In our weekly seriesAnatomy of a Nude Scene, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sexscenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around it, and their legacy. This week, notorious schlockmeister Ed Wood transitions from low-budget sci-fi films to low-budget booby movies with his 1965 nudie classic Orgy of the Dead!
Though he languished in obscurity throughout his career, writer/director Edward D. Wood, Jr.—better known as Ed Wood—experienced a posthumous career revival starting in the early 80s. His 1959 film Plan 9 From Outer Space was dubbed "The Worst Film Ever Made" in a 1980 book titled The Golden Turkey Awards, bringing a newfound interest in his many cult classics. Of course, his star really exploded in 1994 when Tim Burton put out his loving biopic Ed Wood, introducing a whole new generation of bad movie lovers to one of their patron saints.Since that time, nearly every director trafficking in low-budget schlock—Tommy Wiseau (The Room), Neil Breen (Fateful Findings), James Nguyen (Birdemic)—has been dubbed the Ed Wood of his generation,forever cementing Wood's legacy as the first great "bad director."
Wood began his career directing Glen or Glenda, a film that was originally intended to be a biopic of Christine Jorgensen, the first American person of note to undergo sex reassignment surgery. Wood instead turned the camera on himself, adding in elements of his own life as a closeted cross-dresser, andincluding an absolutely mind-boggling subplot involving Bela Lugosi as some sort of string-pulling puppet master. Assembling his own stock company of well-meaning but ultimately talent-deficient stars like Bunny Breckenridge, Paul Marco, Conrad Brooks, and even professional wrestler Tor Johnson, Wood went on to create some of the best examples of terrible films ever made.
Burton's biopic ends—along with most people's knowledge of Wood's work—with the 1959 premiere of Plan 9, but the writer/director continued making films up until his death 19 years later. The only thing that your average bad movie lover knows is that his films somehow got worse after Plan 9, but only true devotees of Wood's work have witnessed first hand just how dire things got for the lovable loser later in life. With the exception of 1960's The Sinister Urge—immortalized in a brilliant episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000—Wood didn't direct a single feature film in the 1960s, but he did write a handful of films that got produced, including today's film.
1965's Orgy of the Dead wasn't directed by Wood—that honor fell to Stephen C. Apostolof under the pseudonym A.C. Stephen—but it bears many of the hallmarks of a Wood production. Part of the "Nudie Cuties" subgenre that ran through stag and adult movie theaters in the 60s, Orgy of the Dead stars famed "psychic" Criswell, a frequent Wood collaborator, as an all-powerful being named Emperor of the Night. The Emperor presides over a secret ceremony in a graveyard in the dead of night, aided by his assistant The Black Ghoul (Fawn Silver), dressed up to look like another member of Wood's ensemble Vampira, who was offered the role but declined.The ceremony essentially consists of ten undead souls—all gorgeous, busty women—who will dance for him, but if he isn't pleased by the evening's entertainment, he will banish them all to eternal damnation.
Around the same time Criswell's big "ceremony" is about to get underway, we meet a young couple (William Bates and Pat Barrington) driving in a Chevy Corvair down a foggy road. They suffer a terrible accident and soon find themselves in the very same graveyard where Criswell's festivities are about to begin. Over the course of the next sixty minutes, ten different women will be introduced and brought before Criswell to perform topless burlesque dances, while the helpless couple is chained to two posts and made to watch the dances unfold.While the timeline doesn't necessarily make this a given, it would seem that another schlockmeister—former fertilizer salesman Hal Warren—took more than a little inspiration from this film for his 1966 bad movie masterpiece Manos: The Hands of Fate.
And, as they say, that's the movie. One after another, each woman comes out, does her dance, strips down to some teeny undies, and is never seen again. There's an abundance of tone-deaf stereotyping going on as the women come from various points in history, so, for example, a Native American princess (Bunny Glaser) does her dance to some powwow music that would certainly not survive our current cancel culture.
Other dancers include Lorali Hart, dressed as a kitten getting whipped by the two musclebound men who help set up each number, Stephanie Jones asa Spanish woman in love with a matador, and Nadejda Klein as a "slave girl." Pat Barrington, the female half of the main couple watching all of this, even appears as one of the dancers named Gold Girl, who first appears in head to toe gold body paint like poor Shirley Eaton from the previous year'sGoldfinger. As you may have gleaned by now, the film is nothing more than a burlesque show in film form, the dance numbers tied together by some floral prose delivered by Silver and Criswell, who required the help of cue cards—held on set by Wood himself—in order to get through his dialogue.
Orgy of the Dead has next to no cultural footprint in the world of cinema, consigned to the dustbin of history with nearly all the other "Nudie Cutie" movies of the era. Were it not for the involvement of Wood—and to a lesser extent Criswell—the film would have probably evaporated from the public conscience long ago. However, if you happened to be a randy young man in the throes of puberty in the pre-internet era, it was quite a bit better than the static pages of a nudie magazine or—god help you—an issue of National Geographic. With the advent of the internet and every pornographic act conceivable making itself available to anyone instantaneously, it can't really compete.
If you're an Ed Wood completist or just a fan of "Nudie Cuties" in general, it's far from the worst example of the subgenre. However, it's easy to see why the film nowplays like a quaint relic of a time gone by, because that's precisely what it is, for better or worse. Vinegar Syndrome released an immaculate version of the film on Blu-ray in 2017, including a commentary track from Frankenhooker directorFrank Henenlotter, so if you're gonna go for it, you might as well get the best version possible.
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