The Sinister Urge

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.

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

The Sinister Urge (1960)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s hard-hitting look at the smut business has Lt. Carson (Kenne Duncan) and Sgt. Stone (Duke Moore) trying to solve a couple murders where the victims had just taken part in the pornography world. They believe the victims can be traced to a certain woman (Jean Fontaine) but they need to find out who's actually doing the killing. THE SINISTER URGE is Wood's attempt to show how ugly and evil the porn business is so I guess it's kind of ironic that this would be his last directing job for ten years until he would start working in, you guessed it, the porn business. As you'd expect, this here is a pretty poor film that like most of Wood's stuff has an interesting idea but the story is all over the place and in the end it just makes no sense. It seems that Wood was wanting to do the story about a psycho turned on by porn and then mix in a detective tale and the two items just didn't mix very well. The film is certainly a tad bit sleazier than the normal 1960 production but this doesn't make up for the weak dialogue or bad performances. It's funny but the film really puts down those who take advantage of girls who come to Hollywood to become stars and the film also preaches that girls should just stay home. The first female victim has such a Southern accent that I'm guessing Wood found her as she stepped off the bus. Wood's regular outlaws (Duncan, Moore, Conrad Brooks) are all here and it's worth noting that this here was Duncan's last feature film. Fans of Wood's work will still want to check this out but it's certainly miles behind his classics.