Orgy of the Dead (1965)

Orgy of the Dead, released in 1965, is promoted as an Ed Wood Jr movie. He did not direct it but he did write the screenplay, based on his own novel.

While he has a huge cult following it has to be admitted that Wood’s reputation as a staggeringly incompetent director is richly deserved. The movies he directed are not just shambolic but all too often boring. On the other hand he really did write some very cool very entertaining screenplays. The Violent Years (1956) is a totally crazed juvenile delinquent movie which has to be seen to be believed. So the fact that Orgy of the Dead was written by Wood but directed by someone else makes it quite enticing.

And this movie plays to Wood’s strengths as a screenwriter - his talent for excruciatingly awful dialogue, his total inability to construct an even moderately coherent plot and his tendency to waft off into delirious lunacy.

This movie was in fact directed by Stephen C. Apostolof using the pseudonym A. C. Stephen.

The movie opens with young couple Bob and Shirley heading down the highway in search of a cemetery. Bob writes horror stories and cemeteries provide him with inspiration. They crash their car and do indeed end up in a graveyard, but a very lively one.

Bob and Shirley find themselves prisoners of the Emperor of the Night, his beautiful but sinister consort (the Black Ghoul) and his army of ghouls.The ghouls are beautiful girls who have earned eternal damnation for greed or lust or other assorted sins. What fiendish tortures await Bob and Shirley? In fact all that happens to them is that they have to watch almost-naked pretty girls dancing. The Black Ghoul threatens them with dire fates which never eventuate.

Technically the film is quite polished considering the minuscule budget. The camera remains in focus, the lighting is handled competently and it looks like it was made by someone who understood at least the basics of filmmaking.

The Emperor of the Night is played by Criswell, a fascinating character in his on right. He was a popular TV personality (even a semi-regular on the Johnny Carson Show) famous for his predictions which were of course simply outrageous jokes. He knows this movie is intended to be jokey and goofy and he has a lot of fun.

If you want to appreciate this movie you have to understand what it isn’t. It isn’t a low-budget horror B-movie. That’s not what it’s trying to do so there’s no point in complaining that as a horror movie it just does’t work. It’s best not to compare it to movies Ed Wood directed in the 50s, like Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space. Those movies were trying to be very low-budget horror or sci-fi movies.

There’s no point in getting impatient about all the nude dancing and wondering when the horror content is going to kick in. It isn’t going to kick in. Nude dancing girls is what Orgy of the Dead is all about.

Orgy of the Dead is a very typical mid-60s American sexploitation movie of the nudie-cutie type - a lighthearted feel, quite a bit of goofiness and plenty of female flesh. This being 1965 there is no frontal nudity but there’s an abundance of bare breasts.

And Orgy of the Dead belongs to a sexploitation sub-sub-genre that enjoyed a certain vogue in the 60s - nudie-cuties with some tongue-in-cheek horror movie trappings. It belongs with movies like The Joys of Jezebel (1970) and Harry Novak’s Kiss Me Quick! (1964) and House on Bare Mountain (1962).

You have to judge Orgy of the Dead as a nudie-cutie. And as nudie-cuties go it’s not great but it’s OK. It doesn’t have the charm of Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr Teas (1959) or Doris Wishman’s Nude on the Moon (1961) or Hideout in the Sun (1960). It doesn’t have the madcap inventiveness of The Girl from S.I.N. (1966) or the cheerful goofiness of Henry’s Night In (1969).

But it does have lots of bare-breasted dancing lovelies.

Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-Ray release looks fabulous and includes quite a few extras.