to serving as a Vaudeville-esque comedy team with their famous "Cleopatra and the snake" routine, the Mummy and the Werewolf also function as the host's backstage crew. It is suggested that the Mummy is the one who has been selecting the various women who emerge into the graveyard to dance for Criswell's approval, just as standup comics once hoped to win a thumbs-up from Johnny Carson. We are also told that there are many more souls who are waiting for an audience with the Emperor but that they will have to be dismissed for now. This is reminiscent of The Tonight Show's famed green room, where guests wait until they are summoned to the set. Apparently, if this film is to be believed, there is a "green room of the damned" in the shadowy void between life and death.
Of course, as on talk shows, there is a great deal of discussion of time in Orgy of the Dead, specifically how much of it is left. Unfortunately for them -- and luckily for us -- many of the Emperor's prospective "guests" are bumped from the evening's lineup. They share this fate with many would-be talk show guests who never make it to the panel with the host.
Certainly, like any good late night chat show, Orgy knows the importance of a flashy, eye-catching set. I said previously that most of the film's action is limited to one single location -- and it is -- but what a location! The phony cemetery in this film is so rich with details -- headstones, cobwebs, monuments, vampire bats (lifeless and rubbery), crypts, and a constantly-working fog machine -- that it has eclipsed even the patently false graveyard from Plan 9 in my imagination. If I ever become insanely, unfairly wealthy, I will have this entire set reconstructed in my home. That is a promise.
Much has already been written by others about the film's acting and its wonderfully ludicrous script, so I will attempt to be brief when addressing these points. If viewers become frustrated with the circular nature of Orgy of the Dead, I suggest a simple remedy: fast-forward through the nude dancing to get to the dialogue. You will find much to savor here. Criswell begins the film with the third iteration of Eddie's "monsters to be pitied" speech. Getting longer and more ornate with each appearance, this bit of cosmic doggerel began as simple onscreen text in Final Curtain (1957), then was recited by Criswell in Night of the Ghouls (1959), and is again performed by Criswell here in what must be considered the speech's final form. I can recite it by heart, should anyone ever need me to do so. Other famous Criswell lines are here as well:
Among the other performers, clearly the most intriguing is Fawn Silver (aka Fawn Silverton) as the pale-skinned Princess of Darkness. An obvious attempt by Wood and Apostolof to manufacture a new Vampira, she is the film's most compelling and dynamic character, and the scenes in which she erotically menaces Shirley with a knife are the dramatic highlights of the entire production. It's a pity Silver's screen career wasn't longer.
It's easy to see, however, why neither Pat Barringer nor William Bates really made it in the movies. She's mannered and whiny here, while he has the personality of drywall. Like Anthony Cardoza and Tony McCoy, Bates was a pay-to-play performer who got a plum role in the production because he helped fund it. Barringer, of course, was hired for her surgically-enhanced chest and perfunctory dancing skills.
Together, these two zeroes somehow add up to one, as Bob and Shirley are among my favorite couples in the entire Ed Wood canon. It helps that Ed assigns them some of the film's ripest dialogue. (Example: "Your puritan upbringing holds you back from my monsters, but it certainly doesn't hurt your art of kissing." "That's life. My kisses are alive.") Being completely hopeless as actors, they read these lines in a very flat, literal way, like schoolkids reluctantly taking part in a holiday pageant.
And if those two weren't enough, Wood has given us another extraordinary couple with the Mummy and the Wolfman, cheapskate replicas of characters from the more innocent Universal horror films that Ed grew up loving. They really don't belong in Orgy of the Dead -- which, paradoxically, is exactly why they belong in Orgy of the Dead. The Mummy's dialogue is very badly and strangely dubbed, while the Wolfman seems to communicate only in grunts and howls. (When he howls, of course, actor John Andrews tilts back his head and inadvertently reveals his neck under the mask.)
As for the dancers themselves, who have the lion's share of the screen time, their quality varies. Some observers have declared that Orgy utterly fails as erotica, but I would not necessarily agree with that assessment. Indeed, at least two of the dancers -- Colleen O'Brien (Street Walker Dance) and Nadejda Dobrev (Slave Dance) -- are quite sexy, and all of the women are pleasing to look at as they gyrate in the near-nude for our entertainment. The dances go on too long, and the number of performers probably should have been trimmed from ten to, say, six or seven. One definite keeper is Texas Starr, who performs her memorable Cat Dance in a ridiculous full-body cat costume to the strains of a song which is as close to legally possible to "Alley Cat" without actually being "Alley Cat." The scene and the music are so unabashedly comic that they completely break the spooky, eerie vibe the film had been attempting to cultivate.
The film's uncredited score, is by Bolivian composer Jaime Mendoza-Nava, who also worked on such well-known films as The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) and The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972). While author Rob Craig is highly critical of Mendoza-Nava's work, dismissing it as schlock, I unabashedly love this faux-exotic "lounge lizard" Muzak and am a proud owner of the Orgy of the Dead soundtrack album (Strangelove Records, 1995). Here, you will find Spanish bullfighting themes, a truly lovely Arabian melody (reminiscent of the one Tchaikovsky wrote for The Nutcracker) carried by the oboe and accented with finger cymbals, a trumpet-heavy funeral dirge, patently counterfeit "Native American" chanting ("Ya-ho! Wa-ho!"), Mancini-style pop jazz, sleazy burlesque "bump 'n' grind" music, and much more. What's not to love?
Before I leave Orgy of the Dead, I'd like to point out the way that Ed Wood's script uncannily presages two prime examples of midnight cinema, namely Hal Warren's "Manos" The Hands of Fate (1966) and Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
From the first time I saw Orgy on VHS in the 1990s, I could not help but notice how similar Bob and Shirley were to Brad and Janet from Rocky Horror. A prototypical all-American couple, they have car trouble, go searching for a telephone, and wind up witnessing and participating in a night of supernatural debauchery. Their squareness, naivete, and total misreading of the situation ("Could it be some kind of college initiation?") make Bob and Shirley the spiritual ancestors of Brad and Janet. The classic 1930s and 1940s horror films of Universal are repeatedly evoked by both Orgy and Rocky as well.
Meanwhile, just like the infamous "Manos," Orgy of the Dead features pagan rituals, human sacrifice, and a weirdly sexual cult in which women vie for the affections of a robe-wearing older man. (The cape in Orgy, by the way, was supposedly Bela Lugosi's from Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. Believe that if you choose. I do.) Even Criswell's title, the Emperor, is suggestive of the Master from "Manos." More intriguing yet is the complicated relationship between the Emperor and the Princess, which grows more antagonistic as the night wears on. The plots of both Orgy and "Manos" unfold with Aristotelian unity over the course of a single evening. Fawn Silver repeatedly petitions her boss, Criswell, for her "own pleasures," just as Torgo ceaselessly begs the Master to grant him a bride.
For these reasons (and others), Orgy of the Dead would make an ideal double feature with either Warren's film or Sharman's film... if someone could just cut it down to 60 minutes.
At roughly 90 minutes, this film is substantially longer than Plan 9 from Outer Space or Glen or Glenda?, yet it takes place almost entirely in one setting and is extremely repetitive and slow-moving. Therefore, many viewers will find the film utterly maddening and almost perversely tedious. Craig astutely points out that, for most of the film, the characters of Bob and Shirley are tied up and forced to watch the proceedings against their will and thus act as surrogates for the tortured audience.
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| Did Johnny Carson's Tonight Show inspire Ed Wood? |
In addition to serving as a Vaudeville-esque comedy team with their famous "Cleopatra and the snake" routine, the Mummy and the Werewolf also function as the host's backstage crew. It is suggested that the Mummy is the one who has been selecting the various women who emerge into the graveyard to dance for Criswell's approval, just as standup comics once hoped to win a thumbs-up from Johnny Carson. We are also told that there are many more souls who are waiting for an audience with the Emperor but that they will have to be dismissed for now. This is reminiscent of The Tonight Show's famed green room, where guests wait until they are summoned to the set. Apparently, if this film is to be believed, there is a "green room of the damned" in the shadowy void between life and death.
Of course, as on talk shows, there is a great deal of discussion of time in Orgy of the Dead, specifically how much of it is left. Unfortunately for them -- and luckily for us -- many of the Emperor's prospective "guests" are bumped from the evening's lineup. They share this fate with many would-be talk show guests who never make it to the panel with the host.
Certainly, like any good late night chat show, Orgy knows the importance of a flashy, eye-catching set. I said previously that most of the film's action is limited to one single location -- and it is -- but what a location! The phony cemetery in this film is so rich with details -- headstones, cobwebs, monuments, vampire bats (lifeless and rubbery), crypts, and a constantly-working fog machine -- that it has eclipsed even the patently false graveyard from Plan 9 in my imagination. If I ever become insanely, unfairly wealthy, I will have this entire set reconstructed in my home. That is a promise.
Much has already been written by others about the film's acting and its wonderfully ludicrous script, so I will attempt to be brief when addressing these points. If viewers become frustrated with the circular nature of Orgy of the Dead, I suggest a simple remedy: fast-forward through the nude dancing to get to the dialogue. You will find much to savor here. Criswell begins the film with the third iteration of Eddie's "monsters to be pitied" speech. Getting longer and more ornate with each appearance, this bit of cosmic doggerel began as simple onscreen text in Final Curtain (1957), then was recited by Criswell in Night of the Ghouls (1959), and is again performed by Criswell here in what must be considered the speech's final form. I can recite it by heart, should anyone ever need me to do so. Other famous Criswell lines are here as well:
- "Torture! Torture! It pleasures me!"
- "A pussycat is born to be whooped."
- "No one wishes to see a man dance."
- "Throw gold at her! More gold! More gold!! MORE GOLD!!!"
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| Two marvelous couples in Orgy of the Dead. |
It's easy to see, however, why neither Pat Barringer nor William Bates really made it in the movies. She's mannered and whiny here, while he has the personality of drywall. Like Anthony Cardoza and Tony McCoy, Bates was a pay-to-play performer who got a plum role in the production because he helped fund it. Barringer, of course, was hired for her surgically-enhanced chest and perfunctory dancing skills.
Together, these two zeroes somehow add up to one, as Bob and Shirley are among my favorite couples in the entire Ed Wood canon. It helps that Ed assigns them some of the film's ripest dialogue. (Example: "Your puritan upbringing holds you back from my monsters, but it certainly doesn't hurt your art of kissing." "That's life. My kisses are alive.") Being completely hopeless as actors, they read these lines in a very flat, literal way, like schoolkids reluctantly taking part in a holiday pageant.
And if those two weren't enough, Wood has given us another extraordinary couple with the Mummy and the Wolfman, cheapskate replicas of characters from the more innocent Universal horror films that Ed grew up loving. They really don't belong in Orgy of the Dead -- which, paradoxically, is exactly why they belong in Orgy of the Dead. The Mummy's dialogue is very badly and strangely dubbed, while the Wolfman seems to communicate only in grunts and howls. (When he howls, of course, actor John Andrews tilts back his head and inadvertently reveals his neck under the mask.)
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| Lovely still of Nadejda Dobrev on the set of Orgy. |
The film's uncredited score, is by Bolivian composer Jaime Mendoza-Nava, who also worked on such well-known films as The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) and The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972). While author Rob Craig is highly critical of Mendoza-Nava's work, dismissing it as schlock, I unabashedly love this faux-exotic "lounge lizard" Muzak and am a proud owner of the Orgy of the Dead soundtrack album (Strangelove Records, 1995). Here, you will find Spanish bullfighting themes, a truly lovely Arabian melody (reminiscent of the one Tchaikovsky wrote for The Nutcracker) carried by the oboe and accented with finger cymbals, a trumpet-heavy funeral dirge, patently counterfeit "Native American" chanting ("Ya-ho! Wa-ho!"), Mancini-style pop jazz, sleazy burlesque "bump 'n' grind" music, and much more. What's not to love?
Before I leave Orgy of the Dead, I'd like to point out the way that Ed Wood's script uncannily presages two prime examples of midnight cinema, namely Hal Warren's "Manos" The Hands of Fate (1966) and Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
From the first time I saw Orgy on VHS in the 1990s, I could not help but notice how similar Bob and Shirley were to Brad and Janet from Rocky Horror. A prototypical all-American couple, they have car trouble, go searching for a telephone, and wind up witnessing and participating in a night of supernatural debauchery. Their squareness, naivete, and total misreading of the situation ("Could it be some kind of college initiation?") make Bob and Shirley the spiritual ancestors of Brad and Janet. The classic 1930s and 1940s horror films of Universal are repeatedly evoked by both Orgy and Rocky as well.
Meanwhile, just like the infamous "Manos," Orgy of the Dead features pagan rituals, human sacrifice, and a weirdly sexual cult in which women vie for the affections of a robe-wearing older man. (The cape in Orgy, by the way, was supposedly Bela Lugosi's from Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. Believe that if you choose. I do.) Even Criswell's title, the Emperor, is suggestive of the Master from "Manos." More intriguing yet is the complicated relationship between the Emperor and the Princess, which grows more antagonistic as the night wears on. The plots of both Orgy and "Manos" unfold with Aristotelian unity over the course of a single evening. Fawn Silver repeatedly petitions her boss, Criswell, for her "own pleasures," just as Torgo ceaselessly begs the Master to grant him a bride.
For these reasons (and others), Orgy of the Dead would make an ideal double feature with either Warren's film or Sharman's film... if someone could just cut it down to 60 minutes.
NEXT WEEK: Orgy of the Dead would prove to be Criswell's last appearance in any film, Ed Wood-related or otherwise, although he would loan Eddie one of his caskets for Necromania (1971), a film we'll get to in due time. But Ed and Cris were good friends off the set as well, and the outlandish prognosticator looms large in the Ed Wood legend. So I thought it was only fitting that I should devote at least one week of this project to the strange, wonderful career of Jeron Criswell Koning aka Jeron Criswell King aka Charles Criswell King aka The Amazing Criswell. While the famed psychic's Los Angeles-based television show seems not to have survived into our time, one can still track down the great man's bestselling books from the late 1960s. And this I have done, my friends. In a week's time, you can read all about my findings as I explore the fascinating and mind-boggling world of... CRISWELL PREDICTS!
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