Lost Ed Wood Film Unearthed

BayBlade writes "It seems a lost Ed Wood film, Necromania was recovered recently, and can now be ordered on DVD. Reuters goes into more depth."

Comments

Picasso?

[fembots]

Considered the worst film maker of all time, Ed Wood

I guess as soon as we start watching the movie, we will know if it's a genuine Ed Wood masterpiece :)

But like Picasso's (note I'm not really comparing Plabo to Ed) paintings, sometimes it takes a different era to appreciate them, especially when the person's dead.

Re:Picasso?

[colmore]

It depends on what you mean by bad. Ed's movies are technically worse than just about any director you will ever find who tried to make freature films.

Sure I'd take one of Ed's movies over say... Pearl Harbor any day. But that's because Pearl Harbor wasn't bad, it was mediocre. But Pearl Harbor was much closer to what you'd be taught how to do in film school.

Ed's movies are amazing. It's like a kid who gets a 0 on the SAT. There's one of two things going on there. Either he knows what he's doing and making mistakes on purpose, or he's misreading the test in some fundamental way, and has no clue what's going on. Ed was either in on the joke, or he was not just inept, but posessed a fundamental misunderstanding of what movies are supposed to be.

The first option seems more likely, but watch a few of his films and you start to wonder.

If you watch 70s horror movies, or schlock kung fu action movies, or Troma, or other B movies that know that they're B movies, you don't see what you see in an Ed Wood film. Modern directors study old B movies for inspiration, just look at Tarantino. B movies have bad actors reading bad lines and working with shitty special effects on no budget, but they're at least filmed proficiently, given their resources. Watch most B movies and you're generally watching an OK filming of a bad movie. Ed Wood not only has bad actors, bad writing, bad effects, and no budget, he also has TERRIBLE pacing, camerawork thats so bad its uncomfortable, long silent pauses, and many many other unnerving problems. He gets so many things wrong it boggles the mind.

They're more than so bad they're good. They're so bad they're past good and enter the territory of the head-scratchingly bizarre.

Quick!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone re-bury it!

This has got to be the worst film ever

[BortQ]

Uh, how bad does a film have to be before Ed Wood won't release it?

Re:This has got to be the worst film ever

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

I heard it's Star Trek V bad ... *shudder* elderly Uhura strip tease scene

I'm sure it's the pinnacle of the art

[delirium of disorder]

but plan9 will always have a warm place in the hearts of geeks.

How is this possible?

[phozz bare]

The movie has an entry on IMDB, with comments dating as far back as 1999.

How did these people see the movie?

phozz

Re:How is this possible?

[vert2712]

Because it was never lost. The film has always been available in one form or another.

Maybe this new 'lost' version has different/more hardcore material but the film was never really that hard to see. Necromania was originally a softcore feature, with hardcore inserts shot by cinematographer Ted Gorley to spice up Wood's softcore effort and make it more marketable, a very common practice in those days (Wood never actually liked to film actual hardcore scenes). As with most films of this kind, I'm sure there are tons of different edits/versions floating around, but that doesn't mean it was a "lost" film.

And anyway an hardcore version (credited to director "Don Miller") has been has been available from Alpha Blue archives for years (they sell it on VHS paired with another similar short titled Daughter of Satan). Something Weird Video also used to sell it.

The guys who announced this are trying to get mileage from to the recent DVD release of Tim Burton's "Ed Wood" -- and it looks like it worked: you think CNN and Reuters would have picked up this story otherwise?

Nothing to see, move along...

Wood

[Anonymous Coward]

"The 1971 movie is a porn film documenting the sexual enlightenment of a young couple at the hands of a coven of witches"

So this is like Blair Witch project meets Deep Throat?

Quotes

[FiReaNGeL]

It's actually a sad story... the guy had to turn to pr0n industry at some point, because nobody wanted to fund him anymore (I'm sure you can guess why). Here's some quotes from the Reuters article :

"Struggling to find backers for more mainstream work, Wood turned to smut in the 1960s, making a string of films and "loops" -- short porn flicks shown in coin-operated booths -- up until his death in 1978."

"This is an old film. It's in the '70s, they're hairy, they don't look the way we are used to now,"

"He says "Necromania" displays Wood's wit and style and he points to a scene where the main character Danny is struggling to untangle a pair of red pajama bottoms to put them on."

You KNOW you want to see it! :) There's a trend developing here in Quebec (since about 2 years) where dumb (absurd and bad) humor = good humor... Is it the same way everywhere else? Let's hope it won't spread to movies...

The movie also include for fans of Ed :
That film shows the making of Wood's most famous film -- "Plan 9 From Outer Space" from 1956 -- in which actors screw up their lines and "special effects" include pie tins for flying saucers.

We need a new slashdot category

[sowdog81]

Seems we're getting more porn related stories. Thats a good thing if you're in doubt.

And Now

[Ossadagowah]

We must summon Best Brains and reform the MST3K crewe for one final mission ... after they finish with Battlefield Earth.

Undead Wood

[Doc Ruby]

Who owns the copyright on this movie? Wood died 26 years ago. These movies were discovered rotting in an LA warehouse. Largely ignored in his lifetime, Wood's audience has created much of the "value" of these films by perpetuating a subculture around them. There's no mention of any copyright holders in the story, even in the story of the people who discovered these copies that are being copied and distributed on DVD - all people who never even knew Wood, or participated in the "life" of these movies until after they were left for dead. If I get a $20 DVD, can't I just set it up on an MPG stream for anyone who wants to pay bandwidth costs like me?