tiistai 6. marraskuuta 2012

The most surreal bruise in Motion Picture history



Aw Gaaawd... It's time for a look of the Ed Wood-scripted Orgy of the Dead, that recently aired on Finnish state television. Praise God for socialism. To give some kudos is to say that the picture is by far the greatest stripper-horror film I've yet seen, the same way James Cameron remarked that his Piranha II is the greatest film ever about flying piranhas. Orgy is mightily awful to be sure, but its plotless ghoulishness, paired with painfully prolonged stripping sequences sink the viewer into a kind of vomitous hypnotic state.

And the tagline? Ooooooooh man, Orgy of the Dead has one of the pleasurable ever: "Are you heterosexual?". Good God.

The plot has a wholesome couple -- a horror novelist and his wife -- stumble upon a nightly graveyeard, where the mighty Criswell himself -- reciting lines from Wood's then-shelved Night of the Ghouls (the finest Wood picture in my view) is a sort of deity - like a sinister version of the benign Pull ze stlink!-Bela Lugosi character from Glen or Glenda? He is there with a sidekick, a Vampira knock-off called Booborel-- er, Ghoulita, to view candidates for damnation performing striptease acts, and suffering their sentence henceforth. Into the mix are thrown the most delightful characters in the film; a werewolf and a mummy duo, who act as a sort of twisted Greek chorus to this whole delirium (the mummy mostly does the talking, while the werewold nods his head and howls).

But enough! That's all for the storyline. The main thing about this movie for me is that weird blue color blob on the horror novelist guy's forehead. See it...? It comes on-screen every once in a while, when you've watched another twenty minutes of apathetic stripping. Wha da hell iz that? Some guy push the wrong button during the color timing process? Indeed - the movie generally has a weirdly saturated color scheme, so the thought of it being simply some reflection of color gel light came to mind... for sure. Only on the second viewing recently when I catched it on television, did the ghoulish realisation dawn on me - IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE A BRUISE! Aaawww gosh.

I would like to take seize this opportunity, and nominate this particular one as the most interesting bruise in cinematic history.

But seriously fellas - the pleasures of camp films is usually seen as merely in low production or artistic values, resulting in the viewers having their giggles. This view is a far too superficial one. The attraction might more truthfully lie in the widly inconsistent aesthetics that these pictures have. This issue is suprisingly rarely even pondered upon, let alone succesfully - Pete Tombs' book Mondo Macabro is a commendable exception.

You gasp in wonder while watching Teenagers from Outer Space, when suddenly -- for no reason whatsoever -- in a fire fight with the police, the coppers' guns start to give out animated (? [?]) muzzle flashes. And -- it's also when seeing Orgy of the Dead; yeah, the werewolf and mummy are terrific, sure, the strippers are dandy ... but it's all ' bout that colourful, wildly surrealistic, gorgeous Salvador Dali-ish bruise.


Monsters to be pitied...! Monsters to be despised...!

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