For those of you who are dyed in the wool fans (or maybe in this case, the flesh), here are a dozen more stills from Ed Wood's ORGY OF THE DEAD. Half of them feature the fabulous Pat Barrington and I particularly like the "cast shot" starting things off. For a nudie cheapie, they certainly promoted the hell out of this.
BONUS!
Ed Wood didn't only make films, he was also a prolific writer who cranked out lurid and pornographic novels and non-fiction books for years. It is estimated he wrote about 100 books and three dozen short stories, the proceeds unfortunately going to fuel his alcoholism. The numbers may not be accurate as he used a number of pseudonyms. Here are some examples of his paperbacks that show his interest and exploitation of the sleazy underbelly of society.
This collection of ORGY OF THE DEAD stills and Ed Wood paperback covers is great!
ReplyDeleteThe Wood bio NIGHTMARE OF ECSTASY had a section covering the literary works of Wood, with a partial list of titles and IIRC a few of these covers, but in B/W. It's good to finally see better repros and more examples of these.
The NOE section on Wood's fiction included a lengthy, mind-bending dialogue quote from one of these torrid tomes, in which a man addresses an inexperienced female after exposing himself to her-- which went something like:
"You've never seen this before? You've never seen [insert ridiculously long list of obscure slang terms for "male sex organ" separated by ellipses]? You've really never seen one of these?"
From that quote, the mind boggles at the idea the target audience could possibly be sexually aroused by anything Wood wrote. (Driven to collapsing in a fit of laughter, maybe-- but that's a different form of release...)
One other thing seeing these stills reminded me of-- and I'm sure this has to have been noted by others before:
Fawn Silver's look as "The Black Ghoul" was pretty much duplicated years later by Elvira, right down to the dagger in the waistband. The hair's a little poofier on top and spikier on the ends, the makeup's more extreme, and they just ripped the red sections out of the cleavage and sleeves and split it up the side more.
Maybe she's acknowledged the source of the look somewhere, but I can't recall. (And don't get me wrong-- I absolutely LOVE Elvira.)
Thanks for posting these, John!
-- hsc
I was a devoted Elvira fan during her original run (who wouldn't be?) and vote for her for a Rondo Award every year -- she's done a lot for the horror film. NOE was a very interesting read. Tom Brinkman's Bad Mags Vol. 1 has an extensive chapter on Ed's fiction, as well.
ReplyDelete