Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 222: Ed Wood and Admit One Video Presentations (Part 2)

Ed Wood (top row, center) stars in Glen or Glenda, as released by Admit One Video Presentations.

Last week, we got to know Admit One Video Presentations, the offbeat Toronto-based company that distributed Ed Wood's movies in Canada in the 1980s. Like numerous other companies from that era, Admit One acquired vintage low-budget sci-fi and horror films and released them profitably for home viewing, much to the delight of the emerging "bad movie" cult. You might think of them as Canada's answer to Rhino Home Video or Something Weird Video. To my knowledge, Admit One put out their own versions of all six of Ed Wood's directorial efforts from Glen or Glenda (1953) to The Sinister Urge (1960). If eBay listings are to be believed, these releases are now pricey collector's items.

I was unaware of Admit One until recently, when reader Brandon Sibley brought the company and its products to my attention. To me, the most intriguing of the company's tapes is their release of Glen or Glenda because it gives us yet another slightly different cut of the film. In the past, I've explained how Glenda was released under numerous titles and was edited to various lengths, often to appease the censors. To summarize, the main edits I'm familiar with are:

• The Rhino cut. The longest, least-censored edit I've seen, if not necessarily the best looking or sounding. It was released on VHS tape by Rhino Home Video and was included on the two-disc set Ed Wood: A Salute to Incompetence (2007) from Passport International Entertainment. The film's title card is obviously, clumsily doctored. Whatever real title appeared onscreen has been blurred out, and the title "GLEN OR GLENDA" has been pasted over it. I believe this change was made by distributor Wade Williams, who did something similar to Night of the Ghouls (1959) aka Revenge of the Dead.

• The Image Entertainment cut. The most common version I've seen on the market. This is a sharper, cleaner transfer of the film with less static on the audio track, but it's plagued by numerous omissions, including a scene in which a homosexual man (Bruce Spencer) hits on an unfriendly straight man (Conrad Brooks). The dialogue also deletes certain references to God and sex. Some shots, including part of Glen's nightmare, have been trimmed for pacing reasons. Image's cut is the one used for the colorized version of Glen or Glenda and was also the one Rob Craig consulted for Ed Wood, Mad Genius (2009). It, too, has the doctored title card.

• The AGFA cut. The most recent edition of the film and the one that has provoked the most angry reactions from Ed Wood fans. This transfer from the American Genre Film Archive features dramatically brighter, crisper images than we've ever seen before, but it is also easily the shortest, most censored cut of the movie on the market. It's missing many sequences, some of which are iconic and crucial (e.g. the buffalo stampede) and also reorders certain scenes, especially during Glen's nightmare. The film features a unique credit sequence, including a title card that incorrectly identifies the movie as Twisted Lives. 

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 221: Ed Wood and Admit One Video Presentations (Part 1)

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. 

(today's zomby) AND CANADA'S GREATEST FILMMAKER, JOHN PAIZS!

And hey, check this out! Yesterday's post about the Dragnet finger puppets actually made it to the front page of the popular website Buzzfeed, which links to cool and interesting stuff on the Internet. Did it generate any traffic to this site? No, not really. But it's an honor just to be nominated. Here's a screenshot to prove it happened:

But enough of that! Today, I want to talk to you about Canada's greatest director. Ivan Reitman? Nope. James Cameron? He wishes! Atom Egoyan? Try again. I'm thinking of... JOHN PAIZS!

"Who's John Paizs?" you say.

This is John Paizs right over here.

Born in 1957 in Winnipeg, John Paizs is the writer, director, and star of the darkly surreal meta-comedy Crime Wave, a.k.a. The Big Crime Wave (1985), a film I'd probably count as my favorite of the 1980s and a serious contender for my favorite of all time. Describing this movie is an probably an impossible task, but I'll try it anyway. Paizs plays Steven Penny, a struggling young filmmaker whose last, government-backed movie bombed and who now wants to break into the glamorous world of "color crime moviemaking." Apparently broke, he rents a room over a garage from a suburban family, the Browns, and starts to work on his next script -- a "color crime" epic to be titled Crime Wave. Trouble is, he can think of beginnings and endings for Crime Wave but not middles. ("Middles are hard to think of, as every scriptwriter knows," says one song on the soundtrack.) Time and again, Steven seems on the verge of collapse, but the Browns' young daughter Kim (Eva Kovacs) becomes Steven's #1 fan and cheering section and encourages him to keep going. Through Kim's well-meaning interference, Steven comes into contact with the sinister Dr. Jolly (Neil Lawrie), a supposed "script doctor" (and medical doctor) who is also a homicidal maniac.



Those are the broad outlines of the plot, but they barely begin to describe Crime Wave, a movie which seems composed of equal parts Blue Velvet and Sesame Street. The movie is narrated by -- and mainly told from the perspective of -- young Kim Brown, and there are plenty of dream and fantasy sequences along the way, including supposed deleted scenes from the many, many unfinished versions of Crime Wave. Here, for instance, is the film's opening sequence. At this point in its development, Steven Penny's Crime Wave is going to be about the seedy underbelly of celebrity impersonation:



Later, after many script revisions, Crime Wave is about the seedy underbelly of direct home sales:



And so it goes.

Crime Wave should have been the first of many, many features for John Paizs, but he only made two more full-length films, the 1999 sci-fi comedy Invasion and a 2005 made for TV movie called Marker. Paizs did some TV directing for Canadian series like Maniac Mansion and The Kids in the Hall before winding up as a Director in Residence at the Canadian Film Centre. Sadly, Crime Wave is tied up in rights issues and is not currently available on DVD. But on the bright side, some of Paizs' early short films have been posted to You Tube and are well worth watching.

The International Style (excerpt) (1983)