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| This quirky company brought Ed Wood's movies to the Great White North. |
The home video gold rush of the 1980s and '90s was a boon to director Ed Wood, even though he was already dead by then. By pure serendipity, the book The Golden Turkey Awards (1980) made Eddie and his films famous at the same time people were starting to buy VCRs for their homes. Naturally, those folks needed plenty of prerecorded videotapes to play on those expensive new machines of theirs, and numerous distribution companies popped up to supply those tapes. Ed Wood's movies certainly were not left out in the cold. His best known works, including Glen or Glenda (1953), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), were released on tape numerous times by numerous labels.
In the 1980s, a Canadian company called Admit One Video Presentations produced its own line of Ed Wood tapes, perhaps hoping to capitalize on the Golden Turkey publicity. Very little evidence of Admit One survives today, apart from some Ebay listings for their products, but they released editions of numerous sci-fi and horror films: Robot Monster (1953), Reefer Madness (1936), Spider Baby (1967), The Horror of Party Beach (1964), Chained for Life (1952), Satan's Satellites (1958), She Demons (1958), Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), Monster from Green Hell (1957), The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy (1958), White Zombie (1952), Lost Planet Airmen (1951), and Bowery at Midnight (1942), which came paired with Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946).
What concerns us, however, are Admit One's releases of Ed Wood's movies. It was reader Brendon Sibley who brought the company to my attention. As far as I can tell, Admit One put out its own editions of Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bride of the Monster, and Glen or Glenda plus Jail Bait (1954), Night of the Ghouls aka Revenge of the Dead (1959), and The Sinister Urge (1960). In case you're counting, that's all six of the feature films Ed directed during his classic period. You must admit that's a very decent Ed Wood catalog, especially considering the Tim Burton biopic was a decade away and Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) hadn't even been published.
On November 25, 1982, The Toronto Sun published a most interesting article about Admit One and its creative director, a loyal Ed Wood fan named Fred Mollin. According to the article, Mollin learned of the existence of Revenge of the Dead in 1979 and spent several years trying to secure the rights to the film, which had languished for decades in a processing lab. Mollin was assisted in his quest by Randy Simon, coauthor of the chapbook Ed Wood: A Man and His Films (1981), and Bela Lugosi biographer Richard Bojarski. After years of dead ends, Mollin finally reached out to Ed's widow, Kathy (misspelled "Cathy" in the article), but she had just sold the rights to Revenge of the Dead to "a Kansas City pay TV company." I'll assume this refers to Wade Williams Productions, since Williams (1942-2023) was based in Kansas City. Ultimately, Mollin and Williams were able to come to terms, and the former screened Revenge of the Dead for "trash fans" at Toronto's Bloor Cinema.
Here's the article in full:
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| Fred Mollin dresses like the detective he is. |
On December 13, 1983, Fort Worth Star-Telegram writer Mike Price devoted a section of his "Off the Drawing Board" column to Fred Mollin and Admit One Video Presentations, stating that the company specialized in releasing campy, low-budget movies but did so "with a sense of perspective, a serious verve and consistency and without condescension." Naturally, Ed Wood gets a shoutout.
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| "Paper-plate spaceships and inarticulate dialogue." |
On March 11, 1985, The Boston Globe ran a major feature story called "Le cinema terrible" about the enduring appeal of so-called "bad movies" on videocassette. The story emphasizes how low-budget sci-fi and horror films of the past could be acquired quite cheaply and then marketed profitably on VHS. Naturally, in a story like this, both Ed Wood and Plan 9 are referenced. Among the interviewees was Robert Taylor of Admit One Video Productions. Below are the relevant excerpts:
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| "It's just so awful." |
On April Fools' Day, 1990, The Toronto Star impishly published a review of a nonexistent suspense thriller called Crimes of Fashion, supposedly starring Erik Estrada, Linda Blair, and Frank Gorshin and directed by Ed Wood! The newspaper called the film "an unexpected comeback for director Wood." That's an understatement, considering Eddie had been dead for over eleven years by then. The article was part of a contest to see if the Star's readers could spot the phony review. Here is the original article from the newspaper's Video & Home Entertainment section:
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| Few comebacks have been as unexpected as this one. |
The bogus Crimes of Fashion review did not stump the readers of The Toronto Star, and an Ontario woman named Sherry Rosen was randomly selected as the winner of the contest, claiming a T-shirt, a free dinner, and "as many videotapes as she could carry out of the building." The July 8, 1990 edition of Video & Home Entertainment contained letters from many of those who had written in, including one fellow who mistakenly thought it was Estrada, not Wood, who had died. Another felt it was Frank Gorshin.
Yet another letter-writer was Robert Taylor, who now identified himself as the "former Operations Manager of Admit One Video Presentations." Perhaps the company had gone under by then. Taylor correctly pointed out that Ed Wood had died in 1978 and had not actually directed or produced The Violent Years (1956).
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| Robert Taylor was no longer working for Admit One by 1990. |
All things considered, since it was by all appearances a small-time operation, Admit One Video Presentations generated a fair share of publicity both in Canada and the United States. I honestly didn't expect to find this much about them. There was so much, in fact, that I had to turn this article into a two-part series! Next time around, we'll look at the actual Ed Wood videos released by Admit One. Until then, the balcony is closed.