The Sinister Urge

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.

In a very ironic twist, the anti-pornography film, "This Sinister Urge", was made by Ed Wood, Jr.....and all of his subsequent films were, in fact, porno movies! While by today's standards the Wood films of the 1960s and 70s were pretty tame, nonetheless they were filled with nudity and were shown in theaters in the roughest parts of town! He was responsible at that time for such 'classics' as "Sex Orgy", "Nympho Cycler", "One Million AC/DC" and "Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love"!

Of course, Ed Wood, Jr. is known less for his porn and more for his 1950s craptastic films...perhaps the worst movies of the era. Think about it...he was responsible for "Jail Bait", "Bride of the Monster", "Glen or Glenda" and "Plan 9 From Outer Space"!! All of these movies are terrible in every way...the acting, the scripts (if they even had one), direction,....the works. So is "The Sinister Urge" any better than Wood's typical output?

The film opens with a horribly filmed scene of a half-naked woman running towards the camera. It's gratuitous but also very badly done...with a very shaky camera and it's artless to say the least. Soon a weirdo shows up and is apparently chasing her. Soon, he murders her (perhaps he does more...but the film cuts away but strongly implies she's sexually assaulted). What follows is a police investigation of the crime as well as the snuff film* industry.

The acting is often terrible in this film. 'Actors' often have trouble delivering their lines or over-emphasize the wrong words or syllables. The murderer showed all the subtlety of Snidely Whiplash! With a competent director and reasonable budget, they would have re-shot these awkward scenes.

I was also surprised as the film does show some nudity...even though it's usually not associated with Wood's soft-core output. I have a hard time believing even in 1960 that Wood had an easy time showing such a film in traditional theaters and it must have either run in porno theaters or was taken on the road and shown in odd locations here and there. All I know is that for an anti-porn film, it shows a surprising amount of flesh!!

Overall, it's pretty much an Ed Wood film....need I say more?!



*Snuff films have been widely talked about over the years and supposedly show actual murders perpetrated for the audience's amusement. However, there's no evidence that any such films ever have been made. Do the research....you'll see what I mean.

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.

You know that when Mr. Wood made a film he did put all of his heart and soul in each one of the films (ok the ones I saw and the 50's films that most people see) The problem being is that he was completely incompetent as a director. You can't polish a turd and all of these films are turds. But he did try his best, in my opinion this is one of the best and funniest, with or without MST. A fairly static film, the only action happening with a fight scene. The rest of the film consist of all the actors explaining about the plot. Carl Anthony is the most static of this bunch. Kenne Duncan and Duke Moore, two of the laziest cops on the beat. Then the rest, Jaffe, Mr. Taxpayer, Dirk (a swell guy), Kline (KLINE!!!!!) and best of all: GLORIA. The scariest woman on the planet who's probably passed on by now of throat cancer, or squeezed to death by some of those outfits, likely from Mr. Woods own collection. Why this film is not on DVD like the rest of the Ed Wood collection I don't know. Somebody get out there and pester Wade Williams productions and get this on DVD too.

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.