Honestly, a streaming service should buy the rights to this and put out an Orgy of the Dead variety show every year.
It’s a nudie cutie where women take turns dancing topless and a couple has to watch for some reason. The dialogue between the hosts and the monster characters could be perfect banter and a Greek chorus, but it just goes nowhere. It’s so captivatingly bad it could easily make your annual Halloween watch list.
I could see a modern version working so well that’s full of drag, burlesque, and whatever other weird freaky stuff you can come up with.
The 1965 version is camp, it needs to go all out gay.
You can probably find it on YouTube or other means, I got reminded about Orgy of the Dead from a Mubi email, it may not be available in your country on there though.
Looks like a complete version is on youtube, but with hardcoded spanish subtitles.
This is classic later Ed Wood Jr. alright. As usual he puts in a lot of personal effort to make something that’s hilariously awful and off-putting and sleazy, yet you can’t look away from the trainwreck.
Wood was most likely transfeminine. She went by the chosen name of Shirley, which she used in many of her screenplays, and regularly showed up femme presenting or in genderqueer attire in public and on set. Her movie Glen and Glenda is an early example of trans lesbian representation (back then trans women where assumed to be exclusively interested in men). Her gender identity was explained away by her contemporaries with pseudopsychological nonsense like “a neomaternal comfort derived mainly from angora fabric”, but it’s pretty obvious to me she was one of us.
I was not aware of that, thanks. Guess it’s downplayed in mass media far more than I knew.
Yeah, i only learned it through a transfem friend of mine who’s the biggest queer media nerd i know and loves to infodump this kind of stuff.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The dialogue between characters after the dances gets me. It could be fun banter and Statler and Waldorf style quips but they just go nowhere.
That’s why I could see a modern version working so well, but a bit of that magic would be lost
I always wonder if these kinds of movies were straight vhs or w/e they had in 65?
This is a classic example of a B film. Theatres back then had double features where you got two films for the price of one and the second movie was usually low budget stuff, and often relied on being a bit edgier than the usual fare to make up for the cheaper production. Video tapes only started to become a thing a decade after this, and didn’t get really big until the 1980s.
Interesting. I Wonder why did 2 movies in the first place.
Probably more opportunity to sell concessions.
Movies also weren’t 4 hours long with no intermission like they are now.
I think they still got shown in a cinema because back then there was no other way to watch a movie. I remember listening to Eli Roth on a podcast saying the quality of slashers really dipped in the 80s because of direct to VHS.
Before then, studios had to consider schlock real movies because they’d get shown in cinemas and the people making the movie tried to do their best with the resources they had. Perceptions changed and budgets were slashed with vhs and you had so fewer resources to work with
