whatsnew

Movie Critique

One of our assignments included a Critique of a play, movie or DVD, I chose to ask a friend for what they considered to be the worst movie they had ever endured. The movie he gave me was Orgy of the Dead.

From beginning to end, Ed Wood’s newly re-released and remastered Orgy of the Dead was both embarrassing and full of laughs. While directed by Stephen Apostolof, the screenplay was written by Ed Wood. Orgy of the Dead was meant to be a serious erotic horror movie but makes the viewer laugh out loud at the ridiculous antics of the cast. Criswell performs miserably and appears to be in a drunken stupor for most of the film. He reads woodenly from his cue cards and is having problems focusing. His lovely Empress, whom he also calls the Princess of the Night and seems to be a forerunner to the Elvira Mistress of Darkness, does somewhat better, she actually knows her lines. She is melodramatic but pulls off a lustful Empress that shares the dark desires of Criswell.

This disastrous movie starts out with two leopard skin skirt clad slaves that open Criswell’s crypt and then take off the lid to his casket. Instead of sitting up in the casket, we have a cross dissolve to Criswell, already sitting up, making his cue card speech while his eyes move as he reads. We go to decent, though time dated, opening credits with a naked girl painted in gold in the background. The next scene is the Bob and Shirley couple driving down a road at night. Interior scenes of the car are pitch black which are cut to external scenes of the couples car driving down a deserted road, these are clearly daylight handheld shots that have been adjusted in post to be a blue filtered, darker footage but not nearly dark enough to be convincing. The movie gets worse from here with the spinning stock footage of a supposed crash and the couple lying on the ground in the aftermath. Bob’s makeup bruises are poorly done, Shirley lies next to him with clothing barely askew. She sits up and takes Bob’s head and cradles it. Our friends Bob and Shirley are eventually caught by rented costumed werewolf and mummy and brought into the graveyard to watch the poorly acted, outlandish hijinks and the cattle call of cut-rate nearly-nude dancers. We go to the dimly lit and almost convincing atmospheric graveyard where Criswell strolls out attempting to look like Count Dracula with his cape held up to hide his face. The scene cuts to a different angle of Criswell and suddenly all of the atmosphere is gone, the night no longer has mist rising from the ground. Criswell makes another cue card laden speech which is followed by the entrance of Ghoulita or the Empress of the dead. One dancer follows after another while Bob and Shirley stand tied to head stones and trade wooden lines, Criswell and Ghoulita bicker about their pleasures and the werewolf and mummy make disastrous attempts at comic relief.

The dancers that stroll out and eventually magically lose their attire while they dance to a score that most obviously is added later. The first dancer is supposed to dance in flames but the metal drums that contain the fire are visible at the bottom of the screen. She enters wearing a red poncho and then dances in nothing but her red panties and jarringly white, dime-store moccasins, our conclusion, her strange pseudo native American dance lasts far too long. This movie goes on and on with drab dialog and wretchedly poor dancers.

The highlights of the movie are the better dancers, which appear to have been trained in 
modern dance, the incredibly talented fog machine technicians, and the oddly perky score 
and the hilarious train whistle screams of Shirley. Another scene that is a rare treat is the 
bizarre cat dance in which Easter bunny type music plays while a woman in a cat suit with 
bottom and breasts removed dances in what appears to be more convulsive than enticing 
manner and has the dancer practically mounting a headstone while a leopard spotted cabana
boy snaps a whip at her. The most incredibly funny line from the entire movie is where a slave
 girl is whipped by one of the cabana slave boys, followed with Criswell’s screams of, 
“Torture torture, it pleasures me!”

The ending has a few nice touches but is overall what one would expect if one is able to sit through the entire DVD. While the movie was something that makes even the bravest squirm in misery with prayers on their lips asking for the ordeal to end, the DVD was well put together. The footage was professionally remastered, the DVD interface was entertaining and well animated, and the extras nearly left me rolling in laughter. Included on this DVD are both the trailer for the original movie and the newly shot interview with the Director, Stephen Apostolof. Apostolof tells us of his ideas and the history behind Orgy of the Dead in broken English and how he became a director in the United States. He also tells the tale of how he met Ed Wood and the fact that Ed Wood was in drag at the time. The interview footage was clean and what Apostolof has to say with a straight face is definitely worth watching. This is a DVD for horror cult fans, film students and B-movie fans, very educational in what not to do when making a movie.