The Sinister Urge

I really think smut gets a bad rep. This Ed Wood schlocker attempts to correlate the smut racket and the ills of society's problems. Well, at least back in 1961. Of course, this isn't shown so well and Ed delivers his usual bland scenes of dialogue where the characters are trying to further progress the story. Or were they trading borscht pie recipes? Well this all adds up to a movie that seems like a 10 hour skin grafting session.

Is it bad? Of course, no question. Or was it made out to be that way? After seeing Ed Wood's works, it looks like his actors are giving serious, genuine performances, but there's a sense that they're having fun with it (that is until Ed explained how he was going to pay them). Characters galore range from crazed psychotic who really intimate with a switchblade to 9 fingered wonder Harvey B Dunn who adds new meaning to `giving the bird'. Some scenes are so kampy, it's funny. An interview with naïve actress really had me laughing when the interviewer slyly explains what type of film they'll be shooting. Also, a group of teeners (aka more of Ed's extras) witness a fight break out for no reason!! To try and explain the hilarity of this scene would not do it justice. Count how many desk scenes there are till your wall paint starts peeling! And that Kline, can he steal a scene or what?

Ah, but let's not forget Jean Fontaine as Gloria. Her grating voice really adds a menacing presence (I will never look at a leotard the same way ever again). Maybe smut wasn't the problem and Gloria was the root of the problem? Well, that or her seal tight ensemble displayed throughout the movie! Listening to Gloria's logic and way of reasoning makes me realize that caning may not be such a bad thing after all. And her great line "Dirk? No, that can't be Dirk. Uh-uh. No, that's not Dirk. No" is well worth the price of admission.

There's so much more like shooting on the smut set of scantily clad (?) actresses, abrupt jump cuts, a police raid (HA HA HA), the Syndicate….oh man, some directors wish they could create movies with the flair Ed Wood had. I'm starting to see method in Ed's madness.

General, bland 50s fear mongering film. This was the first Ed Wood movie I ever saw and it was only because it was an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 300. The acting was wooden and forceful and the scenery looked as if it would collapse at any second. Plot concerns a syndicate of 'smut' makers and the polices crusade against it and the woman who runs the show. The bad guys get it in the end and there is a half hearted attempt is made in showing a link between crime and porn. Watch the MST3K version. It makes the movie actually worth watching.

"The Sinister Urge" is proof if any was ever needed that Ed Wood was a completely and utterly inept writer and director. He does, of course, have a surprising number of fans who actually like some of his work ("Bride of the Monster", I have to admit, isn't really all that bad of a film), but "The Sinister Urge" is so chock-full of Ed Wood clichés (redundant dialogue, amazingly bad acting, and taking hypocritical preaching to a whole new level are but few of the features of this film).

I've seen "The Sinister Urge" several times in its "Mystery Science Theater 3000" version, which features some of the funniest and most seemingly random riffs in the history of that show- one scene features Mike and the bots breaking into song... but I won't spoil that for you. Tonight I watched this film without their aid and it is a prime example of complete cinematic incompetence. From start to finish the script is unbelievably bad, not even in an earnest "Plan 9" sort of way- there's only the occasional laugh here, unless you can find humor in something so pathetically horrid. Similarly, Wood is incapable of even a second of flair in his direction of the film.

There are people in this world who will tell you with a straight face that this is a fine film, an indictment of the seedy world of pornography (oh let's face it, compared to what we have going now, the porn industry in 1960 was one big huge convent). These people are absolutely, unequivocally NUTS. One only has too look at Wood's filmography to see that he had already written several smut films, including notorious early nudie Western "Revenge of the Virgins", prior to this film's release.

"The Sinister Urge" is one of the most boring, plodding, miserable excuses for a film in all of cinema. I'm not a big fan of picking on Ed Wood, to be honest, but this is proof (along with the many other films of his that aren't widely known) that Wood is an astoundingly incompetent director.

1/10

Some people believe that Ed Wood knew exactly what he was doing: that he *intended* to make "bad" movies in order to make people laugh. There are plenty of good reasons not to buy into that theory, and THE SINISTER URGE is Exhibit A.

PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, GLEN OR GLENDA, and BRIDE OF THE MONSTER are endearing in their goofy lunacy. This one, though just as bad as the rest of Wood's oeuvre, is mostly just plodding and dull.

Not that there isn't entertainment to be had here, at least for the bad movie connoisseur: my personal favorite is the obvious use of pre-existing (and completely unrelated) footage, shoehorned in on the waste-not want-not principle and "justified" through the use of atrocious dubbing and risible expository dialogue (which takes place *after* the inserted scene, making it even more ludicrous).

But that's not the sort of thing calculated to make a mainstream audience roar with laughter.

I can imagine someone trying to make a movie like PLAN 9. I can't imagine anyone trying to make a movie like this.

Edward D. Wood Jr (or E.D. Wood credited for the film) is practically revered today as a filmmaker forgotten and neglected in his time as just another Shlock-Meister of B-movie (or Z-movie) cinema. His legacy is now, well, being the ultimate in bad schlock kind of movie-making, where you can almost see the sets about the tear at the seams, the actors going through their lines like they know they won't get any pay for it, and camera-work (and perhaps editing too) that becomes jarring in the worst possible ways. While the Sinister Urge, Wood's last 'real' film before diving deep into obscure porn directing (ironic considering the film's subject here), does not have a kind of classically bad way about it like Plan 9 From Outer Space. That film has since become a kind of cult classic where the actor in place of the late Bela Lugosi in the film, the various props and sets (including the 'saucers'), and horrendous narration becomes most of the ironic fun. The Sinister Urge in comparison doesn't have that impressive ambition to be something more than it can never be, as this film is nothing more than an under-cooked 'warning' film about porn movies, and the people who may kill to be apart of them.

The Sinister Urge is 71 minutes long, which doesn't overstay its welcome (though one may try and define 'welcome' with an Ed Wood picture) as a film with many static camera angles and very few moments of ingenuity. One of those- the scene where the brakes don't work with the car- is ironically successful, as it really shouldn't be at all workable as a scene, but as a little piece of suspense it could be worse. Most of the rest of the picture isn't so lucky- again, many, many actors who seem like they are not only content to not become stars, they're almost doomed to be in pictures like Wood's. Often the performances are wooden, but of course part of the real problem with watching such actors is the often silly dialog. It tries to be 'realistic', but Wood has no gripe with stopping somewhere to have a character (usually the lead cop character) to lay out a dull speech about the message of the story. On top of the story not really being too coherent, anyway, the director's method of the 'cut, print, perfect' method can be seen quite often with some laughable mistakes abound.

Now, does all of this make the Sinister Urge as astoundingly, amusingly bad as Plan 9? Not really; there's nothing too memorable about how the film is bad here, unless you're a die-hard fan of the director. He does try here and there to keep some storytelling merit, with his style being so uncomplicated and static it shows his ambition. But the lack of talent overcomes everything else, not to mention the cardboard-sided points of the film. It's also not too unworthy of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment either, which has now made the film available on DVD. The commentary is spot-on usually and funny, though as with Plan 9 you may still want to make wisecracks on your own. That's Wood as the mustached guy who fights at the Cafeteria in one scene.