Film #123 - Orgy of the Dead (1965)
Mmmmmmmm. Orgy of the Dead. The slightly pungent smell of soft-core pornography is all over this one. This is Ed Wood’s first real foray into porn (though he dabbled a bit with The Sinister Urge). It also marks the beginning of his long collaboration with director Stephen Apostolof, a man who had cut his filmmaking teeth on Journey to Freedom, a low budget film based on his own real-life escape from Bulgaria.
No such noble intentions here. Apostolof (by then working under the name A.C. Stephen) had determined that nudie films were the place to really make money in low budget films and he turned to Ed for a quick script that he could film quickly and cheaply. Ed supplied him with a script about (naturally) a horror writer who finds himsefl trapped in the world of the occult.
Ed really must have thrown this one together fast, because there’s even less plot on view than usual. Basically, we meet Bob (William Bates) and his girlfriend Shirley (Pat Barrington) as they drive around while Bob looks for inspiration for his stories, much to Shirley’s annoyance. A car crash finds them in the local cemetary just as the Lord of the Dead (Criswell) and his Queen (Fawn Silver) begin the night’s festivities, which consist of a series of striptease dances by various damned souls.
Okay, when you’re a fan (nay, an afficianado) of the works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. as I am, you get used to seeing bad acting. It comes with the territory. But Orgy of the Dead has the worst acting of any Ed Wood film I have ever seen. I mean it. Even the porn actresses in his later films were able to emote more than the two stiffs at the top of this bill. Orgy follows the Ed template of buxomy leading lady, beefy leading man, but if your leading man can make Steve Reeves seem like a dynamo of excitement, you know you’re in for a bad time. William Bates can’t convey even the simplest of emotions. Pat Barrington (a stripper who doubles as one of the dancing dead) is no better. Criswell must have really liked Ed to even be in this production, but his particular brand of “acting” just doesn’t work (especially since he had to read all his lines off of cue cards that he could barely see).
As for the dancing… Well… Some of the girls are attractive enough in that mid-sixites floozy kind of way. But it’s stretching things to call any of their dances erotic. I mean, a girl dressed in a cat costume working a scratching post? Yeah, that’s real hot.
But what really prevents the film from generating any kind of titillation is the interstitial scenes with the Lord and Lady of the Damned and their henchmen, a mummy and a wolf man. As bad as some of the Bob/Shirley dialogue is, the horribly unfunny jokes perpetrated by these two are much worse. Even if the dancers were generating some heat, the interruptions would toss cold water on everything.
Orgy of the Dead is not one of Ed’s best creations. Sure, it’s got a lousy plot, bad dialogue and a cheap look. But it lacks that sense of charm that marks Ed’s best work. You can’t blame it on the softcore nature of the film, because Ed did some fun stuff even in his hardcore Necromania. The only really good thing you can say about Orgy is that it is beautifully shot. Apostolof clearly had the werewithall to get good equipment, even if everything else in this film is lousy.