Based upon Ed Wood’s novel by the same name, Stephen C. Apostolof’s Orgy of the Dead is the director’s first film in a career of porn flicks. Though part of the Woodian canon, the work is sub par for even Ed in that it is almost utterly devoid of the inane dialogue which makes Wood’s creations so much fun. What results is a film which falls cleanly into the “so-bad-it’s-bad” category as it somehow succeeds in making a handful of naked women boring.
A horror writer named Bob (William Bates)–his girlfriend Shirley (Pat Barrington) in tow– is in search of a cemetery in hopes of finding inspiration and writing material. After wrecking the car, they awaken in a graveyard and are taken prisoner by The Emperor (Wood consummate, Criswell) and his mistress, The Black Ghoul (Fawn Silver). The captives must withstand a night of undead festivities as they await their inevitable deaths just before dawn.
After all the of “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “why’s” of the situation are explicated in opening scene, the twilight world in which Bob and Shirley are driving–where daylight and darkness alternate between every cut–is wrestled from the lovers as they wreck their vehicle and are subsequently thrust across the apparently cleanly-drawn line of demarcation between desert and the forest before awakening to find themselves amid a thicket. For those of you whose cognitive gears innately grind, this isn’t to presume that time is separate from space, for high noon will instantaneously appear by the film’s climax as the crickets are likewise taken by surprise as they continue to chirp in the midday sun.
Unlike Fritz Böttger in his The Horrors of Spider Island, Apostolof leaves the seventy minutes of nudity in the final cut (out of the ninety of the feature’s running time) in his horror porn flick. However, the daunting achievement by the director is how he manages, via saggy breasts and cellulite on celluloid, to make nude females boring. Though you hope and pray to hear the complaint from Bob that it is tortuous being tied to a pole with a pole, he never utters the line for a reason as Texas Starr (that’s a stripper’s name), dressed as a kitten, perplexedly humps a Roman column like a dog in heat before we are graciously treated with a Zombie Macarena.
Now the true star of the film isn’t Bob or Shirley, nor is it Criswell as he squints and pauses while the looks over Silver’s shoulder (after she forgets to move her lips when introducing the second undead performer) in order to read from cue cards. Rather, it’s the smoke machine’s ejaculations which take center stage as fog shrouds–perhaps in an attempt at doing the viewer a service–the various strippers whom apparently are not very apt at removing their garments for, much like the instantaneous transition between daylight and night at the film’s opening, once the camera cuts to the slant-eyed Criswell as he searches for his next monologue to be delivered in monotone, we return to a now topless performer.
In short, the only thing that Stephen C. Apostolof’s Orgy of the Dead teaches us is that gold-plated bitches are heavy (I would typically leave the teaser at that but, in order to save the reader time, I’ll merely tell you never mind, it’s not worth it). To put it bluntly, the only reason this film has persisted throughout the decades is due to Ed Wood’s name being attached and, even at that, it isn’t trademark Wood for what little dialogue is present, it arrives stale and stagnant rather than inadvertently funny.
-Egregious Gurnow
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