Bride of the Monster

Before we delve too deeply into the weeds, this viewer finds it imperative to make two big caveats. First, any finished movie, as TFH Fearless Leader Joe Dante often preaches, is a bit of a miracle. Completing a project, especially a low-budget indie like Bride of the Monster (1955) that culled resources together from disparate backers and was at one point shut down three days into production due to a lack of funds, is a feat to be applauded. I am fully aware of that reality, even though I will take pains to explore the many shortcomings of this notoriously flawed cheapie chiller. Second, the actual protracted production of this picture, which was at one time to co-star Bela Lugosi and his fellow Universal monster luminaries Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr., is as compelling as the movie itself. So we’ll be touching on some behind-the-scenes morsels, too.

Bride of the Monster marks the second of writer/director/producer/editor Ed Wood’s trilogy of schlocky collaborations with Bela Lugosi and his only starring vehicle among them. Though objectively and classically a “bad” movie, Bride possesses a winning charm and transfixing re-watchability that sets it apart from much of the other flotsam of its age. The film premiered on this date in 1955 at a sneak preview in the Paramount Theatre in Hollywood following a “Testimonial Benefit” fundraiser for Bela Lugosi held at Burbank’s Gardens restaurant. Bride “officially” arrived on several Southern California screens on January 25th, 1956, but today we’re opting to celebrate the 65th anniversary of its first preview screening.

Why does this clunky exploitation picture, uncomfortably melding horror and science fiction themes with laughable special effects, performances and sets, merit any sort of extended analysis today? Because Ed Wood, its one-of-a-kind helmer, has evolved into the Orson Welles of his genre and era. A misunderstood oddball with an irrepressible vision, Wood was (wrongly) hailed by Michael Medved in his The Golden Turkey Awards (1980) as “The Worst Director of All Time.” Worse directors than Wood existed then, and plenty are out there right now, churning out shapeless, interchangeable cookie-cutter product. Wood’s skewed vision of the world, as realized especially well in the imaginative adventures of his mid-1950s heyday, can be called many things, but his work is not interchangeable with anything.

A prolific Z-grade toiler in life, responsible only for a string of feature flops, Wood has achieved a certain immortality in death through the continued ironic appreciation of his Lugosi pictures, a litany of books and documentaries, and the terrific Tim Burton-directed biopic Ed Wood (1994), written by TFH Guru Larry Karaszewski and frequent The Movies That Made Me podcast guest Scott Alexander. Wood first cast Lugosi for the gender-bending drama Glen or Glenda (1953).

Lugosi portrays Dr. Eric Vornoff, a classic mad scientist determined to conquer the planet via his own master race of atomic super-humans. He is accompanied in his evil mission by Lobo (the wrestler Tor Johnson), a malicious mute Tibetan man-servant who harbors a subtle Angora fetish. Vornoff is conducting experiments on unwitting human subjects in an ancient house atop a mountain, protected by their pet man-eating octopus, portrayed by a combination of stock footage and an unconvincing, static prop from Wake of the Red Witch (1948) that the crew reportedly stole from Republic Studios. The Ed Wood biopic faithfully depicts the theft in a terrific caper sequence scene.

Though Vornoff occasionally employs telepathic hypnosis to control his victims, he uses a whip to keep Lobo in line. Vornoff is an expat from an unnamed European nation, and he soon finds himself being pursued first by plucky reporter Janet Lawton (Loretta King), then by his countryman Professor Strowski (George Becwar), and, after both disappear, Janet’s boyfriend Lieutenant Dick Craig (Tony McCoy). Lawton had been investigating Vornoff due to a series of recent disappearances around the property and local rumors of an otherworldly monster (actually the pet octopus, though an unaffiliated alligator also roams the property).

Strowski had wanted Vornoff, banished from his ambiguous home country for 20 years, to return home to continue his research in atomic energy with government funds. Vornoff rejects Strowski’s proposition, and instead feeds his countryman to his eight-tentacled critter. A note: according to a Wood quote captured in Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. by Rudolph Grey (1992), the octopus lost a limb while being stolen from Republic Studios, an absence that the director and his cinematographers Ted Allan and William C. Thompson took pains to conceal.

Vornoff prepares Janet for his next round of atomic experimentation, but she is rescued (I will withhold the identity of her savior here) and eventually reunited with Lieutenant Craig. Without giving too much of the spectacular finale away, a now-mutated Vornoff pursues them, and things reach an explosive finish.

Lugosi, slumming it here in a micro-budget indie production at age 72 after reaching full-tilt horror matinee idol status in the 1930s, stands out in stark contrast to his less experienced costars. Lugosi acts with charismatic scenery-chewing vigor in this final star turn. His performance is all the more impressive when one realizes that the actor was battling a debilitating morphine habit for which he would commit himself to the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, California on April 22nd, 1955. In the stellar documentary Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The “Plan 9” Companion (1992), Paul Marco, who played Officer Kelton, discusses driving a sickly Lugosi home in the middle of a Griffith Park night shoot for Bride of the Monster to inject himself with morphine injection. After this, a reinvigorated Lugosi insisted they return to set. The scene is starkly reminiscent of a moment in the Ed Wood biopic where Wood witnesses Lugosi (Martin Landau) draw a curtain and inject himself, viewed in silhouette in by Ed as opposed to Marco (Max Casella).

Wood and his cowriter Alex Gordon drew liberally from several prior Lugosi mad scientist characters in constructing Dr. Vornoff, including Dr. Hugo Bruckner in Return of the Ape Man (1944), and Dr. Paul Carruthers in The Devil-Bat (1940), though his double-jointed hand hypnosis technique is a lift from “Murder” Legendre in White Zombie (1932). Author Rob Craig astutely found the parallels between Vornoff and Bruckner in Ed Wood, Mad Genius: A Critical Study of the Films (2009).

Wood’s colorful cast was apparently as strange in reality as they were in the biopic. Dolores Fuller, Wood’s long-term flame, had been promised the plum starring role of Janet Lawton. Fuller had previously played the prime female lead in Glen or Glenda. In Nightmare of Ecstasy, Fuller notes that King “came in with 60 thousand dollars, so [Wood] gave her my part. That he had written for me. And I was heartbroken. And that sort of disgusted me, after … everything I was doing to help support him and all.” King counters that Wood “never asked me nor did anyone representing him. … But then I guess he had to tell her that I put up the money! Ed Wood wanted somebody… that he wasn’t [romantically] involved with.”

In the film, Ed (Johnny Depp) is less duplicitous towards Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker), and more the victim of a conversational miscue with King (Juliet Landau). Gary Rhodes and Tom Weaver’s book documenting the film’s production and continued legacy, Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster (2017) seems to support that version of events. The authors note that, “On more than one occasion [during 1990s interviews], [Fuller] admitted that she and Wood might have misconstrued King’s comments about the budget at their initial meeting at the Tail o’ the Cock restaurant. Apparently King said that $60,000 wasn’t much to shoot a film, a remark that may or may not have implied her willingness to invest in it.” It feels incredibly tenuous for an experienced multi-hyphenate creator to predicate the majority of his production budget on a single, ambiguous conversation. But then again, it feels like something Ed Wood might actually do. Wood is quoted in Nightmare of Ecstasy as saying that the film’s final price tag ran a bit north of $89,000.

Whatever the real-life case may have been, King’s delivery in Bride of the Monster as Janet, meant to be upbeat and plucky, feels choppy and awkwardly flat. What doesn’t fall flat, though, is the obvious tension between King and Fuller in Fuller’s reduced role as Margie, a beleaguered coworker. The actresses manage to pack a single one-minute hallway exchange with a deliciously palpable bubbling animus between them. Sadly, King seems incapable of summoning this loathing when Bela Lugosi’s villain threatens her, or when Johnson’s smitten behemoth lunges at her.

King, it should be noted, was a certifiable eccentric herself. Fuller and Wood both state in Nightmare of Ecstasy that King refused to drink water. Fuller mentions that King claimed that it “put weight on.” Wood, meanwhile, is cited as saying, “She could take no liquids of any kind… Any liquid she would immediately throw up. She was becoming completely dehydrated.” Yes, this confounding quirk makes a cameo in the Ed Wood biopic.

So where did Wood get his completion funds? Meat packing plant owner Donald McCoy supplied the money, but he requested that his son Tony star, and that the film conclude with a grandiose explosion. Yes, both those requests were honored. In the Ed Wood biopic, Tony McCoy is depicted by actor Bill Cusack as a lunkhead who struggled reciting his lines. That interpretation does not veer far from the truth, apparently. The scene where Dick Craig (McCoy) and his fellow investigator Marty (Don Nagle) discover Janet’s abandoned car in a wooded area overlooking Vornoff’s estate proved particularly trying to shoot due to McCoy’s limitations. Wood is quoted in Nightmare of Ecstasy as commenting, “[W]e took that scene 17 times. McCoy just couldn’t come across with dialogue. He was the worst I ever had.”

Lugosi shines brightest in his infamous monologue, where he discusses his dismissal from his never-named home country (“Home? I have no home…”) with Professor Strowski. His face darkens, and he trembles as he digs deep within himself to essentially illuminate a bit of narrative exposition. Lugosi veers from quivering anguish to expertly controlled insanity with expert theatricality. Though the circumstances around him (the cheap sets, the hilarious props, the other actors) border on absurd, Bela Lugosi remains the tremendous acting talent he usually was.

Beyond Lugosi’s demented diatribe, which is quite good, who deserves the credit — or blame — for the film’s otherwise-wooden dialogue? That remains a matter of ripe debate. Across various interviews, Gordon and Wood both claimed to have been the main author of the screenplay. Gordon suggested that he wrote the original script, initially titled The Atom Monster, and Wood then heavily rewrote it before filming. Wood, however, asserted that he gave Gordon credit after the latter contributed an initial idea, but that he, Wood, wrote the script himself. The exchanges certainly echo the surreally off-kilter banter that plagues most of Wood’s other cinematic output. Then again, if Gordon really added so little to the proceedings this time around, it seems dubious that he would merit a screenwriting credit at all.

Elements that equip Bride with its delightfully kitschy bad movie stripes, beyond the acting, include its hilariously phony breakaway sets and its unimaginatively flat camerawork from Ted Allan and William C. Thompson. Allan, a portrait photographer, noted in Nightmare of Ecstasy that his two stages at Ted Allan Studios, the filming location for the Bride interiors, were a compact 110′ x 110′ and 110 x 80′. Another factor working against the cinematographers was the film’s brisk production schedule, which could help explain why so many scenes are captured in cumulative wide shots, with limited closer coverage, to capture all the characters talking to each other in the same scene space. The utter falseness of the octopus, too, makes all the time we get to spend with it a treat. The performers depicting the homicidal critter’s victims clearly needed to move its tentacles around themselves as their characters flail about, struggling to escape.

Co-star Paul Marco relayed that premiere ticket “sales were very, very bad” the Rhodes-Weaver book. The book goes on to acknowledge that the film was just as unpopular with initial critics as it was with its first public audience, citing a May 13th, 1955 Daily Variety review that (accurately) points out, “This re-hashed version of a story which was old hat years ago is an amateurish effort. Even the least discriminating audiences will find it dull.”

Johnson makes his Wood debut here, though he would go on to join the director’s regular repertory player rotation, appearing in two other Wood non-classics. This was Lugosi’s final speaking role in a film, though he would be featured posthumously for minimal portions of Plan 9 From Outer Space (completed in 1956, but not released until 1959), mostly replaced by Kathy Wood’s chiropractor, Dr. Tom Mason, who bore almost no resemblance to Lugosi. And yes, all of this is featured in the Ed Wood biopic. You really should check it out. Karina Longworth explores Lugosi and Wood’s relationship in the fifth chapter of her excellent You Must Remember This podcast miniseries Bela And Boris (2017).

A spin-off/pseudo-sequel, Night of the Ghouls, was completed in 1957. It had a single preview screening in 1959 (under the moniker Revenge of the Dead, which kind of spoils the ending), but otherwise remained shelved until 1984, six years after Wood’s passing. In a macabre twist the director no doubt would have appreciated, Wood was more popular by 1984, from beyond the grave, than he ever had been in life.

In Ghouls, Tor Johnson returns as Lobo, badly damaged following the property’s explosion at the end of the first film, and Paul Marco is back as hapless police officer Kelton. The character had also returned to bumble his way through Plan 9 From Outer Space. His superior, Police Captain Robbins, is back too, but John Carpenter replaces Harvey B. Dunn in the role. The plot centers around a con artist psychic, Dr. Karl Acula (Kenne Duncan), separating elderly, rich suckers from their cash with promises of connecting them to their departed beloved. The intrepid Lieutenant Dan Bradford (Duke Moore) is determined to debunk the exploits of Dr. Acula (get it?).

Dr. Acula and a team of performers have set up their elaborate ruse in a house built over the site of the events of Bride, to the point where the disfigured Lobo (in a pretty cool makeup credited to Mickey Meyers) is wandering around the property intimidating Bradford and his men. Duncan and Valda Hansen delight in depicting the fiendish Dr. Acula and his star “ghost,” Sheila, but the film’s best element is a supernatural 11th hour plot twist that saves it from what has otherwise been a slow march to a meandering finale. It lacks the wacky pathos of its better predecessor. “I remember the appearance of the thought-lost Ghouls in ’84 was kind of a big deal,” Fearless Leader Joe Dante observed in a recent conversation with this viewer, “until people began watching it.”

Ed Wood’s singular voice shines through in Bride of the Monster and, to a lesser extent, its sequel. Though his life was a tragic Hollywood tale in many respects, this flick, like many in his oeuvre, remains an eminently re-watchable slice of trashy, time-stamped fun. Give it another spin. And then go watch Ed Wood.