Sporting Wood

The following review is a contribution to The Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon, running from July 6-12 at Cinema Styles:

There’s a fringe cult that harbors a curious reverence for Ed Wood. Whether they defend his pictures or his standing as an independent filmmaker are moot points amid the gushing adulation. Ever since that ephemeral l’age d’or of Golden Turkey awards and Worst of All Time festivals (circa 1978-82), Wood’s pictures and exploits have been analyzed, scrutinized and documented beyond reason. It’s highly probable that there’s been more written about him than on Jacques Rivette and Jean-Pierre Melville combined.

    To these supporters, the discovery of Wood’s ‘lost’ uncut version of the porn film, Necromania is a major piece of a puzzle scattered about an uncharted course of topsy-turvyism. After his flagrantly inept attempts at science fiction (Plan 9 from Outer Space) and exploitation (The Sinister Urge), the descent into smut ran in concert with the filmmaker’s inability (if not abhorrence) to abide by the system. He wrote a bunch of raunchy novels and scripts under pseudonym, and took to heavy drinking. The inebriation became infectious: in the Wood-scripted Orgy of the Dead, a mid-60’s hallucination of graveyard ghouls and chubby lap dancers, even the cast appears to be blown to the gills.

    Made in 1971, Necromania has floated around over the years in substandard video dubs, but only in the R-rated of two versions. This new DVD from Fleshbot Films offers the full-tilt X-rated affair, the Unholy Grail of Wood’s fractured oeuvre. They have, in fact, provided both films on one disc for examination. Legend has it Wood shot the two separately because his R-rated cinematographer refused to do the X-rated stuff. (Why not have the X-rated cameraman cover both?) But they’re virtually interchangeable save for some genital closeups and a few sequences in which the celluloid appears to have been merely ‘flopped’ (actors facing left in one version are facing right in the other).

    Beginning with his usual plot device of innocent characters stuck at an isolated house where weirdness transpires, Wood replaces traditional B-film situations with cheesy sex clinic material. The director may have failed at emulating and arranging rudimentary genre forms in the early pictures, but Necromania finds him at ease with the disposal of drama and dialogue for shots of ungainly naked people squirming around on beds.

    There are, of course, the Wood trademarks. The free-style stock background music casually segues from bossa nova to do-wop and Egyptian themes without purpose. When an actor hits a snag trying to get his pants on, there’s no cutaway as he starts laughing over the predicament. And a gag of ringing for room service by squeezing a dildo (a ding dong?) is funny, inventive, convenient — and abandoned prematurely because the director didn’t know how (or care) to milk it for full effect.

    Cheap sets with wall-to-wall shag carpets and shag bedspreads are overlit to neutrality, while this “tale of weird love” (so says the title card) inadvertently defends the porn industry’s contemporary trend in body waxing, weightlifting and tanning beds. Wood’s low-rent cast is a grubby congregation of excess pubic hair, flabby beige skin, butt acne, cold sores and dirty feet. It could put you off sex indefinitely.

    At the end of its merciful fifty-four minutes, Necromania’s characters are snared into a transcendental state of eternal sex — short on penetration, excruciatingly long in tongue-wagging. They’ve avoided purgatory, a kaleidoscopic dimension where doughy extras grind all over one another in a game of nude Twister. We share their relief. As the leading man humps away with a bovine witch in a casket, the women lick one another to no end, and Wood reaches his climax. It’s all consistent within the ghetto of early 70’s porn, making Necromania the most competent picture of his career.


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