This is my second entry in the So Bad, It's Good Blogathon hosted by Taking Up Room


Note:  Way back at the beginning I inaugurated this blog with a tribute to Ed Wood.  If you have been reading ever since, maybe you've had time to get over that harrowing experience, so it's time to throw another Wood tribute at you.


Ed Wood, Jr. had a symbiotic relationship with Bela Lugosi.  Both needed something from the other, and although the relationship was friendly, both tended to use the other to achieve a personal goal.  As depicted in the Tim Burton loving biopic Ed Wood, Lugosi had fallen on hard times.  He was a morphine addict and could not get work in Hollywood, his metier of classic horror having fallen out of fashion.  Wood was a struggling wanna-be director, but he was not getting much success at getting jobs in his chosen profession.  When the two met it was a match made in heaven (or that oither place depending on how you feel about Wood, or Lugosi for that matter...)

In 1953, the two met and Wood saw his chance.  He had recently approached George Weiss, a purveyor of low-budget sleaze to direct a potential film about the life of Christine Jorgensen.  Jorgensen had had a sex-change operation that transformed her from a man, George Jorgensen, into Christine.  Plans for the movie about Jorgensen fell through when she threatened to sue if it was done.  Undeterred, Weiss hired Wood to write and direct a movie, already titled I Changed my Sex, just without any references to Jorgensen.

Instead, Wood decided to make his own story, about transvestitism (men who wear women's clothing).  Since Wood himself was an aficionado of doing the same, this turned the film into a more personal story.    He cast himself as the star of the film, under the credit of "Daniel Davis", and cast his new-found friend Lugosi as a guide through the film, a somewhat bizarre combination of mad scientist and god.

Because Weiss wanted a sex-change movie, and what Wood had originally created was just a film about transvestites, Wood added a second part to the movie which covered the story of a man who actually does have an operation, but the main focus of the movie was Wood's personal plea for compassion for those who are somewhat different from the norm.  It should be noted that the film is a victim of it's own time and ethos.  At the time a man dressing as a woman could get him arrested.  Whatever your view is about the transvestite is today, society has relaxed somewhat on their view of the phenomenon.  It is no longer illegal to dress up as a member of the opposite sex, and only one's personal view of the situation has any impact at all.

The message of acceptance is there, but because Wood was a rather inept, if not enthusiastic, director, the message is sometimes lost. Wood's ability to find ways to use stock footage from the vaults to somehow emphasize his story is one of the things that can both enhance and detract from the intended message.  (A rampaging horde of buffalo?  Omly Wood himself knows what that means...)





Glen or Glenda? (1953):


The movie opens on the God/Scientist (Bela Lugosi) informing the audience that sometimes things are not always what they seem to be.  Or maybe he's just being cryptic.  You decide.

Man's constant groping of things unknown, drawing from the endless reaches of time, brings to light many startling things. Startling because they seem new...sudden...but most are not new to the signs of the ages. A life...is begun! People...all going somewhere. All with their own thoughts, their own ideas. All with their own personalities. One is wrong because he does right...one is right because he does wrong. Pull the strings! Dance to that, which one is created for. A new day is begun. A new life is begun. A life...is ended.

The opening is on a man dressed as a woman who lies dead, having committed suicide.  It turns that that he committed suicide because, try as he might, he couldn't resist the temptation to dress in women's clothes, despite the public outcry that such a behavior was abnormal.  (Remember, I said earlier at this time it could get you arrested if you did such things that were not considered fit for "normal" people to do.)  A police captain, Inspector warren (Lyle Talbot) approaches Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell) to try to get some information on why any one would want to be in such an abnormal mental state.





Dr. Alton tells the inspector he has two cases in which he can illustrate the phenomena better for him.  The story of Glen (Edward D. Wood, Jr. under the screen name "Daniel Davis") constitutes most of the film.




Dr. Alton takes pains to establish that Glen is not a homosexual.  He is just a guy that derives pleasure from the feel of women's clothing on his body.  Some of this, it seems, may be attributed to a rather bizarre upbringing.  His mother wanted a daughter instead of a son, and there is some indication that Glen's father was rather in his attitude toward his son.  (Much like Wood's own childhood, if his background story is to be believed).  When Glen was a young boy he wanted to dress up as his sister for Halloween, but it didn't stop there.




Now Glen is in his thirties and on the verge of marrying his sweetheart, Barbara (Delores Fuller, who was actually Wood's significant other at the time).  Barbara doesn't know of Glen's predilection for wearing women's clothes, and Glen fears that he must actually tell her before she discovers the awful truth for herself.  He debates on whether or not to tell her before the marriage and risk having the plans for marriage come crashing down, or if he should wait until after the marriage, and thus risk alienating his new bride.  (In the parlance of the time, it's either damned if you do or damned if you don't.  There doesn't appear to be a third option where she accepts him for who he is.)






The Scientist appears again, heralding a segment of the movie in which Glen is haunted by all sorts of bizarre fetish inspired dreams.

Beware...beware! Beware of the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep. He eats little boys...puppy dog tails, and big, fat snails. Beware, take care....beware!

The dream sequence seems to have been added only to titillate the viewer, although it could easily be the inspired haunting of Glen wrestling with himself over his dilemma.   Eventually Glen does decide to come clean with Barbara.   Since this is a parable of Wood's own worries about his own transvestite tendencies and not a morality play, of course she accepts his predilection, although as she says, "Maybe we can work this out".




Since the movie was supposed to be about sex change, there is an additional sequence tacked on about Adam/Anne ("Tommy" Haynes).  Adam's story also somewhat parallels Wood's own story in that he, too. wore women's underwear while fighting in WWII, with the exception that when Adam gets out of the service he does have a sex-change operation and becomes Anne.


Yeah, so if you aren't ready for really bizarre, you aren't ready for Ed Wood.  I won't even get into the soft core porn he made after his career as a mainstream director fizzled out.


Drive home safely, folks.

Quiggy

So you're probably asking  "What the Hell?  It Came From Hollywood???  How the Hell can that be a lost classic?"

Which is exactly what I would expect the normal person to say.  Either that or "What the Hell is It Came from Hollywood anyway?"  If you haven't been around that long, you may have never heard of it.  If you aren't an avid B-movie lover like myself, you may have never heard of it.  If you don't look for the most obscure things to blog about, you may have never heard of it.  However, if you like Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Gilda Radner and/or Cheech and Chong and you have never heard of it, my question is "Why the Hell haven't you heard of it?"

Sometime in 1982, the duo of Malcolm Leo and Andrew Solt, the pair that gave us "This is Elvis!" among others, collected clips of various cheesy B-movies and pieced them together and got the likes of Aykroyd, Candy et.al. to introduce segments on such subjects as "Aliens" "Brains" and of course a tribute to Edward D. Wood, Jr.

This is Mystery Science Theater 3000 on attention deficit disorder.  Instead of one complete movie, you get bits and pieces of some of the most unintentionally hilarious scenes from some of the cheesiest pictures ever made. Plus you get the running commentary of the host of the segment. This movie is the one that inspired my interest in cheesy sci-fi and drive-in movies.

So why do I call it a "lost" classic?  Because it has never been released on DVD, that's why.  If you are lucky you might be able to scrounge up a worn out VHS copy of it.  Or if you have access to the right tools on your pc or tablet you can watch it on youtube.



The fact that this gem has never been released to DVD, yet such clunkers as the 1973 musical remake of Lost Horizon has is a mystery.  For more insight on why I picked that particular movie head over to Angelman's Place and read his take on Lost Horizon.

It Came From Hollywood cannot really be encapsulated as I have done with other movies.  It's one that has to be seen to be appreciated.  The list of credits at the end is like a blog list of future entries to this blog, some of which I already have, but some I will have to keep a weather eye out for at my local video place.  Not just a few of them are most people's lists of the worst movies of all time.  (Did I mention they have a tribute to Ed Wood segment?)

In case any of this intrigues you, I have added a link to a youtube page that has the entire film which I hope works....






So long from the back seat, folks.

Quiggy

What better way to inaugurate the new Midnite Drive-In with a dedication to one of the quirkiest film directors of all time?  Ed Wood may have not had the talent to step into the shoes of John Ford, or Billy Wilder, or Otto Preminger, or even Roger Corman for that matter, all of whom released memorably classic movies in 1959 (Rio Bravo, Some Like It Hot, Anatomy of a Murder and A Bucket of Blood, respectively.). But  that same year also saw the release of not one, but two Ed Wood gems;  Plan 9 from Outer Space  and Night of the Ghouls.  Wood may not have had talent but, God bless him, he had heart.  And that's what endears him to me.

Night of the Ghouls (1958)

Night of the Ghouls is, like most of Ed Wood's movies, unintentionally hilarious.  The premise is that an old abandoned house, the site of some previous nefarious deeds (more or less, this was supposed to be a sequel to Bride of the Monster, an early Wood flick), is now the site of more strange events.  The movie begins with a coffin in which Criswell, a somewhat famous magician of the time, is apparently dead.  He rises from the coffin and delivers a a speech in his inimitable stentorian voice, warning the people in the audience of "Monsters to be pitied! Monsters to be despised!"



The movie really gets going with a few sequences of the mysterious; a young couple encounter a weird woman/ghost on the road, and an elderly couple encounter another while taking a short cut.   The police call in a lieutenant to investigate and send a uniformed officer to help.  The bumbling police officer is a familiar one to Wood aficionados, having played the same in several Wood's flicks.




During the investigation, the lieutenant finds that a fake psychic, Dr. Acula (Dracula, get it?) has set up shop in the old abandoned house on Willows Lake.  He has Lobo, a former inhabitant of the house for muscle and a very attractive blonde girlfriend to act as a "ghost" to scare away snoopers (this being the apparition the old couple saw earlier).  But there is also another woman/ghost who appears and is really scaring people, including the bumbling police officer.



The fake psychic meanwhile is trying to bilk an old woman out of her money through a "seance" with her dead husband.  This combined with the investigations by the lieutenant, and attempts to keep the whole thing under wraps makes for the rest of the story.  Confused?  Watching the movie won't alleviate that very much.  It is a story apparently written on some pretty decent drugs.  But it is funny in it's own way.  There's a ghost in a sheet which dances across the screen (with the pants legs of the person barely concealed at the bottom of the screen), and a gabbling head which appear during the seance which will have you rolling on the floor laughing.








Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

This is it.  The one that nearly everyone agrees is the WORST MOVIE OF ALL TIME!

It's definitely not Academy award material.  But it is amazing that some of these people went on to have careers after this.  What makes this movie fun is the way everyone in the movie is so serious about their parts.  The script itself was ludicrous.  The actors barely able to hold their own.  And some special effects errors that are legendary.

The movie begins with the death of a poor old man who, after the death of his wife, cannot go on living.  (Ed Wood used some footage of Bela Lugosi he had shot just before Lugosi died, but for the majority of the movie it's not Lugosi in the cape but a guy who Ed conned into being him, with a cape across his face to help convince people it was Lugosi...but even that doesn't help.)




The police are called to the cemetery to investigate a mysterious flying saucer that supposedly landed there.  Inspector Clay, played by another Wood regular Tor Johnson, is killed by a zombie woman, played by Vampira (Maila Nouri).  He too becomes a zombie.



We are then taken aboard the flying saucer where two aliens have been working to animate corpses.  This is the "Plan 9" of the movie.  To animate the dead and have them help take over the Earth.  Why?  Because all people of the earth are idiots, ya see?  Especially the ones who invested money in Ed Wood's' harebrained ideas for movies.  All $2 worth of it.



Bu as I said before, the really fun part of Plan 9 is catching all of the unintentional flubs and special effects disasters:  From the cardboard gravestones that shimmy and shake and tip over as you walk by them, to the shadow of the boom mike on the wall of the cockpit behind the airline pilots (and the shower curtain that is a door to said cockpit), to the infamous strings you can see suspending the flying hubcaps ( I mean saucers...).  Plan 9 from Outer Space ranks as the worst movie of all time, but to me it is the absolute greatest "worst", meaning it is one I enjoy reveling in it's exquisite badness.

That's it from the backseat of the Plymouth Fury this time.  Have a safe trip home, kiddies.

Quiggy