Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 31: "Revenge of the Virgins" (1959)

"Savage Maidens Without Men!": Another Western thought to be written by Edward D. Wood, Jr.

"This is the revenge of the virgins. Once again, the trespassers have paid the penalty, and the legend continues. Beware the savage guardians of the Golden Horde."
-narrator Kenne Duncan, Revenge of the Virgins 

"The power of men is illusory. The power of women is real."
-author Salman Rushdie

One of Pete Perry's sexploitation classics.

This week, we turn our attention to two men named Pete, one real and the other (most likely) imaginary. The real one is Peter "Pete" Perry, Jr., yet another of schlock cinema's "utility infielders," who managed to keep his career in Hollywood alive for almost 30 years by diversifying his resumé. A little editing here, a little producing-directing there, maybe some writing and acting from time to time, etc. In that sense, his filmography resembles that of multifarious B-movie contemporaries like Ronald V. Ashcroft, Don Davis, and Edward D. Wood, Jr. But Pete's career in exploitation filmmaking is obscured by clouds of doubt and ambiguity. Biographical information about the man is frustratingly rare.

Most of the writing about Pete Perry has been in the form of reviews of the movies he made. The magnificently-named blog Johnny LaRue's Crane Shot has this career overview, which calls Perry "a pioneer of the sexploitation genre." And Goregirl's Dungeon has a nicely-illustrated feature about one of Perry's films, too. You'd think there would be an interview with this man or at least a few scattered anecdotes about him, but if they exist, I cannot locate them.

The most specific detail I can find about Perry from an official source is this one-sentence biography on the website of Something Weird Video, a company which now distributes several of his films: "Director Peter Perry," says SWV's Lisa Petrucci, "often worked with [adult film producers] David F. Friedman and Harry Novak during the 1960s under a number of aliases." Oh, man, did Pete Perry have aliases. Over the years, he was Dick Crane, A.J. Gaylord, Arthur P. Stootsberry, and Seymour Tuchus (my personal favorite). He seems to have gotten his start working for other filmmakers with Ed Wood connections. For instance, he wrote The Flesh Merchant (1956), which was directed by W. Merle Connell, i.e. the man whose bondage footage had been clumsily edited into Glen or Glenda? back in 1953. Then, Pete Perry worked for Ronnie Ashcroft as a writer-actor on the potboiler Girl with an Itch (1958).

The very next year, Pete directed his own first feature, a "nudie Western" novelty called Revenge of the Virgins (1959). This film was distributed by a company called Radio Voice of America or RVA. Critic Rob Craig has cleverly noted that these are also the initials of Ronnie V. Ashcroft, hinting at another possible connection between the two men. After Virgins, Perry would go on to direct a dozen more flicks over the next 20 years, almost always in softcore, with such rather well-remembered titles as The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966), My Tale is Hot (1964), and Kiss Me Quick! (also 1964).

The Notorious Cleopatra, credited to
"A.P. Stootsberry" (aka Pete Perry, Jr.)

But directing was not Pete's only gig! As an editor, Pete Perry was employed several times by the notorious anti-auteur Al Adamson (1929-1995), who combined sex and violence in such ensanguined films as Blood of Dracula's Castle (1969), Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970), and Five Bloody Graves (1970), all three of which featured John Carradine. Meanwhile, the Internet rumor mill asserts that Pete Perry is the same person as Bethel Buckalew, who worked extensively as a writer, director, producer, and production manager in softcore sex films of the 1970s. Perry and Bucklalew do have several films in common, including The Notorious Cleopatra (1970) and Mag Wheels aka Summer School (1978). But Perry himself disputed that claim in a brief statement he gave to the Temple of Schlock blog in 2008. While he distributed My Boys Are Good Boys (1978), a comedy directed by Buckalew, he had no part in the making of that film. According to Perry, Buckalew "is a real person. I used to use him in the early days as my production manager, but then he went off on his own and did those other things."

Pete's company, Peter Perry Productions, indeed has a few late-1970s titles to its name, including Good Boys. In his own personal writing resumé from the '70s, Ed Wood claims to have penned a screenplay for "Pete Perry Prod." called Bed Time Talk. No other record of this film exists, and I have no evidence that it was ever produced. Considering Eddie's talent for churning out screenplays in a hurry, I have little doubt that he wrote something called Bed Time Talk once upon a time, but it doesn't seem to have gotten past the screenplay stage. By the end of his directing career, like Ed Wood before him, Pete Perry attempted to transition from soft to hardcore with A Woman's Dream (1980), whose cast includes at least a few actors with names I recognize, mainly from the invaluable Rialto Report podcast, namely Jamie Gillis and Herschel Savage.

As for Pete himself, he seems to have retired from the business after editing Chris Warfield's Sounds of Sex in 1985. My Internet sources informally tell me that Perry is alive and living out West, possibly in Nevada, these days. I wish him well.

Pete LaRoche's Outlaw Queen

But now, friends, it's time to discuss the career of another Pete, specifically Pete LaRoche, a writer who just may have been our very own Edward D. Wood, Jr. working under a pseudonym. Here is what the Internet's best Ed Wood fan site, The Hunt for Edward D. Wood, Jr., has to say about him:

The issue of Pete LaRoche is an interesting one. The name (and a variant, "Peter La Roche") appears on only three movies in the IMDb, all with some sort of connection to Ed. Outlaw Queen and The Wetbacks both feature involvement by Ed's friend and protege, Ronnie Ashcroft (see The Astounding She-Monster). Revenge of the Virgins features narration by Ed's best friend Kenne Duncan, also features Nona Carver (whose only other work is Take It Out In Trade) and uses the same music used in The Beast of Yucca Flats, which stars Tor Johnson and features Conrad Brooks. All of this is quite interesting, of course, but doesn't really point directly to Ed. The only problem is, I can find absolutley no information about Pete LaRoche anywhere else. So, for now, my suspicion is that "Pete LaRoche" might just be Ed, and his films will be listed here [in a separate section of the site], with the most apocryphal of the apocryphal films.

In his book, Ed Wood, Mad Genius, critic Rob Craig chooses to include Revenge of the Virgins in his survey of Eddie's career and gives it a full write-up, which he prefaces thusly:

Ed Wood's participation in this low-budget film is disputed; it is included on the assumption that Wood wrote, or contributed to the screenplay, which is credited to a "Pete LaRoche." The only other screenplays credited to LaRoche are Wetbacks (1959) and Outlaw Queen (1957), but there are at least two magazine articles during the time period with a similar by-line, dealing with Western movie stars William S. "Bill" Hart and Tim McCoy. Pete LaRoche may in fact be a separate individual, or one of Wood's many pen names, as Wood was an avid fan of the Western film genre, and could have easily been the author of all extant "LaRoche" pieces.

One of Pete LaRoche's fact-based Western articles from the 1970s.

It is interesting to note that Craig covers neither The Beach Bunnies (1976) nor The Snow Bunnies (1972) in his book, despite the fact that both are clearly and unambiguously credited to Edward D. Wood, Jr. And yet Revenge of the Virgins does make his cut! This movie, then, must have struck Rob Craig as genuine enough to merit taking up space in his book. One connection that neither of these writers seems to make is that all of LaRoche's screenplays are Westerns, a factor which ties it to the LaRoche-written magazine articles. The Hunt for Edward D. Wood, Jr. actually links to the piece about William S. Hart, so I've had a chance to peruse it. Craig asserts that these articles were written "during the time period" that LaRoche was working as a screenwriter, but this is not strictly true. The LaRoche movie scripts stretch from 1956 to 1959.

The two known LaRoche articles, however, appeared in 1971 --  not coincidentally, when Ed Wood was working quite frequently as a magazine writer. And, yes, he did occasionally pen fact-based Western articles during that time. (See: "Pearl Hart & The Last Stage" from week 9 of this series.) Pete LaRoche's biographical sketch of Western actor-director William S. Hart appeared in the June 1971 issue of True West magazine. The other known LaRoche piece, "Colonel Tim McCoy -- Army Man, Movie Star," also surfaced in June 1971, this time in a publication known simply as The West. What's truly fascinating, at least to dedicated Wood-ologists, is that "Army Man, Movie Star" was reprinted in August 1974 in a magazine called Golden West, Vol. 10., No. 9. But here, it was credited to "Glenn Shirley." Draw your own conclusions.

Hart's manliness: above reproach.

I am still currently attempting to secure a copy of "Army Man, Movie Star" from a library in Arizona. But I have read the William S. Hart article, and I have no trouble believing it is Ed Wood's work. More specifically, this article could easily have been a chapter in Ed's book, Hollywood Rat Race, which devotes an inordinate amount of ink to the directors and actors of the cowboy pictures Wood so loved. Hart (1864-1946) was born in Newburgh, NY, a mere 17 miles from Ed's own birthplace of Poughkeepsie, and just like Ed, Hart first worked as a stage actor before getting into movies. The screen icon's acting-directing career, which was noted for its rugged manliness and realism, stretched from 1914 to 1925 when he was displaced by "showmen" like Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson and retired to his ranch in Newhall, CA. Pete LaRoche seems especially impressed by the fact that Hart insisted upon doing his own stunts. Here, I must point out that Ed Wood's first-ever appearance in a movie was as a stuntman in the Sam Fuller-directed Western, The Baron of Arizona (1950), starring Vincent Price. When LaRoche writes of Hart's on-set derring-do, he makes this very Hollywood Rat Race-esque observation:

Today all of it would be filmed with a double while the studio's valuable property star would be sitting in the shade probably sipping a tall, cool one. This is not to say that all of today's stars are unable to perform the dangerous stunts which are written into the script. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Lee Marvin and a few others are fully capable of meeting any demands; but their studios wouldn't allow it if a double or trick photography could make a passable substitute.

Many of the hallmarks of Ed Wood's book are present in this one brief passage: alcohol consumption ("sipping a tall, cool one"), the phoniness of Hollywood, and the pampered nature of modern movie stars. Eye-catching lists of celebrity names, like the one seen above, are extremely common in Rat Race as well. Wood's typically byzantine gender politics are also on full display in this article. The author goes off on a longish digression about the nature of male-female relationships in Hart's movies, seemingly offering his own "frontier" version of Freud's Madonna-whore complex:

Louise Glaum

In most of his films, [Hart] was reformed by the "good" girl after having shown (in a time of crisis) that there was a basic goodness in his own character. As for sex in his films, Louise Glaum usually played the seductive gal who made no bones about what she was selling, and Hart paid for it, no questions asked. This was an authentic part of the frontier town, and Bill Hart did not leave it out. This was the era of the "man," and his wants were not denied or restricted. Hart made this plain in all his films. Saloons were there. Gambling went on around the clock, and the ever-present dancehall girls were around to please, entertain and satisfy. While women were a precious item on the frontier, they were not regarded as highly destructible and fragile as the women of today. 

Hart was truthful in the handling of his women. He was gentle to the gentlewoman who, in his films, represented what was fine in womanhood, but he was hard in dealing with the kind who aroused his wrath. A notable example of this treatment was vividly displayed in his film of 1916, Hell's Hinges. While he was against a young minister's establishing a church in the town of Hell's Hinges, he respected him for attempting to carry out his mission in the face of strong opposition. And when Louise Glaum, the town's foremost Lady of Joy, seduced the young minister after having plied him with whiskey, Hart broke in on her and thoroughly manhandled her.

So there you have it, ladies: Baffling and Unhelpful Gender Stereotypes of the Oooooooold West! Fool around with a man of the cloth and get the crap beaten out of you. And now, we turn our attention to a most curious late 1950s Western in which women hold all the true authority, while impotent and incompetent men strut around and peck at each other like addle-brained roosters in a cockfight. None of the women in this film are "highly destructible" or even remotely "fragile," and the closest thing this movie has to a "gentlewoman" is a rather weak-willed man.

REVENGE OF THE VIRGINS (1959)

Title screen from the film.

Alternate titles: None. Even the French title translates as Revenge of the Virgins.

Availability: Revenge of the Virgins is available as half of a DVD called Naughty West Double Feature (Something Weird Video, 2003), along with Van Guylder's The Ramrodder (1969), a movie whose cast features Marsha Jordan as well as Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil. (And, yes, it was filmed at the notorious Manson hangout, the Spahn Movie Ranch.) Something Weird also offers Revenge on its own as a download for ten bucks.

Russ Meyer's breakthrough.

The backstory: For about as long as motion picture cameras have existed (let's say the 1890s), people have been using them to record sexually explicit scenes and images. Watch any of those made-for-cable documentaries about the "history of sex in the movies," and you're bound to find grainy, flickering, black-and-white footage of people stripping off and doing all sorts of interesting things to themselves and each other, including bondage and S&M scenarios. But because of religious restrictions, moral concerns, and censorship laws, such potentially "objectionable" movies had to occupy a clandestine or subterranean place in our society for decades. Ultimately, by the 1950s, "stag films" and "loops" became part of the Twentieth Century way of life, though the only method to see them was by visiting out-of-the-way theaters or by renting them privately and projecting them on a bedsheet or small screen at a bachelor party or men's club meeting. Meanwhile, thanks to Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine, which debuted in 1953, (mild) female nudity became somewhat more acceptable as mainstream entertainment for heterosexual men. At least in print, that is. The movie world wasn't quite as accepting yet.

But in 1959, there appeared on the entertainment scene a new form of diversion: the "nudie cutie," a feature-length narrative film which incorporated female nudity into a storyline. With Lena Dunham now flashing her boobs regularly on HBO's Girls, this may not seem like such a big deal. But in the waning years of the Eisenhower Administration, this was a revelation! The father of the genre is widely considered to be writer-director Russ Meyer (1922-2004), who not coincidentally had been a photographer (and a damned good one) for Hefner's Playboy. Though he would go on to make better, more inventive movies, Meyer's game-changer was a modest "Frenchy comedy" called The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), starring Bill Teas, a combat photographer who had served alongside Meyer in the Marines in WWII. Produced on a modest $24,000 budget, the film attained a level of commercial success unheard of in the sex film market, with grosses in the low seven digits. (In today's money, imagine taking about $200,000 and turning it into $8 million.) A key to the film's success was the fact that its abundant nudity was completely removed from any sexual context. Teas merely imagined seeing naked women wherever he went, and the movie allowed us -- through the magic of cinema -- to see what he was seeing.

So The Immoral Mr. Teas is a sex film with no sex. Just what the doctor ordered! In its own way, Mr. Teas is as much a landmark in movie history as Gerard Damiano's Deep Throat (1972), a feature-length film which actually contained unsimulated sex acts as part of its story.

But just as Damiano's much-celebrated, much-hated film was preceded by producer Bill Osco's less-heralded, now-forgotten Mona: The Virgin Nymph (1970), there is some debate as to which director actually started the whole "nudie cutie" phenomenon in the late 1950s. Russ Meyer is the widely-acknowledged king of the genre, but it is worth pointing out that Pete Perry's Revenge of the Virgins appeared the very same year. It was critic Rob Craig who gave me the idea that perhaps Perry had beaten Meyer to the punch. Granted, both Teas and Virgins were quickly made, so it is entirely possible that Perry saw Meyer's film and rushed his own "nudie cutie" into production before the year was over. Or this could be one of those "great minds think alike" situations where both Meyer and Perry saw where the sex film industry was headed and started to work along similar paths. This could be a sexual-cinematic example of the "multiple discovery" theory, in which important breakthroughs are reached independently and simultaneously by different experimenters.

It's important to point out that The Immoral Mr. Teas and Revenge of the Virgins are not even vaguely alike, tonally or structurally. The one crucial element they have in common is the inclusion of female nudity in a storyline which contains no onscreen sex. Otherwise, these are very different movies! Meyer's full-color comedy is a lighthearted, rather drowsy little trifle of a film which plays more like a series of skits or vignettes. While the women in the film do not engage in any explicit sexual activity, Mr. Teas' fantasies are certainly fueled by male lust, hence the word "immoral" in the title. On the other hand, Perry's movie is a brisk, violent, no-nonsense Western in which the female nudity is never presented in a sexual manner at all. In fact, even though it's the film's selling point, the toplessness of the "Indian" characters is never once commented upon and now comes across as an almost surreal nonsequitir, like the random naked lady (played, no kidding, by Russ Meyer starlet/girlfriend Kitten Natividad) who makes an unexplained appearance in Airplane! (1980).

Ramona Rogers, aka Jean Nieto.

So Pete Perry may or may not have invented the "nudie cutie," but he was most definitely an early adapter and deserves to be called a pioneer in his field. And what kind of team did Mr. Perry assemble to create this groundbreaking film of his? Well, I alluded earlier in this article to Pete's possible connection to Ronnie Ashcroft, director of last week's film, The Astounding She-Creature. There is considerable overlap in the cast and crew between Virgins and She-Creature. Most obviously, the two films share a score: the jarring, Stravinsky-like compositions of Guenther "Gene" Kauer. The only examples of "new" music in Perry's film are the upright piano heard in an early saloon scene, plus the thudding "war drums" used to represent the Indians. (Both of these might be stock, as they are used more as sound effects than true background music.)

Elsewhere in the crew, one of the two credited cinematographers on Revenge of the Virgins is Gene Gropper, who did some reshoots on She-Creature for Ronnie Ashcroft. And the uncredited narrator is Ed Wood's good buddy, Western badman Kenne Duncan, who played one of the leads in She-Creature. Besides Duncan, the most interesting name in the cast for Wood-ologists is Nona Carver, who plays the blonde-haired "white goddess" who leads an all-female tribe of Native Americans. Carver, of course, is the stripper who played a madam in Ed Wood's Take It Out in Trade (1970).

The topless Indian maidens, the "Golden Horde," appear to be played by strippers and pinup models, none of whom amounted to much in the film industry. There are six altogether, none of them Native American in ancestry. Only one has even a second credit to her name. That would be Ms. Betty Shay, who appeared as a dancer in a filmed burlesque show called Merry Maids of the Gay Way (1954). Another member of the Golden Horde, Ramona Rogers, at least has a few extant glamour shots and seems to have also worked under the name Jean Nieto.

Charles Veltmann, Jr. and costar Jodean Lawrence.

As for the film's non-nude performers, there are a surprising many who went on to long, successful careers, and a few who... well, didn't.

Among the latter group is milquetoast Charles Veltmann, Jr. (aka Charles Veltman), who booked at least one more Western, John Wayne's famously troubled The Alamo (1960), but nothing else. Ralph Cookson, a grubby barkeep here, didn't even get that far. Colorful character actor Stanton Pritchard has a brief filmography indeed, but it includes Ronnie Ashcroft's Like Wow! (1962). Louis Massad didn't get a great deal of film credits, but racked up plenty of TV gigs in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly in Westerns (Gunsmoke, The Virginian) and action shows (Mission: Impossible, McCloud). Del Monroe has a similarly TV-heavy career, with the expected emphasis on shoot-'em-ups and manly fare (Mannix, The Rockford Files, The Fall Guy). The late Hugo Stanger (1901-1990) worked in films for 30 years, snagging some of his most plum assignments (Beetlejuice, Psycho III) near the end.

The actor listed in the credits of Revenge of the Vrgins as "Hank Delgado" has an almost-entirely undistinguished filmography... unless he's really Henry Darrow (birth name: Enrique Delgado), who has been getting steady TV and film work (including recurring roles on TV's Harry O, The Bold and the Beautiful, and at least three incarnations of Zorro) since the late 1950s. In that case, Revenge of the Virgins was the beginning of a lengthy Hollywood career.

By far, however, the best and most compelling performance in this film is given by feisty Jodean Lawrence (1932-2010), an actress who was still going by the name Jodean Russo back then. Lawrence was her maiden name, and she reverted to it after getting divorced. A Los Angeles stage performer of note, Lawrence's film and TV career didn't take off until the 1970s. She went on to appear in such prominent motion pictures as Airport (1970) and Johnny Got His Gun (1971), along with a slew of TV shows (Little House of the Prairie, The Streets of San Francisco, The Six Million Dollar Man). Her death  in 2010 merited an obituary in Variety. In case you were wondering, Edward D. Wood, Jr. was not likewise honored.

The viewing experience: Though conceived as a hybrid of the Western and burlesque genres, Revenge of the Virgins reminded me more of those 1970s horror movies, including Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977), in which a group of "normal" people travel to a desolate, remote location, only to find themselves being cold-bloodedly picked off, one at a time, by a family of savage, feral strangers. In this film, however, the "victims" are depicted in an entirely unflattering way, so our sympathies are not aroused by their deaths. The "killers," on the other hand, are portrayed in a basically neutral manner and do not suffer any casualties, unlike the grotesque clans in the Hooper and Craven films. And while the horror films of the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond eventually winnow the pool of potential victims down to one last female survivor, the fabled "final girl," Revenge of the Virgins narrows down its "straight" cast to a single, rather effeminate man. The plot of this movie is extremely basic and straightforward, with very few digressions or distractions, so I think I'll let narrator Kenne Duncan -- who recites the prologue with the chummy, impersonal bonhomie normally reserved for Hawaiian travelogues -- set the scene for us:

Nona Carver as "Yellow Gold"

Out of the early days of our Western frontier have come many legends. Some of these stories are based on fact. Others, no doubt, were conceived in the minds of grizzled old prospectors, too long alone in the hot barren waste, consumed by their one dream -- the dream of finding gold. Each one convinced that he would one day hit the biggest bonanza of all. Many of these stories, as you know, concerned Indians. They were the large tribes or nations in Arizona, such as the Apache, the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Papago and many more. California's Indians were divided into smaller tribes. There were a good many of these groups who were all but extinct when the Spaniards landed. Most of them are far more primitive than their brothers in other territories. Their culture was that of the Stone Age. 

This story deals with the last days of one such tribe. Already small when Spain first claimed California as her own, their numbers steadily dwindled as they waged an unending war against the white man. They refused to be converted to Christianity by the padres of the mission. The white man was their mortal enemy, to be killed on sight. While their number was decreasing, the number of their enemy was increasing. The Anglo or Yankee had migrated West and was embarked upon the feverish search for gold. The remnants of this tribe had been driven back into the hills in an area which was thought to be rich in gold. Individual prospectors and parties of men had gone into these hills, never to return. There came a time when the only remaining members of this tribe were women. Their men had been all killed in their ceaseless battle with the white man or had died of pestilence. 

Ironically, the leader of these women was herself white. She had been captured as a baby, and the only reason she had been spared was the fact that heir hair was the color of yellow gold. To the superstitious minds of these primitive people, this was the symbol. She had been sent to them by the Sun God, and they treated her as a goddess as she grew to young womanhood. Since she had known nothing but the ways of these Indians, their enemy became her enemy, and she fought and killed her own people. 

This is the story of one party of white men and one white woman who, in their search for gold, encountered these Amazons of the West. 

A member of the Golden Horde fires an arrow.

The knowledgeable Wood-ologist will easily find numerous parallels here between Duncan's narration and the plot and dialogue of the Ed Wood-scripted Orgy of the Dead (1965). The very first sentence, for instance, is evocative of a line spoken by horror writer Bob (William Bates) in the later film: "All of my books are based on fact... or legend. That's perhaps why they're more interesting and sell in the top spots." An emphasis on "facts" is a key Wood-ian motif, as discussed in some detail in my review of The Beach Bunnies. Moreover, the theme of worshiping gold above all else is a major motif in Orgy as well, with Pat Barringer's character paying the ultimate price for her devotion to the precious metal.

Of all the movies in the Ed Wood canon, Orgy and Virgins are the two which feature a great deal of non-sexual female nudity, though the topless diving sequence from Venus Flytrap (1970) is another good example. You might remember that Orgy featured its own Native American character, the Indian maiden who was forced to dance for Emperor Criswell. Another Orgy character, the Princess of Darkness, described this young lady as "one who loved flames. Her lover was killed by flames. She died in flames." While Orgy's lone Indian character worshiped fire, the members of the Golden Horde in Revenge of the Virgins fiercely protect the gold on their land, for reasons that the non-Indian characters describe as some kind of primitive, indecipherable superstition. The white characters, of course, want the gold for selfish, practical reasons.

Whose side is the movie on? Clearly, not with the treasure seekers, as they exist mainly to die for our amusement. But the Golden Horde aren't very sporting either, shooting the white folks with arrows from a distance with no warning. "Well, that's the Apaches' idea of fair play," says Stanton Pritchard in disgust. The Indians only risk a close-range attack after the last survivor has been bitten by a snake* and is too weak to fight back. Besides, we never get to really know any of the Golden Horde as individuals. We are rarely left alone in their presence, apart from one ritualistic dance scene which again hearkens back to Orgy.

In other words, the Native American characters are rightfully protecting what is theirs, but they're doing so in a rather cowardly way, so morally they're kind of a wash. The film's final shot, with the female Indians swarming around a male victim, makes an interesting counterpoint to scenes from such other Wood-scripted "girl gang" flicks like The Violent Years and Fugitive Girls.

*Yes, Revenge is yet another (alleged) Ed Wood movie with a snake in it. See also: Bride of the Monster, Necromania, The Astounding She-Monster, and Orgy of the Dead.

Pan Taggart: Ed Wood's onscreen surrogate?

The basic plot of Revenge of the Virgins is extremely simple, and Kenne Duncan's introductory narration gives away most of what happens in this hour-long feature. Dandified city slicker Melvin Potter (Veltmann) and his greedy, domineering, sexy wife Ruby (Lawrence) have just arrived in a frontier town looking for a business investment with the small amount of cash Melvin has socked away. Ruby wants wussy, submissive Melvin to purchase the saloon, but he finds that it's simply out of his price range. (It seems Melvin's previous business ventures have not been too profitable.) But while he's checking out the place, Melvin encounters a local character: a hard-drinking old coot named "Pan" Taggart (Pritchard), whose wild stories about a mother lode of gold deep in Injun country are a source of great amusement to the snickering patrons of the tavern, who buy him drinks but don't believe any of what he says. Yet Melvin is somehow convinced by Taggart, and they make plans to gather a group of men and weapons and go after that gold.

Whether he knew it or not when he was writing this script, Ed Wood created a good onscreen surrogate for himself in the character of "Pan" Taggart, whose nickname is short for "panhandler." In his later years, when he was deep into alcoholism and working for Pendulum Publishing, Eddie would regale his much-younger coworkers with anecdotes about his glory days working in motion pictures with Bela Lugosi, and they treated him much like the bar patrons treat Taggart in Revenge of the Virgins, finding Ed amusing but giving little credence to his words.

Anyhow, when Melvin relates his new plans to Ruby, she reacts as if this were Jack and the Beanstalk, and her husband had just sold the family cow for a handful of magic beans. Their big scene together is classic Wood. The reversal of traditional gender roles is on full display here, as it is Ruby who clearly "wears the pants" in the relationship, even though she looks womanly and dresses in a very alluring and feminine manner. (Throughout the film, Ruby repeatedly tells Melvin to "shut up," a phrase she shares with macho Jail Bait gangster Vic Brady.)

Ruby: Who is Pan Taggart?! 

Melvin: He's that prospector I told you about, the one that knows about the gold. 

Ruby: I sent you out to try and talk a deal with the owner of the saloon, and you come back without talking to him? And have the gall to tell me you wasted your time talking to a stupid old fool? 

Melvin: But.. but, Ruby... 

Ruby: I want that saloon. Do you understand? For once in my life, I wanna be somebody! I wanna run that place and be the queen of the beehive. And have all the people come to me for things. I wanna make money. Big money! 

Melvin: Ruby, Ruby, you just said it! That's exactly what's been on my mind! Big money! 

Ruby: Well, then go out and buy the saloon! 

Melvin: Ruby, honey, forget about that saloon for a minute. That's not what I'm talking about! Besides, if... if you were to be the queen around a place like that, honey, I... I just couldn't stand it! All those men pawing at you! 

Ruby: Oh! 

Melvin: Ruby, honey, listen to me! Hear me out just this once. Now we both want big money, but I'm telling you again I just haven't got the wherewithal to buy a place like that! 

Ruby: Before you married me, you sold out a freighting business in Illinois! What did you do with the money? 

Melvin: Well, I... I sold out the place because I couldn't make a go of it. Now, now if you've got a place that isn't doing very well, you're not going to get very much for it, are you? Now, Ruby, listen... this Taggart swears up and down that the gold is there. And I believe him! 

Ruby: Why? 

Melvin: Well, if it wasn't there, say... say he made up this whole story just to mooch a bottle and some food, he wouldn't be willing to risk his life, now would he? Much less three months of hard work and a long trip. Oh, no, no. He can get a bottle and food a lot easier than that! 

Ruby: Where's this gold supposed to be? 

Melvin: At a place he calls Gold Creek. It's deep in Indian Territory. Now, honey, it's no picnic to get there, but we can be rich! Real stinking rich! And we won't have to sweat it out in that lousy saloon for the next 15 years! Listen, Ruby, all we have to do is bag it up! Bags of gold!

"Tell me about the rabbits, George!"

The only two men Melvin manages to convince to go in with him are a couple of no-good desperadoes (Delgado and Stanger) on the run from the law. These men immediately start scheming how to screw naive, too-trusting Melvin over; they also start making inappropriate sexual overtures toward Ruby. This ragtag party of five -- Taggart, the Potters, and the two crooks -- head out in search of Gold Creek. From this point on, Charles Veltmann, Jr. temporarily takes over the voiceover chores from Kenne Duncan, making Revenge of the Virgins another Ed Wood movie with multiple narrators. After a few minutes of screen time, there are two additions to the group -- a pair of Cavalry deserters (Massad and Monroe), who also do a lot of dastardly, sneaky plotting behind Melvin's back. Frankly, having two matching pairs of scumbags was overkill. The desperadoes and the deserters are difficult to tell apart, so these two "new" characters don't add a great deal of variety to the film. I guess their real purpose is to provide more victims for the Golden Horde to kill, and believe me, the archery-related deaths start early in the proceedings and don't let up.

The only real moment of pathos along the way is when Pan Taggart is killed. His death comes mere seconds after he finally gets his hand on the gold that he has been dreaming about for years. His last words before being struck by an arrow are: "Gold! Gold! Here it is! Gold!" The irony of this does not go unnoticed by the other characters. "Old coot tries for ten years to convince somebody that there's gold up here," says Delgado. "When he finally makes it back, he gets one minute to feel it between his fingers." That's life in a nutshell, ain't it? Later, when Ruby is struck down, Melvin insists on putting a marker at her gravesite. ("It seems kinda lonesome without a touch of somebody cared.")

As Rob Craig notes in his assessment of this film, graves and funerals are a common theme in Ed Wood's writing career. In the Pete LaRoche article about William S. Hart, he even devotes a few sentences to the final resting place of Hart's beloved pinto, Fritz. ("Fritz is buried at the William S. Hart Ranch in Newhall, Calif.," the article informs us, "his memory commemorated by a suitable monument.")

Ultimately, Revenge of the Virgins leads to a climax in which Hank Delgado plans to shoot Charles Veltmann, Jr. in the back while the latter prattles on obliviously about the saloon he'll buy with his share of the gold once he returns to town. The scene very much reminded me of the famous "rabbits" scene between George and Lenny in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. I don't know whether or not Ed Wood was thinking of that when he wrote this screenplay, but it seems likely. The difference here is that there's no undercurrent of tragedy in Revenge, since both characters -- the shooter and the shootee -- are almost entirely worthless.



All in all, this is a movie that Ed Wood fans in particular and seekers of strange entertainment in general will definitely want to check out, if only for its lost-era oddness and squeaky-clean brand of decadence. Revenge of the Virgins is easy to find in a variety of formats, and it's a quick, quirky, relatively painless viewing experience, even for rookies who may find themselves overmatched by the likes of Orgy of the Dead. Better yet, if you're an aspiring Wood-ologist but are a bit squeamish about pornography, this is an ideal "gateway drug." Revenge will allow you to check out the "naughty" side of Eddie's career without the potential embarrassment of seeing actors and actresses in sexual situations, either real or simulated.

Or if you're slightly put off by the prospect of sitting through a black-and-white Western from the 1950s, you may be put at ease to learn that this one is roughly 50% boobs, 40% people being shot with arrows, and 10% Ed Wood dialogue. That's a winning formula, I'd say. Moreover, this little movie is a museum artifact of cinematic sexploitation plus a statement (albeit a muddled one) on both the role of women in society and the treatment of the American Indians by white settlers. What more do you want from an hour of light entertainment?

In two weeks: One of the most talked-about, shocked-about motion pictures of 1959 was Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, a film so scandalous that even star Jimmy Stewart's father came out publicly against it. Of Hollywood's offerings the very next year, easily the most controversial was Alfred Hitchcock's now-seminal slasher Psycho. If you take Anatomy of a Murder and cross-pollinate it with Psycho, what do you get? I have no idea, but director Boris Petroff was hoping audiences would be curious enough to be lured into the movie theaters and drive-ins of America to see his latest creation, a sleazy crime thriller whose screenplay was credited to Petroff's wife, Jane Mann, and film/TV writer Don Devlin. But there are those who believe that a certain Edward Davis Wood, Jr. may have had a hand in the creation of this particular movie. Did he? We'll sort all this out in one short week as we examine Anatomy of a Psycho (1961).

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 30: "The Astounding She-Monster" (1957)

This magnificent poster semi-accurately represents the contents of The Astounding She-Monster.

An impressive credit for Ashcroft.

Let's turn our attention to the career of Ronald V. "Ronnie" Ashcroft (born in either 1921 or 1923; died after a lengthy illness in 1988). Like Ed Wood, Ronnie hailed from the East, specifically New Bedford, MA. And just like Ed, Ronnie worked for a major film studio at the very beginning of his career. In Ashcroft's case, though, the studio was Twentieth Century-Fox, and his job there was working in their New York publicity office in the early 1940s. This experience gave the young man a taste for the film industry, and his plan was to become a cameraman. 

In a twist all too typical of the Ed Wood saga, Ashcroft was prevented from reaching his goal by the $1000 initiation fee demanded by the camera operators union. The course of his career and life, then, was changed by the relatively-affordable $250 dues of the editors union.

According to film historian Bruce Eder at the All Movie Guide, "Ashcroft spent years as an editor's assistant, and then moved up to jobs such as sound effects editor for some of the smaller producers; he fulfilled the latter capacity in Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended, in 1956, and was the editor on the independent feature Wetbacks, starring Lloyd Bridges." The Corman movie does not turn up on Ashcroft's obviously-incomplete IMDb filmography, nor do any references to Ronnie's work as an assistant editor. His movie and TV credits there stretch from 1956 to 1983. 

As Eder suggests, Ashcroft seems to have toiled mainly as a sound editor but also served as a film editor (including a gig working for Edgar Ulmer on 1959's The Naked Venus), producer, director, and writer. His film work seems largely confined to independent features, but Ashcroft found more mainstream employment on television, even landing an Emmy nomination for his work on Police Story in 1974. As a fan of 1960s rock and soul music, I was most impressed to see that Ashcroft had been an "audio consultant" on Steve Binder's The T.A.M.I. Show (1964), perhaps the most magnificent of all concert films.

Ronnie Ashcroft's true "golden age" stretched from about 1957 to 1962. That's when he was an independent producer-director in his own right, working for himself rather than for others. He directed three of his own productions: a sci-fi film called The Astounding She-Monster (1957) and two early, tame sexploitationers, Girl With an Itch (1958) and the Russ Meyer-inspired Like Wow! (aka Mr. Peek-a-Boo's Playmates) (1962). A fourth Ashcroft production, a Western called Outlaw Queen starring jazz bandleader Harry James, was directed by Herbert S. Greene.

Connections to Ed Wood abound in Ashcroft's career. Most obviously, he was Eddie's assistant director on Night of the Ghouls (1959) and produced the short film Trick Shooting with Kenne Duncan (circa early-to-mid-1960s). In addition, two of the Westerns on Ashcroft's resume, the aforementioned Wetbacks (1956) and Outlaw Queen (1957), were written by the mysterious "Pete LaRoche," an obscure scribe who might possibly have been Edward Davis Wood, Jr. operating under a pseudonym. We will examine the career of Mr. LaRoche more closely next week.

In the meantime, it's perhaps interesting to note that our good friend Kenne Duncan is in Outlaw Queen, while I. Stanford Jolley of The Violent Years is in both Wetbacks and Outlaw Queen. In fact, actor Duncan is the linchpin of the entire Ed Wood/Ronnie Ashcroft saga. "I met Eddie Wood at the home of my good friend, Kenne Duncan," Ashcroft explained to Rudolph Grey in the book Nightmare of Ecstasy.

One day during the making of Night of the Ghouls in 1958, Ed dropped by Kenne's place to give him some good news and bad news. The good news? For just $20, Eddie had rented a tiny studio called Picture Recorders from 6:00pm to midnight and had three sets ready to go. The bad news? His assistant director had quit on him, and Eddie desperately needed someone to corral the actors so that they'd know their lines and be ready to go when it was time to shoot. Being broke, Ronnie Ashcroft said, "I'm available!" Eddie hired him immediately. But an hour before filming got underway, Eddie, Kenne, Ronnie, and cinematographer Bill Thompson took time out to get sloshed at an establishment called the College Inn, where Ed blew through a stack of $100 bills he was supposed to be using as the cast's payroll. When Eddie and the gang finally arrived at Picture Recorders, the hapless director didn't have enough cash on hand to pay Tor Johnson, who then refused to work. Ah, the hazards of no-budget filmmaking, eh?

Curiously, Ronnie Ashcroft discussed his experience on Night of the Ghouls as if it were his first encounter with Edward D. Wood, Jr. But Ghouls was filmed in 1958, and as we shall soon see, Eddie was Ronnie's mentor on a film that had already been released the previous year...

THE ASTOUNDING SHE-MONSTER (1957)

British lobby card for the film.

Alternate titles: The Naked Invader [script title]; The Astounding She Monster [no hyphen], Mysterious Invader [British title]; the Italian title translates as She, the Monster.

Availability: Thanks to distributor Wade Williams, who plastered his own name over the opening shot despite having no hand in making the movie, this film is easily and cheaply available to the public. You can purchase it as a standalone DVD (Image Entertainment, 2012) or as half of a DVD double feature with Richard E. Cunha's 1958 film, She Demons (Image, 2003). If you'd prefer to stream or download the film instantly, you can do that as well.

The backstory: The 1950s were a fecund time for outlandish sci-fi films that fed off the Cold War paranoia of the Eisenhower Administration. For a few years there, America's drive-ins were treated to a seemingly endless succession of fright flicks about rampaging robots, monsters, and aliens of all descriptions. Sometimes the threats came from other planets or other galaxies, while other problems were of man's own making, brought on by overambitious scientists trying to play God.

Strangely, although intended strictly as light entertainment, these movies tended to be grim, fatalistic, and preachy with downbeat endings. But they had eye-catching posters and lobby cards, and their titles employed such telltale buzzwords as "invasion," "planet," "attack," "creature," "robot," "space," and "monster." These movies viewed science either as a near-magical panacea for all of mankind's problems or a menace that would wipe out civilization. Aliens (often appearing in humanoid form) were walking, talking metaphors for all kinds of social concerns, from the ever-looming threat of Communist Russia and the accompanying specter of mutually-assured destruction to the rise of youth culture, which was viewed by many adults as incomprehensible and therefore dangerous.

Although there were occasional "respectable" and high-minded studio-made science-fiction films, such as Fox's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and MGM's Forbidden Planet (1956), the vast majority of these movies were cheap, quickly-made independent productions aimed squarely at the teenage audience. As the decade wore on, these low-rent flicks got even more gimmicky and outrageous in their attempts to conquer the lucrative youth market with sillier monsters and tackier titles. These are the movies that would eventually form the backbone of TV's Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988-1999), where they were routinely mocked. 

Though they are fondly remembered by many, the science-fiction films of this era were not exactly highly regarded in critical circles, and they created the general perception among the public that the entire sci-fi genre was mere "kid stuff," a notion only partially dispelled by more serious fare like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It really wasn't until George Lucas' Star Wars (1977) became an across-the-board smash that the stigma was erased.

Ronnie Ashcroft's The Astounding She-Monster, for some reason, never turned up on MST3K, nor was it used by any of MST's spinoff projects like Rifftrax, The Film Crew, or Cinematic Titanic. I'm not sure why. It would have been perfect for their purposes, as it is flimsy and ludicrous, yet seems to take itself rather seriously. Its more-or-less brisk pace and merciful 62-minute running time also help. 

Ronnie Ashcroft, though not a rookie in the film industry, had never actually directed a movie before. For his inaugural feature, then, he apparently decided to keep the film's cast down to six people and limit nearly all of the action to a single location, a cabin said to be in California's San Gabriel mountains. The interiors were rather obviously shot on a set, but The Astounding She-Monster does contain a fair amount of location footage. Characters are seen driving on a remote highway, and there are a few sequences in a wooded area (probably Frazier Park, the same filming site as Fugitive Girls), plus several shots of a ritzy-looking neighborhood the script claims is the affluent West LA community of Brentwood, CA.

This being an Ed Wood-related movie, you can bet there is a generous amount of stock footage, too, specifically shots of animals, including a deer, a snake, and a bear. 

Stock footage of a real bear, intercut with shots of the director's wife wresting bear-suited Kenne Duncan.

The authorship of She-Monster is questionable. The credited screenwriter is someone named "Frank Hall," who has no other titles to his name. The IMDb cites Ronnie Ashcroft himself as an unbilled scribe on the project. It's my personal theory that Ronnie's buddy and mentor, Ed Wood, had at least some hand in crafting the screenplay. Maybe that's wishful thinking. What we do know of Eddie's direct involvement in the project comes from an anecdote related by Ashcroft to Rudolph Grey: 

I was cutting a sequence on The Astounding She-Monster. I got to a point where the invader comes upon a huge black bear. As the girl from outer space reaches out in a friendly gesture to touch the bear, it drops dead. I was having trouble with what we shot; I was very unhappy about it. Eddie came walking into the cutting room, and I told him my problem. He looked at the scene and said, "Listen, Ron, you go down to the costume company or maybe one of the prop houses and get one of those goddamn bear skins, not one of the silly things you wear to a party, but one that really looks real. And we'll get somebody into that bear skin and we'll go back to the same location." 

So, I got the bear skin. Eddie promoted Kenne Duncan to volunteer to get in the bear skin, and a whole gang of us went up to Frazier Park. [My wife] Lorraine got into the invader suit and put on the weird wig. Kenne crawled into the bear skin. Eddie grabbed the reflectors. Gene [Gropper] was on camera. We made a couple of takes, and all of a sudden we hear a voice coming from the bear. Kenne was yelling, "Goddamn it, stop, let me out of this thing!" Kenne had been smoking a cigarette in there, and the damn smoke was choking him! Anyway,  Eddie's idea worked out. he had a lot of savvy about the business, how to get out of tight spots. We ran the footage at the lab the next day. It was great and we were able to put it into the sequence. When it comes to friendships in Hollywood, they're rare. I'll say this about good old Eddie: whenever I was really in trouble and needed help, Eddie Wood was there.

That behind-the-scenes story, unfortunately, is more entertaining than the scene itself. What you actually see in the finished movie is some rather pedestrian stock footage of a black bear wandering through the woods, mixed in with shots of Shirley Kilpatrick, as the titular monster, looking bemused. Then, in a brief, blurry close-up, you see the director's wife (in a wig) strangling what appears to be a bearskin rug. There's some high-pitched growling on the soundtrack, though whether this is supposed to be coming from the alien or the bear I couldn't say. By the standards of low-budget sci-fi movies of the era, the sequence is borderline acceptable. Only for a split-second do we see the lifeless, immobile face of the bear.

Incidentally, though these inserts were shot by Gene Gropper, the movie's cinematographer of record is the redoubtable William C. Thompson, a key member of Ed Wood's inner circle. The Ray Mercer Company is responsible for the one big special effect in The Astounding She-Monster, namely a diffused shot of a lit match that stands in for the fiery meteor that transports the title character from a distant star to our planet.

Shirley Kilpatrick poses.

The cast, small though it is, does contain a few notable performers. Obviously, for Ed Wood fans, the most familiar name is D-list Western baddie Kenne Duncan (of The Sinister Urge, Crossroad Avenger and much more). "He damned near worked in every picture I made," Ronnie Ashcroft reminisced. "When he committed suicide [in 1972], I couldn't believe it. He was tired of living, just like [actor] George Sanders." 

While Kenne once again played the heel, this time a gangster who kidnaps an heiress, sturdy Oklahoma-born actor Robert Clarke (1920-2005) played the heroic leading man, a geologist whose chemistry skills prove useful in the clutch. Clarke went on to work for Ashcroft a few more times, including Outlaw Queen and Girl with an Itch. He appeared in literally dozens of films (The Man from Planet X, Bedlam, Back to Bataan, etc.) and TV shows (Dragnet, Knight Rider, Dallas, Dynasty, etc.) over the course of a half-century-long career. 

Among Clarke's final credits is Alienator (1990), a supposed remake of The Astounding She-Monster directed by another Ed Wood acolyte, Fred Olen Ray. The cast is loaded with B-movie stars: P.J. Soles, Jan-Michael Vincent, John Phillip Law, Ross Hagen, Robert Quarry. A similarly nostalgic all-star cast was assembled for Clarke's final film, The Naked Monster (2005), written and co-directed by Ted Newsom, who also made the documentary Ed Wood: Look Back in Angora (1994).

Clarke's leading lady in this film, Marilyn Harvey, had a much less durable and distinguished career but did get a smattering of TV work (including an episode of Gunsmoke) in 1962. Jeanne Tatum, who is hysterical (in both senses of that word) in this film as a boozy gun moll, also did some TV work (Dragnet, Rawhide) in the 1950s and 1960s; this is the most famous of her feature films. Kenne Duncan's rather dimwitted sidekick in the film is portrayed by multi-talented showbiz lifer Ewing Miles Brown, who played Wild Bill Hickok in last week's movie, Son of the Renegade. In 1977, working as a producer-director, Brown hired Ronnie Ashcroft to edit a family comedy called A Whale of a Tale, whose cast included William Shatner.

And we mustn't forget the film's real star, the She-Monster herself, Shirley Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick does not seem to have ever appeared in another movie besides this one, though she was at least considered for a role in Columbia's The Gene Krupa Story (1959) with Sal Mineo. Other than this movie, Kilpatrick's reputation rests on her career as a model and pinup girl from 1954 to 1965, during which she appeared in such now-forgotten men's mags as Gent, Gala, and Bold. She also stripped under the name Celeste Kirk. Shirley married a man named Villy Carpenter Jakobsen in 1987 and now lives in Sequim, WA. 

One persistent rumor about Ms. Kilpatrick is that she went on to cult stardom as plump character actress Shirley Stoler (1929-1999). Though there is a strong facial resemblance between the two Shirleys, there is ample evidence that they are not the same person. I think Kilpatrick looks a lot like Divine in John Waters' Pink Flamingos (1972). In a series of weird coincidences, "Shirley" was not only Ed Wood's drag name but was revealed to be the Divine character's birth name in the unproduced sequel, Flamingos Forever.

Three of a kind?: (from left) Shirley Kilpatrick, Divine, and Shirley Stoler.

The viewing experience: Delirious and delightful, if a bit downsized. Though Ed Wood's name appears nowhere in the credits of The Astounding She-Monster, his presence can seemingly be felt in every scene. 

The plot feels like at least two different kinds of stories (hostage drama and alien invasion) rather clumsily welded together and has that intangible dream-logic quality of Wood's most famous work. The dialogue, as per usual, is highly artificial: a mixture of baldfaced exposition, technical gobbledygook, and improbable slang. The cheapness and hastiness of the production are plain to see. The script takes rather outrageous liberties with science, and there is something naive and childlike about the characterizations -- as if the author had no idea how, say, a gangster or a geologist or a society heiress would behave or speak in reality.

If there is something that separates She-Monster from Plan 9 from Outer Space and Bride of the Monster, it is the fact that Ronnie Ashcroft's film is more streamlined than a 1950s Ed Wood film. Even when he had little time and less money, Eddie wasn't apt to scale back his ambitions the way Ashcroft did with this film, focusing on a small set of characters in one particular location. And, apart from a few eccentric flourishes, She-Monster's script takes fewer narrative and philosophical detours than most of Eddie's creations. The characters in Ashcroft's movie tend to focus on the plot as it unfolds and don't go off on lofty, random digressions in the true Wood-ian tradition. To put it simply, this is an Ed Wood movie on Ritalin.

A good companion to She-Monster.

The Astounding She-Monster begins the way many science-fiction films of the era did: with a pseudo-scientific prologue read to us by an authoritative, "voice of God"-type narrator. (If you're really into these, check out 1958's Terror from the Year 5000 for a definitive example.) I'm not sure why filmmakers started their movies this way so often back then. Perhaps it was to ground the ridiculous stories in something resembling reality. Or maybe it was to ward off criticism that these movies were just worthless trash with no redeeming social value. Anyway, while we glimpse into the farthest reaches of the cosmos, Mr. Announcer Man talks about the giant explosion that created the universe as we now know it. He doesn't use the term "big bang," though he could have, since that particular neologism dates back to about 1949.

The film takes the requisite left turn into absurdity when our storyteller speculates that this cosmic conflagration might have been the result of a nuclear explosion and that our current universe might have been accidentally created by the destruction of a previous one. It seems far-fetched to me, but one distant "star of the 12th magnitude," called (I think) Anterius is so concerned that nuke-happy Earth is going to commit "cosmic suicide" that it sends a sexy female emissary, the catsuit-clad She-Monster (Shirley Kilpatrick), via a glowing meteorite, to our planet. Her exact mission is unclear. Mr. Announcer Man says that Anterius wants to destroy Earth before we can do the same to it, but the ending of the movie reveals the She-Monster's intentions to be more peaceful than that. Continuity isn't exactly the movie's strongest suit, but then again, dreams aren't noted for their airtight continuity either.

After the opening credits, accompanied by Guenther "Gene" Kauer's Rite of Spring-esque score, the story proper begins. Again, Ronnie Ashcroft relies heavily on voiceover to explain what's happening to the audience, but the tone of the narration has changed entirely, so much so that I have to suspect that this film had at least two announcers. The IMDb lists Scott Douglas (who also appeared in Wetbacks) as "Narrator," plus Al Avalon (making his debut here) as "Radio Announcer." It's my guess that Avalon and Douglas switched off on voiceover duties, with the former performing the prologue and reciting most of the film's radio broadcasts -- the characters in She-Monster, you see, frequently tune into one of those convenient, only-in-the-movies radio stations that exist solely to provide periodic plot updates -- while the latter narrated the post-credits introductory scenes. While deep-voiced Avalon is bombastic, serious, and stentorian, Douglas is gossipy, sarcastic, and utterly unsympathetic to the characters, watching with haughty, detached amusement as terrible things happen to them.

As the story begins, a two-bit gangster named Nat (Kenne Duncan), his right hand man Brad (Ewing Miles Brown), and his socialite-turned-boozehound girlfriend Esther (Jeanne Tatum) are planning to kidnap wealthy heiress Margaret Chaffee (Marilyn Harvey) as she leaves her Brentwood home in a Cadillac convertible. Sounding a bit like a fey Rod Serling, storyteller Douglas makes it clear that he doesn't feel the least bit sorry for Ms. Chaffee:

Magaret Chaffee -- young, beautiful, and very rich. The beginning of a normal, carefree day in the life of a socialite. The normal, everyday problems that confront them. Overslept. Late for cocktails. Perhaps the Cadillac won't start. Just another, average afternoon. Too bad, Margaret. The Cadillac has not failed you. Ride swiftly. You have a very special appointment this day. An appointment that may very well change your life... or end it.   

For these three people, this day means the beginning of a job. A job so carefully planned for so many weeks. There's the gate, Margaret. Beyond it lies the most fantastic experience of your life. The wheels have started. Carefully laid plans have been put into operation. No use to struggle, Margaret. Being kidnapped could be considered almost normal for a wealthy socialite. And you are being kidnapped. In fact, you're all being taken to a rendezvous with fate. High in the San Gabriel mountains, the stage has already been set. No turning back now. But if they only knew. The best laid plans will go astray this day.

Vintage She-Monster lobby cards

Ashcroft's inexperience as a director shows a bit here. When Douglas mentions the "three" kidnappers, the director cuts to a shot of them in their car. Unfortunately, the way this image is framed, only Ewing Brown and Kenne Duncan can be seen; poor Jeanne Tatum is in the back seat and totally out of our field of view. One wonders if she was even present when this scene was filmed. Once Nat and his pals have scooped up Margaret, they take her for a ride on a remote-looking highway that passes some mountains and forested areas, right near where the She-Monster has landed.

The title character, clad in a skintight costume that in black-and-white looks like bare flesh, spends most of the movie wandering around the forest, killing everything with which she comes into contact. It's no trick, really, since she's teeming with radiation. Once she touches a living thing, it gets sort of a joy-buzzer-type jolt and then keels over dead. I'm reminded of one of Criswell's lines from Orgy of the Dead (1965): "I have but to touch you with my finger, and it would mean the end of you, all over!" Before she kills any humans, the She-Monster tests out her power on a few forest creatures, all of whom are represented by stock nature footage. In a moment that would not have been out of place in Bride of the Monster, Ashcroft cuts from a stock shot of a real snake to a staged shot of Shirley Kilpatrick halfheartedly tossing away a phony rubber serpent. Ms. Kilpatrick seems supremely bored and disengaged throughout the proceedings. Perhaps this is why she found no subsequent acting work.

It's worth pointing out that the film's title and poster make a big deal of the alien's femininity, but apart from Ewing Brown's comment that the monster resembles "a naked dame," sex has very little to do with the story. The movie can't truly be read as a parable about gender politics or women's role in society. Once all the facts about the She-Monster are in, we can only judge her to be a morally ambiguous character -- admirably motivated but indiscriminately destructive. The otherworldly being might as well have been genderless or neutered for all the difference it makes in this story.

Dim bulb Brad is spooked when he briefly glimpses the She-Monster and crashes Nat's car, forcing the party (including the three crooks and their victim) to relocate to a nearby cabin, occupied by square-jawed geologist Dick Cutler (Robert Clarke) and his loyal collie, Egan (played by Ashcroft's own dog). So snotty is narrator Scott Douglas that he even describes our thoroughly-nice hero and his adorable pet in an unflattering way, calling them "the ever-present 'innocent' bystander and his canine companion." That may not sound too terrible, but it's his tone of voice that makes it seem so nasty.

This is the point at which The Astounding She-Monster transmogrifies into the cinematic equivalent of a TV "bottle episode," with the criminals and their hostages confined to the remote cabin and everyone trying to figure a way out. Unfortunately for them, any time they set foot outside the cabin, they are immediately confronted by the She-Monster. These poor folks leave and then return to the same place so often that I started to think of the Pirandello-inspired Twilight Zone episode called "Five Characters in Search of an Exit." MST3K fans, meanwhile, will remember how that show dealt with the opening scenes from Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster, as two hapless characters kept winding up at the same spot over and over again.  ("We're back here! How did that happen?")

The She-Monster goes out just like the Wicked Witch.

From that point on, the story develops exactly as you'd guess that it would, with characters getting killed off every 10 minutes or so until only the hero and heroine, Dick and Margaret, are left. By then, apparently having gotten sick of the woods, the She-Monster has no qualms about just jumping through the window -- glass and all -- and menacing characters inside the cabin as well as outside. Dog lovers may be upset to learn that poor Egan is among the victims. There is a mistaken belief among some moviegoers that dogs always survive in movies, but MST3K viewers will know that filmmakers will occasionally kill off adorable pooches simply to demonstrate how very real the threat is. (See: Revenge of the Creature, The Deadly Bees, Manos, etc.) I think the one moment of this film that really affected me emotionally occurs when Dick Cutler announces his plan to retrieve Egan's body but is prevented from doing so by the She-Monster.

Ultimately, after a few comically absurd Mr. Wizard-esque discussions with Margaret involving alpha rays, gamma rays, platinum, radium, and "aqua regia," Dick intuits that the monster is protected from our atmosphere by a thin layer of protective metal. So he whips up some kind of all-purpose, alien-killing acid in his home laboratory, douses it on Shirley Kilpatrick, and watches her dissolve, Margaret Hamilton style. Only then do Dick and Margaret find the written message that the She-Monster had been concealing in her locket. Apparently, our extraterrestrial visitor was just dropping by to give us an invitation to join the Council of Planets, which is sort of like the NATO of Outer Space. The letter is in English, explains Dick, because the aliens must have been listening in to our shortwave radio broadcasts. Hmmm. That's even less plausible than the "dictorobitary" (language computer) from Plan 9.

And what about all the seemingly random, unprovoked killing? Well, Dick says that in retrospect, the She-Monster only killed when she was being attacked. After about five viewings of this film, I can say with certainty that this theory is complete and utter horseshit. Not only does Shirley Kilpatrick zap anything and everything that crosses her path, no matter how benign, there are a few moments when she takes obvious pleasure in terrorizing the other characters.

"Fun couple" Esther and Vic; Margaret in foreground.

Since the plot of the film is relatively straightforward and concise, Wood-ologists will have to look for their hero's trademark eccentricity in the dialogue and characterization instead. The She-Monster herself is a bit of a cipher, and the romantic leads are about as exciting as a pile of wet laundry. 

Fans will want to concentrate, then, on the characters of Nat and Esther, yet another scheming criminal couple of the type we've seen so often before. (Going into this project, I had no idea how many examples of those I'd find in Wood's work.) It's not difficult to see them as version 2.0 of Vic and Loretta from Ed's previous film, Jail Bait (1954). Always believable as a slimy lowlife, Kenne Duncan has loads of fun with the slang-slinging, belligerent Nat, and he's well matched by Jeanne Tatum as the hopeless alcoholic Esther, who gives off a strong "Ethel Mertz goes bad" vibe. The tenor of the Nat/Esther dynamic is established early with this wondrous dialogue:

Nat: Sit down, you lousy drunk! 

Esther: I prefer to be referred to as an alcoholic.

If Ed Wood has a surrogate in this movie, it's definitely Esther, who talks of nothing but alcohol (I'm not kidding!) for the entire movie and at one point declares, " If I could drink, I'd think better." A fairly long stretch of the film is devoted to a Mexican standoff in which Esther debates both Dick and Margaret about who will fetch more booze from the bedroom. Sadly, the very second she finally gets the bottle she's been negotiating for all this time, Nat shatters it with a bullet. The lousy rat! 

Foul-tempered Nat, for his part, is a one-man quote factory. He gets two of the film's most famous lines: (about Margaret) "Our young socialite has gotten up on her social register!" and (about Brad) "The way you keep puttin' your foot in your kisser, it's a wonder you don't get athlete's mouth." And Nat is the springboard for the script's one big, Wood-ian digression: a debate about capitalism, politics, and the redistribution of wealth. Esther has just been bragging about her former life as a wealthy landowner when Nat suddenly goes off on a rant:

Nat: The filthy rich! They're nothing but a bunch of parasites! 

Dick: Oh, I don't know. It seems to me, a lot of our modern American millionaires have earned their wealth. 

Nat: In a pig's foot! Just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Coincidence, that's all. Now you take a guy goes to the racetrack, picks a winner, collects a bundle. Did he earn it? Nah! Coincidence! 

Dick: Well, what's wrong with that? 

Nat: The point I'm making to you is that if there hadn't been a thousand little bettors bettin' on the same race, he wouldn't have won a thing! And the millionaire wouldn't have gotten his dough if there hadn't been a million little guys workin' their tails off! 

Dick: And it's your idea to redistribute the wealth more evenly among the little guys, is that it? 

Nat: Exactly! And since our society doesn't want to cooperate, then the little guy's gonna move in and take what he can get. 

Dick: Now that puts you in the category of a criminal. 

Nat: You're only a criminal when you're in the minority! Now you take a crook like Hitler was. Surround him with a million other crooks, and what do ya got? The ruling party of a country! And nobody thinks you're a crook anymore! 

Dick: So it's your idea to just move in and take what you can get. 

Nat: You said it, bub! And I can do it with my moxie! 

Esther: What he's pointing to is the hole in his head! 

Nat: Shut up, ya crummy lush!

Obviously, as a law-abiding, right-wing, pro-military super-patriot, Ed Wood would have thoroughly sided with Dick in this debate. And yet I cannot help but speculate that some of Nat's dialogue resonated with Eddie as well. Certainly, Ed Wood was a man who watched others in his profession get rich and famous undeservedly, while he toiled away for decades and earned very little money for his troubles. While I don't think Eddie wanted to "redistribute the wealth," I think he did feel that he just needed a few lucky coincidences to get on Easy Street. While I'm on this subject, I should also mention that in last week's movie, Son of the Renegade (1953), the elder Red River Johnny was somewhat of a Robin Hood figure who did "redistribute" some of what he stole to "whoever needs it the most." The definitive essay on the Macroeconomics of Ed Wood has yet to be written, I'm afraid.

As other critics have pointed out, there are a number of plot similarities between The Astounding She-Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space, especially if you consider the films in the broadest possible terms. In both stories, an alien civilization is concerned that the inhabitants of Earth will one day destroy the entire galaxy, so they send an emissary to our planet in a desperate bid to prevent us from blowing ourselves up along with everything else in existence. Once here, said emissary embarks upon a sketchy, poorly-thought-out plan that makes no sense and mainly involves terrorizing random people in a fairly obscure location in the Los Angeles area. After it's all over, the surviving human characters remark how much more advanced the aliens are than Earthlings, even though their plan was a complete flop. Take this line from the last scene of The Astounding She-Monster:

Margaret: Obviously, this universal council is made up of people from worlds far more advanced than our own.

And compare it to this similar line from the last scene from Plan 9:

Col. Edwards: We've got to hand it to them, though, they're far ahead of us.

In both cases, amusingly, the aliens receive this high praise only after wiping out in spectacular fashion. Perhaps even as far back as the 1950s, Ed Wood was already presaging his own "success by failure." Maybe he was hoping that, long after his own death, the rest of humanity would look at his work and be amazed by how far ahead of the times he was. In a way, he got his wish. After all, Eddie's been gone about 35 years now, and yet here I am poring over his work. And there you are, reading about it. Perhaps Ed Wood knew something that his contemporaries didn't.

Next week: Let me tell you about a 1950s screenwriter named Peter "Pete" LaRoche. He had three screenplays produced in the 1950s, all low-budget Westerns, then was never heard from again. The third and final one was an Indian-themed sexploitation movie that was among the earliest so-called "nudie cuties" in Hollywood history, perhaps even beating Russ Meyer to the punch. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's also the only LaRoche film that seems to have survived into our time. 

But that's not the most interesting thing about Mr. LaRoche. No, what makes Pete so fascinating is that he seems to have never existed at all. He has no history, other than those three screenplay credits. No birth date. No death date. No photos of the man. No anecdotes from friends or coworkers. Nothing. The most popular theory, then, about the elusive Pete LaRoche is that he was really our very own Edward D. Wood, Jr., working under an assumed name. We'll dig into all of this in a mere seven days as we explore the enticingly-named Revenge of the Virgins (1959).