Lost in the Woods: or, the peripatetic angora sweater

This afternoon we had a long telephone conversation earlier in the day, and asked the question: does the world really need another blog entry about the films of Edward D. Wood Jr.?

Well, here at the Umbrellahead Review, our answer is a resounding "Maybe!" Especially since, with one exception, we're mostly covering his lesser-known films today. So if your mind's in a muddle -- like a thick fog -- then clarity awaits:

Crossroad Avenger: The Tuscon Kid (1953)

Grade: C-

Glen or Glenda (1953)

Grade: C- (C+ without the added exploitation footage)

Jail Bait (1954)

Grade: F

Night of the Ghouls (1959)

Grade: B-

Crossroads of Laredo (1948, completed 1996)

Grade: F

Most people know Ed for his horror films, but he started out in Westerns, most of which seem to have Crossroads in the title. Of the two mentioned here, Crossroads Avenger is by far the more watchable, and gets bonus points for its unusual premise: the hero is an insurance investigator! Gee, I wonder why that pilot failed, eh? Otherwise it's mostly by-the-numbers, neither egregiously bad nor particularly good throughout its 20-odd minutes. We enjoyed Harvey B. Dunn as Zeke, the wheezy old prospector (or whatever he was supposed to be).

Crossroads of Laredo, on the other hand, is pretty much unwatchable. Originally filmed in 1948, the soundtrack was either lost or never recorded, and so it gathered dust for almost 50 years. When Ed's movies came back into fashion, the producer (Crawford John Thomas) wisely saw an opportunity, and so we have this "restoration", with voice-over narration and music added by Dolores Fuller and company, which comes as a bonus on the Haunted World of Edward D. Wood Jr. DVD.

It was a nice idea, but the problem is, there's just about nothing to the original footage, which just seems like a series of half-realized sketches that, as one IMDB reviewer put it, might have passed for a movie in 1918. There may be a way to wring a viable film out of it nevertheless, but Fuller's additions -- cheesy synthesized music, hopelessly banal commentary, and Elvis Presley Jr. -- don't exactly improve matters. The result is 23 minutes of sheer tedium, relieved only by our bittersweet reflections on canine longevity.

We don't really need to say anything about Glen or Glenda, do we? Except maybe that P. enjoyed it a lot more this time around...but it still drags like hell in the second half. Getting rid of the spliced-in exploitation footage would help (poor Béla!), but even without that, it's 10 minutes too long. Still, it's a hard movie not to like, and it's kind of sui generis anyway, or ne plus ultra, or some other expression in a foreign language that makes us sound pretentious.

Not so for Jail Bait, which is Ed's attempt at film noir (more or less), but fails disastrously in almost every respect: the thuddingly obvious plot, the threadbare acting, the obnoxious soundtrack...even the title (which refers to a gun, of all things) is a fraud! Pour a glass out for Herbert Rawlinson, who died the day after shooting was completed -- which is easy to believe: the poor guy sounds short of breath in every scene. He deserved a better end to his career than this piece of dreck.

By any objective standard, Night of the Ghouls is also dreck, but it's a million times more fun -- and since it doesn't feature Béla Lugosi at the end of his rope, it's the only "Kelton trilogy" movie whose bathos comes 100% guilt-free. Here, the fallen star is Kenne Duncan, who plays a mysterious psychic named...uh...Dr. Acula. Yeah. In his nefarious schemes, he's aided and abetted by a hideously disfigured Tor Johnson, among others.

As always in Ed's movies, the third act drags a bit, but the first 30 minutes or so offers the biggest laughs of any Wood film, hands-down: the séance sequence is downright mind-blowing. This is a must-see for anyone who likes to laugh at things. And you like to laugh at things, don't you?