Caveat: slight return. I've talked about this before, but somehow I feel like I need to do so again.
If you like top ten lists of WORST FILMS EVA then not only do you need to stop reading, but I'm going to fight you. And I fight nasty and I aim to put my opponents in the morgue. Not that they're dead. It's just freaky to wake up in a morgue, when the last thing you remember is having a fight with a camp sociopath on the internet.
There was a lot of this horrid "worst evee" shite back in the 1980s and 90s; it's experienced a revival on YouTube over the last five years, promulgated by pasty faced criticboys who never made a thing in their lives, apart from a dime of someone else's money toadying to rancid studio product. Well, I'm years past the point when this was at all relevant, but tonight (it's always night when you read this, right?) I'm going to talk to you about Edward D Wood Jr.
Half of you have gone "uh?", half of you have gone "Jesus, twenty years too late", half of you have gone "that film with Johnny Depp" and half of you are wondering what joke I'm going to make about maths skills. Keep hanging, finks. I'm not going there. Just walk away and I won't hurt ya.
Well tough to all 200% of you. I can't get Ed out of my head. I first saw his most notorious effort Plan 9 From Outer Space when I was about ten. Quick version; everyone says it's the worst film ever made. It isn't. The end.
The saucers always come back in our dreams. Silver and perfect, out of reach. Anything we see inside will always be a let down. How could anything live up to that? What film maker could put the unknowable on screen? - "Then one day, they destroyed a town" - the battle of LA, urban legend of WW2 anti aircraft units fighting alien ships late at night - one solitary photo, a bright shape caught in a searchlight beam, like a starlet at Grauman's Chinese Theatre -
Plan 9 is goth as fuck. Regardless of what the storyline is, the actual theme is all about playing in graveyards with no money, hanging with your friends in horrible times and being so far on the outside of mainstream that you've forgotten how to get up without a couple of inches of corpse makeup. Zombies, UFOs, ghosts, vampires, film noir and TV psychics all meld together into a dreamlike void, made on a quarter of shoestring in the rubble and demolition sites of fringe LA someplace.
It comes at you, swinging like a champ. Everyone overdoes everything. The chief of police is a pro wrestler and Maila Nurmi (*sigh*) is an alien deathbride creature with claws like a wildcat. The army tries to blow shit up and fails. The aliens tell 50s America that its values and beliefs are a load of fucking arse and the audience sides with them against the sharp suited b-o-r-i-n-g heroes.
There is nothing here - NOTHING - that isn't repeated in alleged genre classics. I've got a lot of time for Invaders From Mars, the movie that links childhood nightmares with the science apocalypse, but on a thousandth of its budget, it would have looked just like one of Ed's pieces. Stock footage and bad alien costumes; the only advantage is that the Supreme Intelligence in that movie doesn't carry a clipboard and go through the evil scheme step by step, like its opposite number in Plan 9 does.
Hollywood shadows - the memory of the Black Dahlia, the all night horror specials on foggy, miniature TV screens - the dying stars. There were once 13 letters in the Hollywood sign, but they took them down after Peg Enwistle jumped to her death. So they tell me. Who knows? Print the legend.
All Ed's movies have something in common; an aura, a sense of that nightmare reality LA. Unlike most other films of the period, you can sense the horror and despair of Hollywood right there onscreen. No-one ever jumped on a bus to become a big star after watching one of these; you can smell the disappointment too strongly. Look at poor Bela Lugosi, ditched by the studios and living out his last days in poverty, supported by his few remaining friends. Or Maila Nurmi, half skeletal with anorexia, blacklisted and unemployable. This isn't the world of the popular kids. This is our place.
Horror host in the torn dress. My mute vampire queen. I wanted to be like you-
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| Note: this is c.1955. Allow that to sink in for a moment |
Which brings me to my next point I guess; how much of Ed's unenviable reputation is the result of arrant transphobia? He was only truly happy as a woman and this in 1950s LA. How the fuck did he even survive out there under those conditions? Thirty years later, smug men in sharp 80s suits were mocking this. Hipster comedy, supposedly making a break from the past but still laughing when men dress like women. Ha ha! Oh, my aching sense of moral outrage. Look at the some of the alleged classics from the last thirty years, as the supposedly hip and left wing stuff like The Young Ones uses trans status as a mark of shame. Move on a decade and look at crap like Friends telling Joey that he shouldn't wear lingerie. I wonder if we've come anywhere at all, our society so desperate to find shame and something to bear our teeth at, like primate packs expelling the weak. At least we have Rupaul in the mainstream nowadays.
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| Ed, looking fantastic as usual |
In the dark places of celluloid, in the queer shadows and the scarred, outsider building sites, Ed's movies aren't like anything else you've seen. He died penniless, having lost everything that ever mattered to him, his scripts, movies, even his pet dogs. I read his story as a kid, thought he must have been ancient by the end. He was eleven years older than I currently am, an alcoholic who wrote trans porn for rent money, too forgotten to even register as laughing stock. Another Hollywood burnout, old flashbulbs dropped in the gutter after the premiere.
And I don't think I've achieved a thousandth of what he did.
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