Ed Wood Extra! An interview with Andrew J. Chambers, director of 'Orgy of the Dead 2'

It's finally time to go back to the cemetery.

Director Stephen C. Apostolof and screenwriter Edward D. Wood, Jr. never got to do a proper sequel to their infamous 1965 nudie cutie Orgy of the Dead, which tells the story of a square couple (Pat Barrington and William Bates) who survive a car crash but end up witnessing a strange occult ritual presided over by a mysterious robed Emperor (Criswell) in an abandoned California cemetery. The film remains Apostolof's best-known by far, and he did plan to do a follow-up in his later years, but the project never came to fruition. He died in 2005, seemingly putting the final nail in the sequel's coffin.

A long-delayed sequel.

Well, thanks in part to an Indiegogo campaign, maverick filmmaker Andrew J. Chambers has changed that. His raunchy, scatological comedy Orgy of the Dead 2 is now available on Blu-ray and can be streamed on YouTube and Google Play. With its gore, gross-out jokes, and topical references, this bizarre film differs markedly from the now-quaint original. And yet, it carries the official seal of approval of Steve Apostolof's youngest son, Chris! When I saw this movie, I realized that I needed to know more, so I reached out to Mr. Chambers, who happily consented to the following Q&A.

What initially made you want to write and direct a sequel to Orgy of the Dead (as opposed to any other movie in the history of movies)?

Other than it being a perfect fit for my style? I really saw a lot of potential for improvement. I loved the idea of the original, but being from a different time, I found it boring throughout most of the film. In the '60s you didn’t need much other than dancing naked ladies to capture the attention of the audience because that’s what nudie cities were for. Now that everyone is desensitized, it needs a little more. Some other writers and directors might think it needed a good story line and better acting. Not me. I think it needed comedy and gore.

Steve Apostolof wrote his own sequel script for Orgy of the Dead. Did you take any ideas from that or was the script totally yours?

I actually haven’t read Steve's script. Chris wanted a script before he agreed to a sequel deal, so I wrote exactly what was floating around in my brain in the months leading up to our first chat. He offered to let me read it after my script was finished to see if I wanted to pull anything from it, but ultimately we decided it was best to have something completely fresh. He did tell me it was written as a comedy, though.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 269: The Ed Wood/Chuck Berry double feature of 1959! [PART 1]

Two movies, one poster artist! Yes, Tom Jung painted both of these.

Ed Wood's most famous film, the sci-fi/horror hybrid Grave Robbers from Outer Space, premiered at the Carlton Theatre in Los Angeles on Friday, March 15, 1957. Lord only knows what the audience thought of it. Eddie certainly must have been curious, because he handed out comment cards to his viewers, asking for their favorite scenes and whatever miscellaneous thoughts they might have about the movie. (I wonder if any filled-out cards have survived from that fateful night?)

To say the least, Grave Robbers is an oddity, combining wonky special effects, stilted dialogue, a surreal plot about an alien invasion of Earth, grainy footage of the late Bela Lugosi, and even the pseudo-apocalyptic rantings of TV personality Criswell. The end result is less like a coherent narrative and more like a strange, half-remembered dream somehow preserved on celluloid. For these reasons and more, writer-director Wood had very little luck getting Grave Robbers distributed after the premiere. As actor Gregory Walcott told Rudolph Grey in the book Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992): "Nobody would touch the darn thing." Even with such well-known figures as Lugosi, Criswell, Tor Johnson, and Vampira in the cast, the movie was going to be a tough sell. 

Was there Hope for Plan 9?

Producer Ed Reynolds was understandably nervous about all this, since he'd sunk plenty of his own money into the production and had convinced others at the First Baptist Church of Beverly Hills to do the same. How was he going to get any of his (or their) money back? According to both Gregory Walcott and Ed Wood's widow, Kathy, it was Reynolds who wrangled control of Graverobbers away from Ed Wood and sold the film to a New York company called Distributors Corporation of America. 

This sale proved a turning point in the movie's history. In 1958, DCA changed the title to Plan 9 from Outer Space and released it to theaters and drive-ins across America—on a limited basis at first, then more widely starting in July 1959. By 1960, Plan 9 was already popping up on television, where it would remain a late-night staple for decades. I've seen no evidence that Eddie profited from this, and I doubt the original investors were reimbursed either, but at least somebody was making money from the movie. And, more crucially, it was being seen by thousands of impressionable youngsters.

Back in those days, double and triple features were much more common than they are today. Theatergoers of the 1950s were accustomed to getting multiple films for the price of admission, plus some added cartoons and shorts. Sometimes, theaters would offer a big budget main feature and a cheaply-made second feature on the same bill. That's what B-movies originally were, essentially cinematic appetizers for more prestigious films. But, as can be seen in vintage newspaper ads from the 1950s and '60s, it was also fairly common for two or three low-budget films of roughly equal stature to be packaged together and shown on the same bill. Which was the "main" feature? Flip a coin.

With its brisk 80-minute runtime and rock bottom price point, Plan 9 from Outer Space was an ideal "programmer," i.e. a movie that could fill out a double or triple bill as either the main or supporting feature. And that was its fate for years. In various American cities, it was paired up with such titles as Outlaw Women (1952), Alias Jesse James (1959), The Crawling Eye (1958), Devil Girl from Mars (1954), Time Lock (1957), and The Trap (1959). Most of these are sci-fi and horror films, as you'd expect, but some are comedies and Westerns. So exhibitors must have felt that the genre-hopping Plan 9 made a suitable companion to just about anything they had to offer. (I've even argued that the finale of Plan 9 is Western-like, since Tom Keene, Greg Walcott, and Duke Moore form a posse and settle their differences with the aliens with a barroom-style brawl.)

Podcast Tuesday: "The Genie and the Weenie"

David Hartman and Barbara Eden in The Feminist and the Fuzz.

Three-hundred episodes. It must mean something, but what? Hell if I know. When my cohost and I started These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast in 2018, I didn't even know if we'd make it though all 11 seasons of the sitcom. Well, we did... and then some. After we reviewed all 255 episodes of the original series (1974-1984), we covered its animated spinoff, The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang (1980-1981), and all the feature films directed by the show's creator, Garry Marshall. 

Lately, we've been exploring the vast world of Happy Days-adjacent media, i.e. projects involving the cast and crew of the show. Since many of these fine folks had long, varied careers in show business, we can never run out of material to cover. My first pick for this phase of the podcast was The Money Tree (1971), an educational film starring Anson Williams. This week, we get my cohost's first pick: an extremely of-its-time made-for-TV movie called The Feminist and the Fuzz, directed by Jerry Paris. The plot concerns a liberated San Francisco doctor (Barbara Eden) who, through wacky circumstances, ends up sharing an apartment with a chauvinist cop (David Hartman). 

Will these two mismatched roomies find love against all odds? There are literally only two ways to find out: either watch the movie yourself or listen to our review of it. I know which one I'd pick.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 268: The Ed Wood Wednesdays Disclaimer, annotated

This disclaimer belongs in a museum.

When the Dead 2 Rights blog started in 2009, it was a spinoff of a zombie movie podcast and was, therefore, mostly about zombie movies and television shows. (This was the heyday of The Walking Dead.) When that podcast ended in 2013, I could have let the blog come to an end, but I decided to keep it going. In my search for a new focus, I launched the Ed Wood Wednesdays series of articles in July 2013. It was supposed to run for a couple of months but has now been going for nearly 13 years. By September 2013, I'd already accumulated enough articles to justify an index page. To this day, I continue to update and revise that index as necessary.

In 2021, eight full years into the project, I decided to add a "big fat disclaimer" to the index page. That disclaimer remains there today. I've tinkered with the wording over the years, but the current incarnation reads like this:

BIG FAT DISCLAIMER: Ed Wood Wednesdays is not a reference work. It makes no claim of being definitive or scholarly. It was written strictly for my own amusement and is intended only as entertainment. As such, the articles listed below may contain factual errors, spelling and grammar mistakes, and other glaring omissions. Also, many of these articles were written years ago, so they may contain outdated information and dead links. If that bothers you, please do not read them. I fully acknowledge that you, the reader, may know more Ed Wood trivia than I do. While I cannot stop you from sending corrections to me, I encourage you to start a blog of your own instead. Thank you.

I consider this the single most important paragraph in the entire, 13-year history of Ed Wood Wednesdays, but it is also one of the least-read. How do I know this? Because people keep sending me corrections and complaints rather than starting their own blogs. My advice to the nitpickers remains the same after all these years: instead of complaining about what I've written, write something of your own and show me how it's done.

So today, let's go through the disclaimer line by line and see what it all means.

Swear all you want because profanity shouldn't even be a thing

Maybe he's about to say "friendship." I doubt it, though.

We humans didn't always have a sophisticated written and spoken language the way we do today. No, we probably started out with mere grunts and groans. Only after a lot of trial and error did we decide that certain grunts and groans indicated particular things. And look at us now. We have hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million, words in the English language alone. If that doesn't suit you, there are over 7,000 other languages to choose from on this planet, each with its own rich, diverse vocabulary.

But somewhere along the line, we decided that particular words are so powerful that their use should be regulated, restricted, or even banned outright. Some of these words are hateful insults aimed at races, religions, sexual orientations, etc. We call such words slurs. But many other "forbidden" words simply refer to distasteful topics or express extreme frustration. We call these words profanities.

I understand the stigma attached to slurs, which can be used to denigrate people and may even incite violence. But I have never understood—and will likely never understand—the concept of profanity. What a useless, anti-helpful idea. Who benefits from this? What possible gain is there from making certain words restricted or forbidden? Whose life has been improved by this? All I know is that there are people in this world who take great offense at profanity. And because of them, sentences with these "naughty" words have to be bowdlerized or lobotomized before they can be expressed. How dumb.

You know what really irks me about this? What really drives me up the wall? It's the pious, phony hypocrisy of it all. To me, the most obscene, hateful, offensive, destructive sentiments ever expressed by human beings have not been loaded with profanities. Instead, they have been couched in the perfectly "clean," respectable language of government and commerce. A political leader might issue an order that leads to thousands of deaths. The head of a pharmaceutical company might raise the price of a life-saving drug. An influencer might deliver false and even dangerous information to millions of followers. And not one of these people will use a single so-called "profanity." But we carry on as if "four-letter words" were the greatest plague ever released on humanity.

If you are one of those people who make a big show of being offended by profanity, I have no respect or sympathy for you. To me, it's akin to superstition. If you feel the opposite way, you can express that in the comments section of this article. But you'll have to make an awfully convincing case before I am swayed.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 267 The great 'Hollywood Rat Race' auction of 2026

This eBay auction is a veritable smorgasbord.

NOTE: The following article is about the sale of some rare Ed Wood material. Because this sale is happening on eBay (an auction site) and because the seller is willing to entertain offers (or bids) from interested parties, I am referring to this as sale an "auction." JB.

This is not the article I planned to write this week. I actually wanted to get back to my ongoing series about Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994). But something unusual has happened in the world of Ed Wood fandom, and I feel it is my responsibility to record it for the sake of posterity before we all forget that this ever happened. I strongly suspect that this is the kind of one-off oddity destined to fall down the memory hole never to be recalled again.

On March 16, 2026, Bob Blackburn (co-inheritor of the Ed Wood estate) posted on Facebook about a very intriguing eBay auction he'd learned about through fellow fan Patrick McCabe. It seems that a legitimate memorabilia dealer called NEOvintage was selling a treasure trove of rare Ed Wood materials from the 1960s, including a manuscript of Hollywood Rat Race typed by Eddie himself and some ultra-rare cassette tapes including unreleased interviews with Ed and others talking about Bela Lugosi. The asking price for these precious goodies? A mere quarter of a million dollars, though the seller is willing to offer a $50,000 discount to the right buyer. If you have a spare vacation home you're not using or perhaps a Scrooge McDuck vault of gold coins, maybe consider it.

Podcast Tuesday: "Potsie Weber, Wanted Fugitive"

Margaret Willock and Anson Williams in The Money Tree.

I have surprisingly fond memories of corny, old-fashioned educational or "classroom" movies. My father was a high school teacher—his subjects were history and economics—during the primitive, pre-VCR days when you actually needed a projector and a screen to show a movie in class. I remember accompanying him several times to the Flint Public Library to procure these precious film reels that came in heavy, gray boxes that you needed to secure with luggage straps. For some reason, I found all of this to be unbearably exciting.

It was even better when one of my own teachers at Springview Elementary would show a movie in class. Again, I grew up in the movie projector era, before TVs strapped to wheeled carts became ubiquitous. What a thrill to hear that noisy projector whirring away as the images flickered on the screen. I think I liked the Disney nature movies best, but I generally enjoyed them all, even the really bad ones. It was a wonderful, much-needed break from the tedium of the school day.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we turn our attentions to a somewhat forgotten 1971 educational film called The Money Tree starring Anson "Potsie" Williams in one of his earliest roles. He plays a young married man who gets into major debt by renting furniture and buying a new Ford Mustang on credit. And he drags his poor wife (Margaret Willock) down with him. What did we learn from this film? Well, you can find out below.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Lost Greg Javer/Keith Crocker Commentaries [PART TWO]

Yes, it's already time for a sequel.

I can still remember a few years back when Greg Javer aka Greg Dizawer excitedly emailed me about an Ed Wood project he was working on for Severin Films. To be honest, I didn't quite understand what the project was. I knew that it had something to do with a company restoring and rereleasing some of Ed's adult movies from the 1960s and 1970s, but beyond that, I was in the dark. Eventually, what resulted from all this was a three-disc collection called Hard Wood: The Adult Features of Ed Wood (2024).

It gives me some consolation to know that Greg was still alive when Hard Wood was released on Blu-ray. It's also nice to know that Greg lived to see Ed Wood receive an official New York State historical marker in his hometown of Poughkeepsie, NY. Greg's time on this planet was far too brief, but he managed to have a lasting impact on the field of Woodology.

And we still haven't heard the last of Greg, a year and change after his death! Recently, reader Brendon Sibley sent me some commentary tracks that Greg recorded with film archivist Keith Crocker that were intended for Hard Wood but did not make it into the released version of that set. Drawing on their vast knowledge of vintage erotica, Greg and Keith recorded their reactions to six of the Swedish Erotica loops that Eddie allegedly made in the early 1970s. What was the full extent of Ed's involvement in these silent movies? That's been a subject of debate for decades, and these commentary tracks hopefully provide some insight.

Last week, we presented Greg and Keith's thoughts on The Virgin Next Door (parts 1 and 2) and Western Lust. This week, let's enjoy their commentary tracks for Girl on a Bike, 15" Commercial, and Devil Cult. Again, I had to distort the visuals just a bit to appease the YouTube and Blogger censors, neither of whom would have allowed me to post these films as they originally appeared. You'll just have to imagine actor Keith Erickson's skin tag, among other things.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Lost Greg Javer/Keith Crocker Commentaries [PART ONE]

Keith and Greg talk Ed. (Header image by Brendon Sibley.)

Not long before he died, Greg Javer (aka Greg Dziawer) contributed some commentary tracks to the deluxe three-disc collection Hard Wood: The Adult Features of Ed Wood (2024) from Severin Films. Looking back, this was one of the last major Wood-related projects of Greg's too-brief life. If you purchase that set, you can hear him give his thoughts on Necromania (1971), The Only House in Town (1971), and The Young Marrieds (1972). If you're missing Greg, and I know many of you are, these tracks allow you to spend some time with him.

But these were not the only recordings Greg made for Hard Wood. He and I, for example, recorded a jovial and hopefully informative commentary for the rowdy, rural comedy Shotgun Wedding (1963), which Eddie scripted for director Boris Petroff. Unfortunately, that track got lost in the shuffle and never made it into the finished set. If you're interested in hearing it, I have made it available in a previous blog entry.

Meanwhile, teaming up with film historian Keith Crocker, Greg recorded commentary tracks for six (!) of the adult loops that Ed Wood made as part of the Swedish Erotica series in the early 1970s. These, too, were unfortunately lost in the shuffle and did not make it into Hard Wood. But fear not! Recently, reader Brendon Sibley forwarded these tracks to me and asked for me to present them on my blog. How could I resist an offer like that? 

In fact, I will devote this week and next to the lost Javer/Crocker commentaries. Three this week, three next week. Does that sound like a plan? For obvious reasons, I cannot present the loops without some visual distortion. YouTube has very little sense of humor about these things.

Podcast Tuesday: "The Top 5 Garry Marshall Movies of All Time"

Garry Marshall sure did make some films, I tell you what.

Every pretentious film geek on the internet has a "hot take" on the movies of Quentin Tarantino, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese. And they probably have plenty of opinions about David Fincher, Steven Spielberg, David Lynch, and Paul Thomas Anderson, too. But how many of them have bothered to watch all the movies of Garry Marshall, huh? Probably not too many. Well, that's why you come to my blog. I pick up where the others leave off. I go where no nerd has gone before.

Garry Marshall was a very successful writer and producer of TV sitcoms in the 1960s and '70s, scoring hits with The Odd Couple, Happy Days, and Laverne & Shirley. (Of course, there was also the occasional Blansky's Beauties or Me and the Chimp. Hey, they can't all be winners.) By the 1980s, he naturally wanted to graduate to feature films. And so, he made 18 of them, including some box office smashes and a few major bombs. Along the way, he worked with some of the biggest actors in movie history and turned more than one newcomer into a superstar. For all these reasons and more, I think his films—good, bad, or indifferent—are as worthy of study as those of any famous director.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, my cohost and I give you our picks for the Top 5 Garry Marshall Movies of All Time. And we talk about what we liked and didn't like about our journey through Garry's filmography. Doesn't that sound like fun? Click the play button below and find out.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 266: How accurate is 'Ed Wood' (1994) [PART 3]

Ed Wood (Johnny Depp) looks guilty in this scene from Ed Wood.

It just isn't true, okay?

The "Dolores Fuller" character in Tim Burton's movie Ed Wood (1994)—the temperamental, ambitious-to-a-fault ingenue played by a peroxided Sarah Jessica Parker—is not a fair or accurate depiction of Indiana-born actress and songwriter Dolores Agnes Fuller (1923-2011) who dated Edward D. Wood, Jr. in the early 1950s and appeared in three of his best-known movies. In transforming Eddie's messy, complicated life into a tidy, two-hour biopic, screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski streamlined certain aspects of the story and exaggerated others. Somehow, along the way, Dolores got turned into a cartoon. I honestly think the culprit was this extended quote from Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992):

Dolores Fuller explains why she left Ed Wood.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 265: How accurate is 'Ed Wood' (1994) [PART 2]

Ed Wood (1994) references this production of The Casual Company.

When Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (1924-1978) relocated to Hollywood from his native Poughkeepsie in the late 1940s after his stint in the Marines, his goal was to break into the movie business. The silver screen had fascinated him as a boy, so once he became a man, he took Horace Greeley's famous advice: "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country." Once settled in California, instead of relying on job offers from the major studios (Universal, Fox, Paramount), Ed Wood attempted to produce and/or direct his own low-budget movies. This was a youngster with initiative. A dreamer, you might say.

A young Ed Wood.

Unfortunately, Eddie's earliest Hollywood projects, like the crude Westerns Range Revenge and Crossroads of Laredo (both 1948), were never truly completed during the filmmaker's lifetime and were only released posthumously. I've pinpointed the made-for-TV melodrama The Sun Was Setting (1951) as the first production Eddie actually saw all the way through to completion, though I can find no record of it airing anywhere. Ed's attempts at making television commercials "on spec" and then selling them to clients likewise proved futile. You can still watch some of Eddie's self-made TV commercials today, but I don't think any companies ever used them.

What's most remarkable about Ed Wood's earliest years in Hollywood is how many short-lived production companies he managed to start and how many backers he managed to sweettalk into giving him money, despite having no proven track record of success. Eddie's graveyard of failed ventures includes: Wood-Thomas Productions, Story Ad Films, W.D.C.B. Films, Atomic Productions, and more.

Meanwhile, to earn a little money and (potentially) get his name out there, Eddie did a little theater work during those early years in Hollywood. The great James Pontolillo covers this topic extensively in his book, The Muddled Years of Edward D. Wood, Jr., 1946-1948 (2025). Besides acting in The Blackguard Returns, Eddie managed to stage a farce he'd written himself called The Casual Company: The Laugh of the Marines. This lighthearted office comedy, based on Ed's own military experience, had a brief run at the Village Playhouse in late 1948. In the October 26, 1948 edition of The Valley Times, critic Henry Arntsen described it as a "three-acter" revolving around "a group of pencil-pushing Marines at a Naval hospital." 

Podcast Tuesday: "Skype, We Hardly Knew Ye"

Julia Roberts in Mother's Day.

When Garry Marshall was directing Mother's Day (2016), did he know it was going to be his last movie? He must have at least suspected. He was 81 when this lighthearted all-star ensemble comedy was released, and he died of pneumonia less than three months after it premiered. At the time, he hadn't even made a feature film for five years, the longest significant gap in his directing career. He hadn't completely disappeared during that time, still working regularly as a character actor and popping up as a frequent talk show guest, but he was definitely slowing to a halt.

In a way, it's nice to know that Garry went out doing what he loved. I have rarely encountered a director who so wholeheartedly loved the filmmaking process. It was important for Garry that his actors were having a good time on the set, even when the movie they were making was of questionable quality. Even Rosie O'Donnell and Dana Delany had fond memories of making the abysmal Exit to Eden (1994). It's no wonder that actors kept working with Garry over and over.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we review Mother's Day in all its maternal glory. Is it one of Garry Marshall's proudest achievements? Or did his career end in disappointment? That's what we aim to find out.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 264: How accurate is 'Ed Wood' (1994) [PART 1]

Jeffrey Jones in Ed Wood. Inset: Criswell in Night of the Ghouls.

Ed Wood Wednesdays is, by far, the longest-running series in the history of this blog. It may be the most significant project of my entire life. I started it nearly 13 years ago, and it's nowhere near completion. But within that one big project, there have been a lot of smaller sub-projects, like my reviews of every story in Blood Splatters Quickly (2014) and my 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar. These have been some of the most enjoyable articles for me to write, so I'm always on the lookout for the next possible series-within-a-series. And now I think I've found it.

What I plan to do for the next however many weeks is go through Tim Burton's glossy biopic Ed Wood (1994) scene by scene and discuss how accurate—or inaccurate—it is, compared to the real life and career of Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (1924-1978). Before you get upset, please know that I am doing this purely as a tribute to the movie. I am not trying to criticize director Tim Burton or writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski for taking liberties with the facts. I'm completely fine with them taking liberties with the facts, and I love Ed Wood just the way it is. But this series will (hopefully) allow me to talk about numerous aspects of Eddie's real life and work in an entertaining way.

Oh, and I fully expect to be corrected and nitpicked along the way by you, the readers. If you feel I've made a misstatement, let me know and I'll update the article. Anyway, let's get started.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 263: Victor Crowley himself

"Screw you, Miss Crowley."

Early in Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), Ed (Johnny Depp) and his loyal repertory players gather at a cozy L.A. cocktail bar called Boardner's after staging a performance of Eddie's achingly earnest World War II play, The Casual Company, at a small theater in Hollywood. Even though it's raining and the press didn't actually show up for "press night," their spirits are nonetheless high. Ed even tells eager beaver actor Paul Marco (Max Casella): "Paul, your second act monologue actually gave me the chills."

A review from Miss Crowley.

Then, actor Conrad Brooks (Brent Hinkley) bounds in with a copy of The Los Angeles Register and says he has "the early edition, hot off the presses." He hands the paper to Ed Wood. As the smiling actors crowd around him, Eddie eagerly flips to a newly-published review of The Casual Company by theatrical critic Victor Crowley. But the mood soon sours as they read the article, which Burton shows us in a closeup. Here is what Mr. Crowley has to say about their efforts:

World War II, a time for brave men with "guts," forms the backdrop for "The Casual Company," which opened last night in Hollywood. Let me tell you this is definitely a play about "guts." It certainly took "guts" to stage this disappointment. Penned by one Edward D. Wood, Jr., who also has the "guts" to take credit for directing this foxhole piece, "The Casual Company" takes place on a bare stage with only rudimentary lighting. Fortunately, the soldiers' costumes are very realistic.

The actors, once boisterous, now fall silent. Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray) is the first to speak: "Oh, what does that old queen know? She didn't even show. Sent her copy boy to do the dirty work." Meanwhile, poor Paul is trying to figure out what "ostentatious" means, while Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker) wonders aloud: "Do I really have a face like a horse?" 

But Eddie, the eternal optimist, zeroes in on the one compliment: "The soldiers' costumes are very realistic." Later in the movie, he'll bring this up when he interviews for a directing job with producer George Weiss (Mike Starr): "I just did a play in Hollywood, and Victor Crowley himself praised its realism!" Eddie also says that good reviews are not necessary for showbiz success and points to "the latest Francis the mule picture" as an example.

Podcast Tuesday: "Garry Marshall Drops the Ball"

Zac Efron and Michelle Pfeiffer in New Year's Eve (2011).

A vintage matchbook.

Are you a New Year's Eve person? Does that holiday mean anything to you? I can't say that December 31 holds too many special memories for me, fond or otherwise. For the last few decades—not just years, but decades—I have stayed home on the last day of the year and only intermittently glanced up at the countdown festivities on TV. So a movie like Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve (2011), in which a bunch of celebrities celebrate the titular holiday in various wacky ways, does not have a lot of intrinsic appeal for me. File it alongside Rudolph's Shiny New Year (1976). Nice try, but I'm not terribly interested.

However, if I rummage through my own storehouse of memories in search of ones related specifically to New Year's Eve, I can zero in on a now long-gone restaurant called The Greenery in Clio, Michigan. A classy place, the kind you might take your grandparents for an evening out. The food there was pretty bland, and my family definitely didn't go there on a regular basis. But, for whatever reason, my parents took us to The Greenery every New Year's Eve for years. The place's best feature was an extremely generous and varied dessert bar. That was definitely the highlight of December 31 for me. (The lowlight was the drive home, since there always seemed to be a winter storm raging that night.) Other than that, I can't say I'm for or against this particular holiday.

Nevertheless, in this week's edition of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we are tackling the aforementioned New Year's Eve movie from 2011. As with Valentine's Day (2010), Garry Marshall assembled a boatload of TV stars, movie stars, and pop stars and put them in little, interconnected vignettes, all happening on one special day. If you've ever wanted to see Jon Bon Jovi, Halle Berry, Hilary Swank, Robert De Niro, and Ludacris in one movie.... well, here's your chance. Our review is included below. Do me a favor and listen to it. Thanks.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 262: B-Movie Maniacs (2014- )

Some of the Ed Wood movies featured on B-Movie Maniacs.

It's tempting to say that social media has been nothing but a blight upon the human race. And it's not difficult to find evidence to support that argument. People tend to revert to their worst selves online, and social media platforms allow us to spread gossip, hatred, and misinformation at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, thanks to Instagram and TikTok, we're chasing after material possessions we don't need and body types we can't attain. Even when we're not attacking our neighbors or draining our bank accounts, we're rotting our brains by doomscrolling through photos and videos for hours on end.

No doubt about it, social media has done some terrible things to us as a species. It may even be the invention that ultimately dooms the human race, accomplishing what nuclear bombs, automobiles, and cigarettes couldn't do. It could be deadlier even than Solaronite. I'm definitely part of the problem. I mean, just look at the sidebar on this blog (it's that column of text on the right side of the screen). You'll see that I have accounts on over a dozen different platforms. I'm as addicted to this junk as you are. Maybe more.

To be clear, I'm no fan of Mark Zuckerberg or what he has created. For me, Faceboook is mostly a nuisance, a place where my old high school classmates post their alarming political views and brag about how well their lives are going. Yuck. But Facebook also has an active Ed Wood fan community, and that has played a major role in the history of this series. Social media has allowed Woodologists to get in touch with me and share information, photos, articles, and more. Without those fans, I might have been tempted to ditch FB and many other platforms years ago. (So, yes, you guys are enabling my addiction.)

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 261: More about 'The Sun Was Setting' (1951) and other things

A typical New York sunset, as (not) seen in The Sun Was Setting.

When I started writing this series of articles back in July 2013, my plan was to blitz through Ed Wood's filmography in just a couple of months. And so, I covered a great deal of territory in each article. In the very first week alone, I briefly covered Ed Wood's youth in Poughkeepsie and reviewed Crossroads of Laredo (1948), The Sun Was Setting (1951), Crossroad Avenger (1953), and even Eddie's failed attempts at making TV commercials in the late 1940s. That's absolutely nuts. Nowadays, each one of those topics would get its own individual article, perhaps more than one.

Cut to January 2026. I'm now giving greater attention to these and other topics related to Ed Wood. Last week, for example, I did a deep-dive into Ed's 15-minute made-for-TV melodrama The Sun Was Setting. This strange story, centering around a terminally-ill New York woman (Angela Stevens) who cannot leave her apartment, was the one and only production of a short-lived company called W.D.B.C. Films that Eddie formed with his pal Don Davis and two other men, Milton Bowron and Joe Carter. Bowron and Carter were Los Angeles real estate salesmen who never dabbled in show business again. (I'm guessing it was a "fool me once..." situation.)

Podcast Tuesday: "Jennifers, Julias & Jessicas"

"Starring everybody and me!"

"Hyperlink cinema."

 It's a term I'd either forgotten or had never heard until recently. Either way, it refers to those movies that are sort of like anthologies but not quite. "Hyperlink" films tell multiple, basically self-contained stories, but the characters in those different stories know each other and occasionally interact. Some characters even take part in more than one story per movie. Think of Pulp Fiction (1994), Magnolia (1999), Nashville (1975), Crash (2004), and many more. In Pulp Fiction, for example, there are three different stories ("The Bonnie Situation," "The Gold Watch," and "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife"), and John Travolta's heroin-shooting hitman is a factor in all three of them.

Toward the end of his career, director Garry Marshall (1934-2016) got way into hyperlink cinema. He made three of these movies back-to-back, the first being Valentine's Day (2010). The setup is very simple: it's Valentine's Day in Los Angeles, and we follow the romantic ups-and-downs of various characters, all played by major movie stars. It's actually kind of mind-boggling how many Oscar winners there are in this one, extremely slight romcom.

But does "slight" equal worthless? That's what we aim to find out in this week's edition of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 260: The lingering mysteries of 'The Sun Was Setting' (1951)

Angela Stevens swoons in the arms of Tom Keene aka Richard Powers.

History can play some funny tricks on us. Circa 1947, for example, a twentysomething ex-Marine named Ed Wood migrated from Poughkeepsie to Hollywood with dreams of becoming part of the motion picture industry. But that was just when an upstart called television was becoming a serious threat to the movies. 

The earliest scheduled TV shows, including such mainstays as The Texaco Star Theatre (1948-1956), The Lone Ranger (1949-1957) and The Ed Sullivan Show (aka Toast of the Town) (1948-1971), all came into existence during this time. I Love Lucy, another game changer, debuted in 1951. Clearly, it was a time of upheaval in the entertainment industry.

An unsold pilot.

And so, Ed Wood's early resume is littered with attempts to break into television, almost entirely without success. Many of his hopes were pinned on his friendship with Tom Keene (real name: George Duryea) (1896-1963), a handsome if somewhat bland New York actor who had been a prolific B-Western star in the 1930s and '40s. In the 1950s, television was overrun with cowboy shows, and Keene guested on several of them, including Judge Roy Bean, Hopalong Cassidy, and Corky and White Shadow. 

Given Tom Keene's name recognition and past success, Eddie thought a weekly Keene series was a slam dunk, so he kept making pilots starring the actor such as Crossroad Avenger (1953) and The Showdown (1952), all of which went unsold. Some of these did see the light of day, though, on anthology shows like Cowboy Theater that served as dumping grounds for orphaned pilots. In those days, there wasn't a lot of content to go around, and TV stations had to fill the hours with something.

Around this same time, Keene and Wood were involved a very different sort of TV production, one that had nothing to do with cowboys, Indians, or the range. The Sun Was Setting (1951) must be considered one of the true oddities in the Ed Wood filmography: a soapy 15-minute melodrama about a terminally-ill woman named June (Angela Stevens) who cannot risk leaving her New York apartment, though she desperately wants to. Keene, billed as "Richard Powers," costars as Paul, June's loving but understandably nervous boyfriend. And Phyllis Coates, just a year away from playing Lois Lane on the first season of The Adventures of Superman, rounds out the cast as June's supportive friend, Rene.

What makes The Sun Was Setting so unusual is that it is a straight drama, something Eddie rarely if ever attempted in his career. He made horror films, sci-fi films, Westerns, crime thrillers, and countless adult movies over the course of 30 years in show business, but The Sun stands apart from everything else on his resume. One wonders, then, why Eddie made this little movie. What were his hopes for it? Where did he think it would lead?

One Song at a Time: Remembering a (failed) series on this blog

They can't all be winners, as this series proved.

When this blog started in 2009, it was a spinoff of a podcast called Mail Order Zombie to which I regularly contributed material. As such, for the first few years, Dead 2 Rights was mostly about zombie movies and zombies in general. In fact, I even wrote the blog in character, using my "living impaired" alias from the show. But MOZ went dark in 2013, and I'd already been experimenting with non-zombie material a little by then. Once the podcast was kaput, I decided to ditch the pseudonym altogether and write about whatever interested me.

And what was that exactly? Well, the Ed Wood Wednesdays series started in 2013 and is still going in 2026. For some people, that's all this blog is. Which is fair: there's a lot of Ed Wood stuff on here. Like it or not, there's been a lot of Happy Days stuff on this blog, too. So I'm not just the Ed Wood guy. I'm the Ed Wood and Happy Days guy. I'm fine with that. 

But there's other stuff on Dead 2 Rights, too. I've tried many different approaches over the years, hoping something will break through. Nothing really has. I regret that I dropped the Comedy Classics articles. It's just that they were a lot of work for very little response. I still owe you guys 22 more of them in addition to the 78 I already did. (Maybe someday.) Comics and cartoons have long been a part of this blog, too, but those are more for me than they are for you.

One of my biggest disappointments was a series called One Song at a Time. The premise was pretty simple. Rather than talk about whole albums or genres of music, I'd concentrate on individual songs that meant something to me. I'd relate a little about the history of the song and add a personal story from my own life related to that song. I really thought this series had a chance of connecting with readers, but it apparently didn't. The series lasted from June 2014 to October 2015, then disappeared without a trace. C'est la vie.

The thing is, I've occasionally thought of reviving One Song at a Time, namely because there are a couple of music-related articles that have done fairly well by the standards of this blog. One is about the 1950s duo Patience & Prudence. Another is about the song "Be My Baby." Those still get views every week. In retrospect, the "Be My Baby" article served as the pilot for One Song at a Time.

Anyway, if you're just here for Ed Wood stuff, none of this may interest you. But if you want to know your humble blogger a little better, check out One Song at a Time.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 259: Okay, fine, I'll talk about 'Vampire Zombies... From Space!' (2024)

Some moments from the genre-hopping comedy Vampire Zombies... From Space.

I try never to dismiss a whole genre or subgenre of movies. In fact, it irritates me when I hear people say things like, "I hate all musicals," "I don't like science-fiction," or "I never watch Westerns." Because it means that they've dismissed a huge number of movies they've (mostly) never seen in one fell swoop. To me, statements like that suggest a depressing lack of intellectual curiosity. You're telling me you won't watch a movie because it's in a broad category you don't like? As John Waters would say, that's "contempt without investigation." 

I've been down this road before.

Having said all that—and here I reveal myself as a total hypocrite—there is one subgenre of movies that I approach with extreme skepticism: the fake B-movie. You know, those self-conscious comedies that satirize the low-budget movies of the past while also paying tribute to them. I'm talking about stuff like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001), Buddy BeBop vs. the Living Dead (2009), and Frankenstein vs. The Creature from Blood Cove (2005). You'd be surprised how many of these movies there are, and I feel like I've sat through more than my fair share of them over the years.

More often than not, these movies make me feel vaguely guilty. They're labors of love, but I rarely love them back. The people who make movies like this grew up watching cheap sci-fi and horror flicks, and now they just want to honor their earliest influences in a fun, playful way. What's wrong with that? Well, nothing... in theory. 

But these movies are constantly elbowing you in the ribs, desperate for you to know that they're "in on the joke." They always make a point of emphasizing how shoddy the special effects are, how clunky the dialogue is, and how improbable the story is. They never trust you, the viewer, to figure out any of that on your own. Everyone in the cast seemingly has a license to overact with total abandon, too, as if their lines are somehow funnier if they YELL EVERY WORD! You can always count on plenty of in-jokes and pop culture references in these movies, and there's a good chance you'll be seeing some winking celebrity cameos along the way. It's all much of a muchness. 

Some of these fake B-movies are tributes to Edward D. Wood, Jr., which, I guess, makes them my problem. Or my jurisdiction. And so, I've dutifully sat through John Johnson's Plan 9 (2015) and Andre Perkowski's Devil Girls (1999) and The Vampire's Tomb (2013). Generally, these movies are not a lot of fun for me. I appreciate what the directors are trying to do, but the forced wackiness becomes oppressive after a while. It's like being stuck in an elevator with a college improv troupe.

And that brings us to the movie I'm covering this week. I've known about Michael Stasko's Vampire Zombies... From Space! (2024) for a while now. I get Google alerts about Ed Wood on a daily basis, and there have been plenty of articles over the last year or so about Vampire Zombies and how it compares to Ed's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). I've been studiously avoiding Stasko's film for months, namely because of my previously-stated aversion to fake B-movies. I'd only gotten as far as the (admittedly kind of fun) trailer and didn't feel like exploring this matter any further. Yes, I was guilty of "contempt without investigation."

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 258: Have we been watching Ed's movies all wrong for decades?

This week, we focus on a certain, uh, aspect of Ed Wood's movies.

I'm sorry, you guys, but we have to talk about aspect ratios this week. I know, I know. I'll try to make this as painless as possible. But I'm going somewhere with this, and it relates to Ed Wood. Be patient. Keep in mind that I am not a filmmaker and not even a photographer, so you will have to forgive me if I am technically imprecise. If you can do better, please do.

Kylie does not approve.

As a kid, I honestly never gave much thought to the geometrical dimensions of TV screens or movie screens. (What kid notices stuff like this?) I knew that TVs were squares and movies were rectangles, but I didn't perceive that as a problem. Starting sometime in the mid-1980s, however, a few films—usually artsier titles like Amarcord (1973) and Manhattan (1979)—were released in what was called a "letterboxed format" on VHS and laserdisc. This trend continued into the 1990s, becoming well-known, if not well-loved, among consumers. Letterboxing meant that there would be black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, allowing the entire film frame (usually 1.85:1) to fit within the TV screen (usually 1.37:1 or 4:3) and not have the sides of the picture lopped off.

Letterboxing quickly became controversial, even hated. Film critics insisted it maintained the integrity of the original films and saved them from the indignity of the pan-and-scan process. Viewers, however, felt that letterboxing took movies that had already been shrunk down for television and then made them even smaller until they were difficult to see. And, besides, it meant that about half your screen was taken up by empty black space. How was that an improvement? You can see people's frustrations made manifest in the 1987 music video "The Loco-Motion" by Kylie Minogue. At one point, the familiar black bars appear at the top and bottom of the screen. Kylie scowls at them a little and flicks them away with her finger. The video then returns to its usual 1.37:1 or "fullscreen" aspect ratio.

It should be pointed out that this widescreen vs fullscreen issue generally only affects movies made from the 1950s onward. Before that, it was standard practice for movies to be filmed and projected in what was called Academy ratio, roughly 1.37:1. Classics like The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Casablanca (1942) were shot in this ratio, which meant that they did not have to be cropped when shown on television. We may think of Gone with the Wind (1939) as a widescreen epic, but it isn't. It's Academy ratio, too.

Eventually, TV sets became widescreen, and the letterboxing controversy all but evaporated. (Though we now have the exact opposite controversy, with old 4:3 episodes of shows like The Simpsons being cropped or distorted to fit newfangled TV sets.) Today, YouTube is able to accommodate videos of various aspect ratios. There are even numerous movies with multiple aspect ratios. This became semi-trendy in the 2000s and 2010s, thanks to directors like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson. Nowadays, most people watch things on their phones, so "cinematic integrity" is not exactly a top priority anymore. If you want to see a film the way the director intended (or whatever), you go to a movie theater or get it on Blu-ray or 4K. Otherwise, who cares?