Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 245: The Erotic World of A.C. Stephen (1999) [PART 3]

Director Steve Apostolof poses with actress Rene Bond, who starred in several of his movies.

It's taken me a while, I realize, but it's finally time to wrap up my look at the 1999 Something Weird compilation tape, The Erotic World of A.C. Stephen, gifted to me by reader Brendon Sibley. What can I say? There was just too much material in The Erotic World to cover in a single article. Or two articles. I spent five years working on a book about Stephen C. Apostolof, and there were things on this tape even I hadn't seen in my research.

Steve approves of this one!

Last time, we'd gotten as far as the trailer for Drop Out Wife (1972) narrated by a slightly tipsy Ed Wood. Right after that is another incredible rarity: the trailer for Ray Williams' Wrong Way (1972). To my knowledge, this is the only film ever released by SCA Distributors that was not directed by Steve Apostolof himself. There's obscure, there's super-obscure, and then there's this. I cannot find evidence that Ray ever directed anything again after this.

The film is about two young female hitchhikers who soon find themselves at the mercy of a cadre of creeps, cretins, and sadists. I think we in the audience are meant to identify with the creeps. The announcer tells us that the film is "an experience" (he doesn't specify a good experience) and promises us "sex with a capital S." Looks like something to watch while drinking a room temperature Schlitz and contemplating your life choices.

If you're watching The Erotic World of A.C. Stephen solely for its Ed Wood-related content, I have great news for you: it's nothing but Eddie from this point onward. For this compilation, Something Weird Video assembled an incredible smorgasbord of clips and trailers from the sexploitation movies that Eddie and Steve made together between the years 1972 and 1976. (There's one film from 1978 that's conspicuously absent, but we'll get to that.)

Up next in the rotation is the trailer for the Wood-scripted The Class Reunion (1972), a quasi sequel to College Girls (1968) in which some former classmates reunite for a booze-and-sex-fueled weekend. Think of it as Steve and Ed's precursor to The Big Chill (1983). Just as he did with with Drop Out Girls, Eddie narrates the trailer for The Class Reunion himself—loudly and with great enthusiasm! Here's a transcript:

The Class Reunion! Where experiments never cease! Where biology studies are not held in the classroom! Are the students of today any different than those of yesterday? What really happens at a class reunion? Today's sexual revolution is foremost in everyone's mind, reaching for thrills and excitement! See the wild, uninhibited frolicking, the orgies of a class reunion! See what happens when former classmates get together! See the thrills and excitement in The Class Reunion! Coming to this theater next!

The clips here are well-chosen and diverse, showcasing various heterosexual and homosexual pairings, both gay and lesbian. And SCA's two brightest stars, Harvey Shain and Marsha Jordan, both get to do the "class of '69" joke that Ed Wood must've thought was a real corker in 1972.

And the fun is far from over, folks. The trailer for The Snow Bunnies (1972) is next, and it's also narrated by screenwriter Edward D. Wood, Jr.! Can you believe our luck? This is one of Steve Apostolof's two Bunnies films, and they follow the same formula: some female friends travel to a tourist destination, have a lot of sex with guys they just met, experience some genuine trauma, and then leave. Read the following transcript and see if you can spot any similarities to the narration for The Class Reunion:

The Snow Bunnies! A blizzard of fun, an avalanche of action! What really happens at a ski lodge? The Snow Bunnies! A blizzard of fun! The Snow Bunnies tells it all, tells it like it really is! Girls on skis, looking for thrills and excitement! What really happens at a ski lodge? The Snow Bunnies tells it all! The Snow Bunnies! Coming next at this theater!

Yeah, I'm guessing Ed was half-shot when he recorded that one. He really does repeat himself that often. (Give him credit: he manages to say the film's title four times.) By this point in the tape, the observant viewer should be able to recognize Steve Apostolof's repertory cast. We've already talked about Harvey and Marsha, but look out for Ron Darby, Starline Comb, Chris Geoffries, Rene Bond, Ric Lutze, and gap-toothed Terri Johnson.

Fun in the sun, Apostolof style!

The next item on the tape is the trailer for The Beach Bunnies (1976), the last film written by Ed Wood to be produced in Eddie's lifetime. (More such films would be made after his death.) Unfortunately, Eddie doesn't narrate this one himself. Perhaps he was too far gone for that kind of work in 1976, so Steve Apostolof found some generic, deep-voiced announcer. Still, one great thing about these trailers is that they spotlight certain lines of dialogue I had somehow failed to notice, like: "I never thought you could do it in so many positions on a catamaran!" The film itself is blatantly The Snow Bunnies, just relocated to the beach.

I don't know where or how Something Weird Video dug up some of this material, but the next item on the menu is a lengthy (!) outtake reel from The Beach Bunnies. We see three of the titular Bunnies, including Farrah-haired Linda Gildersleeve, dancing completely nude in a cocktail lounge in full view of many paying, clothed customers. Steve keeps the camera rolling, so the ladies have to gyrate for quite a while. While Steve Apostolof occasionally worked with a choreographer (Mark Desmond) on his films, the dance moves here are improvised. A generic '70s rock song about someone named "T-Bone," is performed several times, and we even hear a little behind-the-scenes chatter between takes. How this material survived into the 1990s is beyond me. Steve must've held onto the footage for years.

We then see two back-to-back trailers for Fugitive Girls (1974), Steve Apostolof's sex-and-crime epic about four surly women (and one nice one) who escape from a prison work camp and go on a wild crime spree before being brought down by the law and by each other. The first trailer uses the film's alternate title, Five Loose Women, and is narrated by a woman who calls herself Sheila, though I can't tell if it's really the voice of actress Donna Young, who plays Sheila in the movie. Then, as if to leave no stone unturned, we see the Fugitive Girls trailer narrated by Ed Wood! The two trailers share a lot of footage ("Good Christ, a lesbian!"), but Woodologists are probably more familiar with Eddie's version than they are with Sheila's version. This makes the Five Loose Women trailer something of a curiosity, since it's not as widely circulated. 

This film is well represented!

And we're not done with Fugitive Girls yet! The Erotic World of A.C. Stephen generously includes a highlight reel of the numerous sex scenes from the movie. We see innocent Dee (Margie Lanier) in bed with her no-good boyfriend (Joe Pepe) at the very beginning of the film. This is followed by a later scene of Dee sharing a cot with predatory lesbian Kat (Tallie Cochrane). By this point in the movie, Dee has been wrongly convicted of being an accessory to a liquor store robbery and sent to prison. She's vulnerable and afraid. Kat is forcing Dee to engage in lesbian sex acts against her will, so the scene has disturbing undertones—sadly typical of the movies Steve and Ed made during this era. For some viewers, it's not "hot" unless one of the parties involved is being coerced.

The nonconsensual sex continues with the infamous, semi-comical sequence in which Harvey Shain's hapless motorist is gang-raped by four of the five female fugitives. (Dee, naturally, abstains.) Ed Wood fans know that this entire sequence is an echo of one he wrote for The Violent Years (1956) almost two decades earlier. By comparing those two scenes, we can see how censorship standards had changed drastically from the 1950s to the 1970s. We round out this portion of the tape with another notorious sequence from Fugitive Girls in which the title characters invade a couple's home and sexually assault the wife while the wheelchair-bound husband is forced to watch. (The actor playing the husband really commits to the drama of this moment.) To me, this unsettling scene is reminiscent of both A Clockwork Orange (1971) and the Manson Family.

The tape concludes abruptly with a few minutes from The Cocktail Hostesses. Viewers unfamiliar with that film might think they're watching another trailer, but it's actually just the cold opening of the movie and a portion of the opening credits. We see our protagonist, an underpaid secretary named Toni (Rene Bond), having sex with her boss, Mr. Henderson (Norman Fields), on a typical Friday afternoon in his office. Typical of the characters in Steve and Ed's 1970s movies, these two lovers complain about their unsexy, grownup problems. Toni's unhappy with her salary; Mr. Henderson dreads his home life. It's a little depressing, but at least these characters willingly have sex with each other, unlike the characters in Fugitive Girls.

And this is how The Erotic World of A.C. Stephen leaves us. The compilation does not include any footage from Steve Apostolof's career-ending debacle, Hot Ice (1978), even though that movie credits Ed Wood as its assistant director and is the last feature film Eddie is known to have worked on before his death in December 1978. Perhaps there were rights issues preventing Hot Ice from being used here. Perhaps Steve still held out hope that Hot Ice would someday find its proper audience, even as late as 1999, and he didn't want it "spoiled" by being in this SWV compilation. Whatever the reason, the movie is conspicuous by its absence.

Which raises a pertinent question: does The Erotic World of A.C. Stephen provide all the Steve Apostolof content a viewer will ever need in one lifetime? After all, the cover promises that the tape is "Your one-stop guide to all things Apostolof!" The answer is that it depends on the viewer. To be sure, this is a very thorough collection of trailers and clips. Watch this, and you'll definitely have a good idea of the kinds of movies Steve made, both with and without Ed Wood, in the 1960s and 1970s. It may whet your appetite to see more of this material. But by reducing these films down to "the good parts," The Erotic World may be doing them a great favor.