Orgy of the Dead (1965)

We begin with an opening preamble from the notorious prognosticator, the Amazing Criswell, who rises from his coffin and does his best to address the audience (and not his cue cards) as he pontificates about the terror tale we are about to see:

A tale of the “Threshold People” that’s so astounding, he predicts, some of us may faint from just the exposure! A sanguinary story of those lost in the twilight time; those who were once human, now monsters, living in a void between the living and the dead! Creatures to be pitied, and despised! A night of ghouls reborn from the innermost depths of the underworld! So, brace yourselves, I guess?

Anyhoo, cut to a convertible Corvair winding around a deserted mountain road at night and at a treacherous speed. Behind the wheel is Bob (Bates), in the passenger seat leaning into him is his girl, Shirley (Barrington), and the couple are bickering about their destination.

Seems Bob is a writer of horror fiction and is currently looking for an old cemetery to draw some inspiration for his latest tale. When asked why he writes about such terrible things, Bob admits he tried other genres first but couldn’t sell a single word of it. But his monsters have been good to him and afforded him a healthy living.

Still, Shirley’s “puritanical” upbringing won’t let her acknowledge such preternatural things are real despite Bob claiming he derived all of his tales on facts and legends of old. And so, he tries to settle things with a kiss, but that does little to calm Shirley down, who is getting spooked by all the monster talk and begs him to just turn around and head home. But when Bob finally relents, his brakes apparently picked this most inopportune moment to fail as he tries to make a quick U-turn and rolls the car off a steep embankment.

Meantime, in the very derelict cemetery Bob was looking for, a mysterious cloaked figure emerges from the fog enshrouded tombstones. This is the Emperor of the Night (Criswell again), who takes a seat on the marble steps of a mausoleum before summoning his consort, the Black Ghoul (Silver) -- sort of the missing link between Vampira and Elvira, who also emerges from the fog and bows before him.

Seems this particular Ghoul is in charge of the evening’s entertainment; and the boss warns if the performers fail to please him, he will banish all their souls to eternal damnation.

Now, it probably should be noted upfront the “entertainment” scheduled for this all-night graveyard jamboree is of the *ahem* “exotic” variety. And as the full moon shines above, the ebony Ghoul summons the first dancer; a woman decked out in Native American gear -- but not for long. Trust me.

For, as our emcee explains how this woman (Bunny Glaser) loved fire, and how she and her lover died in flames, the dancer strips down to almost nothing as she circles around an eldritch pyre until she jumps into it. And once that fire goes out, the Ghoul then brings out the next dancer for her master; a former street walker (Colleen O’Brien), who gets to bumpin’ and grindin’.

Meanwhile, in another part of the cemetery, it appears those wayward travelers, Bob and Shirley, survived the wreck as both were apparently thrown clear and are just coming around. Battered and bruised but still functioning, they hear the music and trace the noise to its source just as the Emperor himself summons the third dancer; a woman who worshiped gold above all else.

As they watch the Golden Woman (Barrington again) complete her ritual, the Emperor then summons two beefy man servants and orders them to reward her with the desired gold. And while this reward begins with a shower of coins, it ends with the girl being dipped into a cauldron of molten gold, turning her into a golden statue (-- think Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger, ‘natch), which is then deposited in a nearby crypt.

Clandestinely observing all of this from the shrubbery, the naive Shirley suspects they’re watching some kind of collegiate initiation ritual but Bob thinks otherwise -- in a supernatural stag film sense. And this is confirmed when the two are captured by a werewolf (Andrews) and a mummy (Ojena) and are then forcibly brought before the Emperor.

But before he passes final judgment on these mortals for interrupting this profane Burlesque Show of the Damned, he orders the captives bound to two stone pillars so they may watch the rest of the ritual (and suffer along with everyone else in the audience) before he turns them over to the Ghoul for proper disposal -- but only after she plays around with Shirley for a bit first, he typed salaciously -- I mean, he typed ominously... 

If you’re a true Edward D. Wood Jr. aficionado, like me, Criswell’s opening monologue might sound a little familiar to you. And it should, because it’s the EXACT same monologue he gave to open Wood’s long thought lost film, Night of the Ghouls (1959).

Yeah, Wood cannibalized this speech for Orgy of the Dead (1965) because at the time Night of the Ghouls hadn’t been released yet because the always cash-strapped filmmaker didn’t have the money to pay for the lab fees. And so, the unprocessed film sat on a shelf for nearly three decades and was feared lost until Wade Williams found it in 1984, paid the delinquent bill, and finally released Night of the Ghouls on home video.

As for the man who delivered that speech, we have Jerome King Criswell, who was born in Princeton, Indiana, circa 1907. According to his own legend, from a very early age Criswell was a keen observer of the human condition and paid close attention to the goings on in his hometown. He then translated these observations into a series of sordid predictions about what would most likely happen to these citizens in a self-published article entitled Short History of the Future, which his father subsequently burned out of existence.

His family also owned a mortuary business, explaining away his life-long predilection for sleeping and having sex inside a coffin.

(L-R) Jerome Criswell and Halo Meadows.

After high school, Criswell attended the University of Cincinnati to study music. After college, he went to work for several newspapers, where he’d translate horoscopes and make bold and highly errant predictions about the future.

In 1930, Criswell married noted Burlesque star Halo Meadows (Myrtle Louise Stonesifer), who proved just as eccentric as he was. (She was convinced her pet poodle was the reincarnation of her dead cousin.) And throughout the 1940s, Criswell kept up with the predictions and tried his hand at being a radio announcer and a news broadcaster, where he honed his sonorous voice into a finely tuned instrument with the volume set at about, oh, 11.

Alamogordo Daily News (July 28, 1955).

The kooky couple migrated to Hollywood in the early 1950s, where, in 1953, Criswell bought some airtime on station KLAC-TV to hawk his latest quackery: Criswell Family Vitamins. And to help fill up the time, Criswell, decked out in his customary sequined tuxedo, started making wild prognostications under the banner of Criswell Predicts and soon became a bit of a notorious local celebrity, started making the rounds at Hollywood parties, and became the personal psychic for Mae West after he predicted she would become President of the United States in 1960.

This was part of an article he wrote for the February, 1955, issue of Spaceway Science Fiction magazine, which cemented a friendship that lasted until the starlet’s death in 1980.

Part Nostradamus and part Liberace, as Criswell Predicts grew more popular and started to be syndicated to other stations, Criswell’s notoriety continued to grow and spread, leading to a nationally syndicated column, where his predictions became even more outlandish.

As the old joke goes, "87% of Criswell's predictions that he reminds you of have come true!" The accuracy of those that he didn’t mention? Well, not so much. For even though he accurately predicted Ronald Reagan would become the governor of California, he also predicted Denver, Colorado, “Would be struck by a ray from space that would cause all metal to adopt the qualities of rubber, leading to horrific accidents at amusement parks.” He also claimed the world would end in August of 1999. Luckily, he blew that one, too.

During his TV run, Criswell ran through many directors and production assistants -- many of them familiar to the B-Movie Brethren, including Lee Sholen -- Catalina Caper (1967) and The Doomsday Machine (1972), William “One Shot” Beaudine -- Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952) and Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966), and a young upstart by the name of, you guessed it, Ed Wood.

By this time Wood had several productions under his belt -- Glen or Glenda (1953), Jailbait (1954), and Bride of the Monster (1955), and was in the process of trying to raise funds for his latest epic, Grave Robbers from Outer Space.

(L-R) William Thompson, Ed Wood, Criswell.

Aside from the Baptists, I have a feeling one of those investors was Criswell, who agreed to bookend the film with some amazing gobbledygook about future events in the future. And I’ve often wondered if it was Criswell who landed Vampira for her role in the film; what with them both being local L.A. TV celebrities and all. Again, what was to become Plan 9 from Outer Space was shot in 1956 but didn’t find a distributor until 1959, which means it at least fared a little better than Night of the Ghouls made out theatrically.

By the 1960s, The Amazing Criswell’s popularity only continued to grow, netting him appearances on national talk shows hosted by Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin and Jack Paar, where he made his most infamous prediction that actually came true, claiming President Kennedy would not run for re-election in 1964 due to something that would happen to him in November, 1963.

Later, Criswell would become a regular and a household name on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, who would later lampoon his guest as Carswell and, later still, as Karnak. And despite being the butt of Carson’s jokes, all of this free publicity allowed Criswell to cash-in with a series of books -- From Now to the Year 2000, Your Next Ten Years, and Forbidden Predictions, and an LP, The Legendary Criswell Predicts Your Incredible Future.

Strangely enough, Criswell would often plug Orgy of the Dead during his appearances on The Tonight Show, which makes you wonder if he’d invested some money in that production, too. And while a lot of people associate the movie with Wood, who did write the screenplay, it was produced and directed by A.C. Stephen -- alias the sadly unsung Stephen C. Apostolof.

Now, as you dig into the personal history of Apostolof it is the stuff that would make a great B-movie on its own -- and it sort of did in the semi-autobiographical feature, Journey to Freedom (1957), starring Wood regular Tor Johnson.

Having fled from Bulgaria after serving as a freedom fighter against the newly installed Communist regime, and after serving out a sentence in a Turkish prison due to accusations of being a spy, and after completing a stint in the French Foreign Legion, Apostolof migrated to Canada in 1950, and then moved to California in 1952, where he worked as a bank clerk and an accountant for 20th Century Fox.

Then, in 1955, he decided to get into independent filmmaking, forming SCA Productions with Robert Dertano and William Thompson -- no strangers to the exploitation film racket. Their first feature was Journey to Freedom, which was distributed by Republic Pictures. But it was with the release of Russ Meyer’s Nudie-Cutie, The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), where Apostolof suddenly had an epiphany:

"I saw what was happening in the market,” said Apostolof (Wikipedia). “I couldn't possibly compete with the major companies, but I saw a niche there for us, the independent guys. I saw those sex-type of pictures that were becoming popular. I went and saw them, and I wanted to see how far you could go with nudity."

See, once the courts decided nudity on its own had no erotic content, and therefore, was not obscene, the Nudie-Cutie was the next logical evolutionary step for this kind of exploitation picture, making it sort of a nine-months later end-result of a drunken prom date between a Nudist Camp picture and a comical stage-bound Burlesque film that preceded them.

As filmmaker and sleaze historian Frank Henenlotter put it so eloquently, “It was a sex film without any sex … and they were undoubtedly the stupidest films on the face of the earth." Voyeurism was still the key: lot's of looking, but no touching -- from the audience, or any characters on screen; just a parade of topless beauties, a lot of teasing, and no muff, punctuated by a lot of bawdy punchlines.

And oddly enough, when this cycle started petering out, monsters started showing up, giving the genre one last gasp with the likes of Bob Cresse’s House on Bare Mountain (1962) and Harry Novak’s completely demented Kiss Me Quick (1964), before the real monsters and psychos started showing up in the next iteration: the Roughie.

But Apostolof never really went down that road and stayed the course, producing and directing seventeen sexploitation pictures over the next decade until the release of Deep Throat (1972) legitimized hardcore porn with the masses and officially killed the draw for this kind of, well, good-natured naughtiness in the likes of Suburbia Confidential (1966), The Bachelor’s Dreams (1967), Lady Godiva Rides (1969) and The Snow Bunnies (1972).

But back in 1965 there was definitely a market for this kind of picture. “I believe in something,” said Apostolof (Nightmare in Ecstasy, 1992). “If I'm in the restaurant business, I'll give you good food and good drink; if I'm in the movie business, then I'll give you good girls with big bazookas. I call ‘em ‘ticket sellers.’"

So how did this all come to be? Well, the cinematographer on Journey to Freedom was William Thompson, who had shot nearly all of Ed Wood’s films from Glen or Glenda to The Sinister Urge (1961). And it was Thompson who later introduced Apostolof to Wood at the Brown Derby restaurant, who was in full drag but still wore his trademark pencil-thin mustache.

Regardless, these two hit it off and decided to make a movie together. Thus, Orgy of the Dead began life as an 18-page spec-script previously written by Wood under the title Nudie Ghoulies, and would be Apostolof’s first go as a producer and a director. 

Also lurking in the credits as an A.D. was future sleaze-merchant Ted V. Mikels -- The Astro-Zombies (1968) and The Corpse Grinders (1971), also making his debut.

To help flesh out the script -- heh, see what I did there? Sorry. Anyhoo, to give the customers what they paid for, what little plot there was would be wrapped around ten striptease performers and topless dancers of various themes and motifs.

According to Wood’s synopsis, these performers were dancing for the fate of their very souls before the Master of the Dead and his consort. But that thread kinda gets lost in all the blustering of Criswell, who got promoted from Master to Emperor, and his constant demands of “Torture, torture! It pleasures me!” or his running commentary of how “a pussycat is born to be whipped."

So, yeah, like with all Nudie-Cuties, the plot of Orgy of the Dead is both rock stupid and essentially irrelevant as these performers resume their dance of the dead with a Cat Woman (Texas Starr), decked out in a topless leopard skin leotard, who gets chased around with a bullwhip. This sadomasochistic turn continues with the Slave Girl (Nadejda Dobrev), who also gets whipped, much to the Emperor's delight, until she breaks free and starts dancing.

All the while, the Black Ghoul can’t keep her hands off the captive Shirley, scratching and pawing at her. And even draws a knife to do more damage but is called off by her master, saying it’s not their time to join them -- yet.

And you know what? I am spending way too much time expounding on all this filler. And so, to sum up, after the Mexican dancer with a thing for skulls (Stephanie Jones), the Polynesian dancer with a thing for snakes (Mickey Jines), the widowed Newlywed dances with the skeleton of her late husband she just killed (Barbara Nordin), the Emperor and the Black Ghoul resume their fight over Shirley; the Ghoul saying they’d better do something quick before the sun comes up and they return from whence they came.

But he’s the boss, applesauce, and so, the dancing continues with a Zombie (Dene Starnes), and then concludes with a woman who died for “feathers, fur, and fluff (Rene De Beau)," which she proceeds to shed and molt if you know what I mean, and as a wise man once said, I think you do.

And just when it appears Shirley and Bob have run out of time, lo, these maledictions tarried too long, dawn breaks, and they all fade away, leaving nothing but skeletal remains behind.

But! Turns out this was all just a dream as the couple are awakened again to tending paramedics. Bob is still unconscious but Shirley is near hysterics, wondering what happened to all the ghouls as she’s loaded into an ambulance. But was it all a concussed dream? Only the Night People can say.

Despite what we see on screen, which appears fairly professional despite the subject matter, Orgy of the Dead was a bit of a chaotic shoot and beset with all kinds of problems behind the scenes for Apostolof.

And his biggest headaches were Wood, Criswell, and actress Pat Barrington. Barrington was a professional stripper, who pulled double-duty in the film as the protagonist and one of the dancers, who thought she was gonna be a star, acted accordingly, and was tagged with being troublesome, which could mean she was troublesome or Barrington had refused to sleep with someone.

As for Wood, well, one of the things I found most disingenuous about Tim Burton’s biopic, Ed Wood (1994), was how the enamored filmmaker completely glossed over the fact his subject matter was a chiseler, a con-man, and what horrific drunks both Wood and his wife, Kathy, were, as not to ruin his 'gee-whiz no-talent boob makes good' aesthetic. And by 1965 Wood was no longer a functioning alcoholic. At all.

Officially, he served as the writer, production manager, casting agent, and a few rumors say he shot second unit on a couple of scenes. The problem was he kept showing up to work intoxicated. And on the rare occasion when he did show up sober, he only stayed sober long enough to con someone out of some money, then disappear, only to come back later bombed out of his skull. Allegedly.

Things reportedly got so bad Apostolof wound up firing and rehiring the pitiable and pathetic Wood several times as the tumultuous production dragged on. Now, I think one of the reasons Apostolof put up with that nonsense was due to Wood being the only one who could deal with Criswell and his traveling entourage, who was cast because of his notoriety and personal relationship with Wood.

And on a side note, apparently, the role of the Black Ghoul was specifically written with Vampira (Maila Nurmi) in mind but Wood and Criswell couldn’t get her onboard this time; and so, she was played by Fawn Silver in a black bouffant wig; and frankly, she appears to be the only decent actor in the bunch. Also of note, the cape worn by Criswell is the same cape worn by Bela Lugosi in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

But wardrobe wasn’t the problem. Nope. Criswell’s problems were he could never remember his lines, blowing them for take after take. And if you look at any photos from the production, you can see Wood holding several cue cards for his friend and it’s painfully obvious Criswell is reading from them in the finished footage. The psychic also had a bad habit of disappearing between setups to take a nap in the coffin he always brought along with him.

When filming finally wrapped, no one was sold on Nudie Ghoulies as a title. And so, several others were kicked around, including Ghouls and Dolls according to Mikels. It was Criswell who offered up Orgy of the Damned, which Apostolof tamed down to Orgy of the Dead. And taking pity on Wood, who was always destitute, the producer threw him a bone and gave him $600 to write a loose novelization of the film. (Last check a copy of it was going for a high three figures on eBay.)

After Orgy of the Dead, Wood would write seven more screenplays for Apostolof before he drank himself to death in 1978. Criswell failed to predict his own passing in 1982. And after his second attempt at a legitimate feature, Hot Ice (1977), crashed and burned, Apostolof retired from filmmaking. He died in 2005.

It’s hard to judge a film like Orgy of the Dead. It is what it is, and exactly what it set out to be. It’s a total goof but grows very tedious due to its repetitive nature. Lots of eye candy, and corny jokes by the mummy and the werewolf; two late additions to bring some levity.

In the end, the film is like the clinical definition of the Nudie-Cutie genre it represents and should be too stupid to even exist. And yet, here it is. Watch and boggle, Fellow Programs. It’s all you can do.

Originally posted on October 20, 2018, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

Orgy of the Dead (1965) Astra Productions :: Atomic Productions Inc. :: F.O.G. Distributors :: Crown International Pictures / P: Stephen C. Apostolof / AP: William Bates, L.S. Jensen, Neil B. Stein / D: Stephen Apostolof / W: Edward D. Wood Jr. / C: Robert Caramico / E: Donald A. Davis / M: Jaime Mendoza-Nava / S: Criswell, Fawn Silver, Pat Barrington, William Bates, Louis Ojena, John Andrews