B-movie icon Edward D. Wood, Jr. did not direct this, but he did write the script–and oh boy, can you tell. There’s hardly a sentence here that a normal person would say. There’s an art to dialogue that reveals character details in such fashion that you never feel like the writer is merely dumping a bunch of information on you.
But Ed Wood doesn’t bother with that shit. He hasn’t got time. He’s got drinking to do.
Wood’s characters explain themselves point blank. In one scene, they tell you exactly what they think and all that they’re ever going to think for the next ninety minutes.
It’s the kind of dialogue that actually sounds best coming from bad actors. They don’t pause or breathe naturally. They’re not comfortable on camera. They say things like “Your puritan upbringing holds you back from my monsters, but it certainly doesn’t hurt your art of kissing” and make it sound every bit as awkward as it should.
The “story”: A horror fiction writer and his girlfriend drive around at night looking for a cemetery to hang out in so he can get inspiration for his next masterpiece. She’s timid–and doesn’t like his writing–but he’s your regular man’s man type. He’s got a taste for danger. That means that he sometimes drives around curves a little too fast and wrecks his car.
That happens here and he and the girl get thrown from the vehicle and land near a cemetery. Just what he was looking for! Sometimes you unexpectedly crash into the things that you want. Sounds like a life lesson to me.
From there, the “plot” pretty much stops.
Apparently, a lot of young, pretty women were buried in this cemetery and at night their spirits rise and put on naked dance shows for the amusement of Ed Wood’s old buddy Criswell, who plays the king of the undead. The lord of the zombies. The long-winded master of the supernatural. The supreme reader of cue cards.
At this point, the movie becomes all about breasts and more breasts, of many shapes and sizes, that quiver across the cemetery set as strippers and young Hollywood hopefuls shake their stuff. Smoke swirls and studded G-strings glisten while Criswell and his pale, voluptuous Vampira stand-in sidekick Fawn Silver leer at the action in cutaway shots. We also get into S&M territory with whippings and bondage and overt dominance-and-submission fantasy, with Criswell as our master to be obeyed unless you want the cat o’ nine tails treatment–and maybe you do.
And, hey, I like boobs just as much as the next testosterone case, but I must be honest. This movie is on the dull side, as far as exploitation flicks go, even for the time. The occasional goofball moment perks you up (balloon-breasted 60s drive-in stalwart Pat Barrington being dipped in gold in a parody/rip-off of Goldfinger, the inexplicable appearance of a mummy and a wolf man), but this film is mostly a reminder that even tits can get boring if that’s all there is.
The only way to enjoy this is as piece of vintage smut. It’s an antique like an old rotary dial telephone that’s for sale at the funky secondhand shop for $900. It was 1965. You didn’t see nudity in mainstream movies and porn was hard to get. You had to leave the house for it and find a place that sells it and wear a fake mustache and a wig when you bought it just in case someone you knew saw you. It was a hassle.
Meanwhile, you just wanted to see boobs and lots of ’em. That’s all you wanted. That was it. Nothing wrong with that. I would even go so far as to call it a perfectly innocent pursuit. You weren’t hurting anybody.
So, you went to see Orgy of the Dead at the Adults Only drive-in. And you saw boobs. And you probably enjoyed it and probably didn’t think about “character development” even once afterward.
Generations later, it’s out on Blu-ray! Jerks like me can now see this garbage in crystal clear high-definition mastered to perfection (by the trusted souls at Vinegar Syndrome) for today’s nuclear-powered flatscreen TVs. The funniest detail that old presentations might have missed: the girl whose ass is clearly getting irritated by her G-string. She exhibits zero discomfort as she dances (and this movie is so cheap that you know they weren’t picky about the takes that they used), but when she turns around the center of her butt is bright red!
I felt bad for her. I hoped she was okay afterward.
There’s your character development.