54 SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES HOLY WOOD! Growing up, we were always a family of movie-watchers. When my mum passed away in 2006, I devoted my only Empire editorial to how her guiding me through early screenings of The Wizard Of Oz and Psycho greatly informed my appreciation of how cinema could be artistic, scary and funny all at once. Her simple advice — ‘If a movie doesn’t grab you within 10 minutes, it’s probably not going to’ — similarly has stuck with me, both as a reviewer and a would-be scriptwriter. Dad’s appreciation of movies was less theoretical but also resonant. Two decades of watching war movies with the retired army reservist — ‘Look at that, walking on a ridge in silhouette!’ was a favourite, followed by a machine-gun noise to indicate he’d just killed all of our heroes — bred an intolerance for flagrant inauthenticity. It was also Dad, who as a salesman for publishers Harper & Row, one night brought home J. Hoberman and Jonathan MARCH Rosenbaum’s fantastic 1983 book Midnight Movies, which expanded my film reading beyond Famous Monsters, Starlog and Fangoria and opened my eyes to — and created an appetite for — the alternative cinema of George Romero, John Waters, David Lynch and Ed Wood. A year later, through his connections, Dad put me forward for a ‘Kids rate the movies’ feature in the Sydney Morning Herald. My 300-word review, of an Aussie flick called Street Hero, wasn’t exactly Pauline Kael calibre (‘The only fault I could pick, in my opinion, is that some scenes are a little unrealistic …’) but it was a start and definitely helped chart my course. ‘I look at this slush and Dad’s staying with us for his 76th birthday. We have a lovely backyard dinner and he surprises us by telling us he once — long before Mum — romanced a minor model who went on to bit parts in try to remember — at one a few Hollywood movies. The things you keep learning about your parents. Usually, at this point in the evening, I’d put on whatever time I made good movies.’ recent Hollywood film it was that Dad hasn’t seen. But tonight the first of Ed Wood’s feature films beckons. Father thinks he might want to watch Glen Or Glenda. ‘What’s this one about?’ he asks. Carl Anthony as film director Johnny While he likes costume dramas, I’m not sure he’ll enjoy a cross- Ryde in Ed Wood’s The Sinister Urge dressing psychodrama. SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 54-55 13/10/09 12:18:47 PM 56 57 SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES MARCH ‘Ed Wood’s called the worst director who ever lived,’ I explain. via hormones, sex-change surgery and learning to walk, talk and ‘He was also a transvestite. When he got to make his first movie, smoke like a girl. Thrown in randomly is Lugosi raving and solemnly he made it about his love for women’s clothes.’ narrated stock footage of cities, steelworks and stampeding ‘It’s a bit like a documentary, then,’ says Dad, unfazed as he buffalo. Producer George Weiss also took it upon himself to splice plumps the cushions on the other couch. in a mild B&D lesbian scene. Um, well, sort of. Laughs come from Wood’s bizarre visuals, such as Glen tortured Edward D. Wood Jr is synonymous with bad movies now but he by devils in his lounge room, and from the tin-eared script, which remained almost forgotten by critics and authors until the public has Lugosi raving about green dragons, puppydog tails and rescued him from obscurity by voting Plan 9 From Outer Space warning us to ‘Bevare!’ Over American street scenes, the narrator the worst film ever made in Harry and Michael Medved’s 1980 book muses solemnly: ‘The world is a strange place to live in. All those The Golden Turkey Awards. He’d been left out of the predecessor, cars. All going someplace. All carrying humans, which are carrying Harry and Randy Dreyfus’ seminal 1978 tome, The Fifty Worst out their lives.’ Lines like that, and ‘I am a man who thrives on Movies of All Time, but now a cult was well and truly born. learning — we only have one life to live’, make me think Wood’s After reading about Wood for years, I first sampled his work in spirit mischievously possessed George W. Bush and Donald 1987 when, for my birthday, some friends and I went to a ‘world’s Rumsfeld. worst’ triple bill of Plan 9, Glen Or Glenda and Phil Tucker’s Robot For its time, Glen Or Glenda has a brave if mixed message. Monster. Sufficiently stoned, we got the giggles we’d come for, ‘Glen is a transvestite, but he is not a homosexual,’ we’re told. It’s but I was surprised by the surrealism of these movies. Glen Or a fantasy of a tolerant 1950s, in that Barbara accepts Glen’s ways Glenda, in particular, seemed cut from the same cloth as David and offers him her angora sweater and off-screen Average Joes Lynch’s Eraserhead, which we’d caught at the same cinema a few discuss how we should see sex-changes simply as human beings. weeks earlier. Superficially laughable elements also contain grains of truth. Over Twenty years later and Glen Or Glenda is still a weird, wild one- stock footage of 1950s American men, we’re told that hundreds off work of art. Wood’s 1953 debut opens with Bela Lugosi — once of thousands of Average Joes wear lingerie beneath their suits, an A-list Universal star on the strength of 1931’s Dracula, now a which, given rates of cross-dressing and the US population at the half-forgotten morphine addict — rattling around a lab and sitting time, is about right. in an armchair surrounded by Halloween props. He’s some sort of We take Dad up to Clare’s parents’ house in the mountains. God-like creator. We have lunch at a swanky hotel and I’m minorly mortified that, ‘Life has begun! Ha! Ha! Ha!’ Bela rants — only to be cut off by amid these plush, olde-worlde surrounds, our Ava careens around, my dad’s full-bodied snore. I gently rouse him and pack him off unstoppable, like some noisy, funny little wind-up demon-clown. to bed. Also a tad embarrassing, given that this is a few days for family, Dad misses out on 65 minutes of lunacy, ineptitude and is that I more than once have to excuse myself with the now sincerity. Under the name Daniel Davis, Wood plays Glen, a secret familiar refrain, ‘Oh, well, I suppose I’d better watch a bad movie’ cross-dresser who needs to come clean to his fiancée Barbara or the slightly more jaunty, ‘Well, the next bad movie isn’t going (real-life girlfriend Dolores Fuller), not least because his obsession to watch itself’. with her angora sweater is getting out of control. The second, Thing is, the family doesn’t mind, especially if I try as much as I less-remembered story is of Alan, who wants to become Anne can not to discuss the films or the arcane trivia I’m learning about SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 56-57 13/10/09 12:18:47 PM 58 59 SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES MARCH them. I mean, who, other than me, really cares that the producer as a giant, with the strength of 20 men. Or … like all the others … of Bigfoot claimed to have been married to Marilyn Monroe and dead!’ And there’s a genuine pathos in Lugosi’s, ‘Home? I have no promulgated the conspiracy theory that she was murdered? home!’ speech — which Martin Landau recreated so beautifully in One thing I can’t stop myself from doing, though, is venturing Tim Burton’s Ed Wood that he won an Oscar. into every op shop, garage sale and video library I come across, Not all of the film’s failures are Wood’s fault. His investor hoping to find bad movies in the bargain box. And on this visit, coughed up on the condition that his talentless son take the lead I strike gold, scoring a VHS of a movie called Blame It On The role and that the movie end with a nuclear explosion, which makes Lambada for $2. This thing is the only film I’ve ever encountered no sense. Critics also take a bit of blame. The Medveds and others with no IMDb listing. And it ‘stars’ Andy Warhol. The temptation claim that Lugosi says of Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson’s hulking to watch it immediately is almost overpowering. But I resist, and Tibetan man-beast Lobo, ‘He’s as harmless as a kitchen’. Funny, adhere to the order of the Bad Movie Bingo. but he line is quite clear and is ‘He’s as harmless as a kitten’. Wood’s 1954 nincompoop noir Jail Bait is less inept than Glen Bride was the last film Wood made with Dolores Fuller. As Or Glenda and much less interesting. The story has Don, a plastic shown in Tim Burton’s biopic, the director relegated his girlfriend surgeon’s son, falling in with mobster Vic and his crowd. Because to a cameo, replacing her with Loretta King, who he mistakenly these dunderheads stop to count their loot during a robbery, thought wanted to invest in the flick. Now in her eighties, Fuller they’re forced to kill a night watchman and a secretary.