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| The book that changed my life. Maybe for the worse. |
Sometime in my early adolescence, I devised a very handy method for finding the weird and outrageous movies I'd been craving all my life. I'd simply flip through video guides and look for all the one-star and zero-star reviews, making sure to note the titles, directors, and actors. This is how I found out about Herschel Gordon Lewis, Russ Meyer, John Waters, and, yes, Ed Wood. Armed with some promising leads, I'd head down to one of several video stores in the area and start hunting. (Or, failing that, I'd look through the TV listings to see what was playing in the wee small hours.)
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| The guru: Danny Peary. |
This strange technique of mine worked because, back then, movie critics were much more square and stodgy than they are today. In their reviews, they were generally aiming for what I'd call middlebrow respectability. (Think: Merchant-Ivory films. Classy but not too demanding.) They were allergic to the kind of stuff I was looking for—trashy movies with lots of sex, violence, surrealism, and bad taste. But the authors of video guides reviewed everything, whether they wanted to or not. Learning about what they hated taught me about what I loved.
Then, in high school, I hit the motherlode. At the late, much-missed Young & Welshans bookstore in Flint, MI, I found a copy of Danny Peary's seminal 1981 tome, Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful. Peary didn't even bother covering "normal" mainstream movies; his book was wall-to-wall weirdness. Just what I'd always wanted! And these weren't mere capsule reviews like I'd find in the video guides. These were lengthy, illustrated essays, complete with cast lists and plot summaries. The author would give a brief history of the film alongside analysis and commentary. I felt like I'd died and gone to heaven.
While I had first seen Ed Wood's name in print in those video guides, it was Peary's Cult Movies, specifically his four-and-a-half-page essay about Plan 9 from Outer Space, that truly made me want to seek out Eddie's work. Without Danny's book, this series of articles (and possibly this entire blog) would never have happened. Who knows? I might be doing something profitable with my life today.
In those primitive, pre-internet, pre-streaming days, Danny Peary was a hero to an entire generation of information-starved film freaks who wanted to explore the world of offbeat cinema. The curmudgeonly critic was an unlikely tour guide, though, since he often seemed at odds with the material he was covering. My copy of Cult Movies, for instance, has this quote from Playboy emblazoned on the cover:
"Wild bunches of film freaks would brave the badlands of a forbidden planet for a compendium like this!"
A nice thought, but Danny gave largely negative reviews to The Wild Bunch (1969), Badlands (1973), and even Forbidden Planet (1956). Of the films cited in that Playboy quote, only Freaks (1932) met with Peary's approval. Danny was no fan of H.G. Lewis, Russ Meyer, or John Waters either, and he had little affection for arguably the biggest cult movie of them all, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
So where does he stand on Ed Wood? I decided to revisit Peary's Plan 9 essay and find out. His cast and crew credits are accurate, as is his plot summary. No quibbles there. As for the essay part, we must remember that Cult Movies came out soon after Harry and Michael Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards (1980), the book that crowned Ed Wood the worst director of all time and Plan 9 the worst film of all time. The popularity of the Golden Turkey book is the main reason Plan 9 is being covered in Cult Movies at all. Naturally, then, Peary largely follows the Medveds' lead and parrots a lot of what they had to say about Plan 9 being so cheap, flimsy, and ludicrous that it's perversely entertaining.
If there's one line from Peary's essay that has stayed with me through the years, it's this one: "As bad as it is, Plan 9 is, except for about a hundred dull spots, a lot of fun." After screening the movie dozens of times for research purposes, I know what he means. For the most part, Peary points out the same continuity errors and silly dialogue that other critics point out, but there are a few examples that are unique to this essay. I'm sure, for instance, it was Peary who made me notice this underappreciated line from Rev. Lyn Lemon: "The bell has rung upon his great career." And Peary is the only critic in history to note that Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott) "goes off on a several-day trip with a teeny overnight bag." I also like Cult Movies' description of the infamous cockpit set: "the type of set used by improv groups."
Along the way, Peary repeats some long-debunked canards about Ed Wood and his films, again getting his dubious information third-hand from the Medveds. No, Eddie did not storm an enemy beach in World War II while wearing a bra and panties under his uniform. And, no, the flying saucers in Plan 9 are not paper plates. But that's what people thought 40 years ago. Also, Paul Marco's character is Kelton, not Calvin, as Peary has it.
Peary also floats the theory that perhaps Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi were working on two different movies at the end of Lugosi's life. He thinks the footage of Lugosi at his wife's funeral and the footage of Lugosi entering the Trents' house and frightening Paula (Mona McKinnon) are from separate projects. Interesting notion, but I don't know that there's evidence to support it.
Peary has some amusing comments about Ed Wood's stock players. Of Criswell, whom he compares to Billy Graham, he opines: "This man belongs in a booby hatch." Of Tor Johnson, he says: "This is the only time I recall he was trusted with dialogue. He is no Leslie Howard." (Peary also recalls Johnson's "exciting" guest role on a 1960 episode of Peter Gunn that I may have to check out. For the record, it's from the show's second season and is called "See No Evil.") His comments about Vampira are quite intriguing: "Her looks remind me a great deal of Carol Borland, Lugosi's costar in Tod Browning's Mark of the Vampire (1935)—except that Borland has screen presence and Vampira just looks like she has anorexia." Unkindness of that remark aside, the connection to Borland is aptly noted. Browning even films Borland approaching the camera with her fingers extended, just the way Wood does with Vampira in Plan 9. And the physical resemblance—the pale skin, the dark lips, the long, straight hair—is uncanny.
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| Blood sisters: Carol Borland in Mark of the Vampire; Vampira in Plan 9 from Outer Space. |
Where the review really gets interesting for me is right at the end, where Danny Peary semi-archly suggests we have misinterpreted Ed Wood's movie all these years. "Could it be," Peary writes, "that putting up a crazy façade is the only way that Wood can get away with making a subversive movie?" After all, the author points out, this is a movie in which the U.S. government wrongly suppresses evidence of UFOs and aliens, prevents Jeff from reporting what he knows, and even covers up the destruction of an entire town.
And Peary is one of the few critics who points out what I have long felt: that the snooty alien Eros (Dudley Manlove) is actually right, even though he's treated as a villain. "Only the fact that he has a diabolical laugh and a lot of conceit covers up that what he says to [the earthlings] makes sense." In reality, the nuclear arms race really has gotten out of control and could still lead to the end of the world. (We are currently 100 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock.) This passage, more than any other, turned me into an Ed Wood fan before I'd seen a second of any of his movies.
Danny Peary's Cult Movies is an important part of my past and a book that I hope fans will continue to rediscover for years to come. Its availability, apart from libraries, is a little dubious right now. You can read it and its 1983 sequel at The Internet Archive, though Cult Movies 3 (1989) is AWOL there. In the Kindle store, you can (and should) buy four short "samplers" that pull reviews from all three Cult Movies books. But used paperback and even hardback copies of those books are still out there on the secondary market for a reasonable price.
The Cult Movies book series didn't just come along at a pivotal time in my life; it came along at a pivotal time in the history of popular culture. In the 1980s, your home entertainment options were rather limited. You had the three major TV networks and maybe a few independent stations, plus AM/FM radio, and whatever magazines and newspapers happened to be available in your area. Your nearby movie theaters only had so many screens. Your local record stores and video stores only had so much shelf space. If you craved "weirdo" entertainment, you had to take it where you could get it. If you lived in Middle America, far from the big cities, an offbeat movie like Pink Flamingos (1972) or Eraserhead (1977) might seem like a miracle, as if you were receiving a coded message from a distant planet many light years away.