“Let her continue to learn. The time is not yet right, that they should join with us.”

Drake’s rating: It turns out that Mutant Mice don’t take “no” for an answer

Drake’s review: In 1959, legendary cult filmmaker Russ Meyer decided that what was really missing from the motion picture experience was copious female nudity. Thus he directed The Immoral Mr. Teas. An accidental hit, the film spawned a whole genre of “nudie cuties” that flooded the market over the following few years. But evidently even nudity wasn’t enough to turn enough of these films into surefire moneymakers, so enterprising film auteurs took it upon themselves to expand their horizons and mashed the creature feature into the nudie cutie with abandon, thus creating the sub-genre of the “monster nudie.”

And let’s face it, in a cult movie genre that featured naked women being menaced by werewolves and Frankenstein’s monsters, Edward D. Wood, Jr. was certain to show up sooner or later.

But if Ed Wood had had his heyday in the 1950s, directing classically bad cult cinema favorites such as Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space, by 1965 those days were long gone. An alcoholic in constant need of cash, Wood sold the script for Orgy of the Dead to Stephen C. Apostolof for a reported $400, allowing the Bulgarian-born neophyte filmmaker to make his directorial debut* with an authentic Ed Wood screenplay.

Now while Apostolof no doubt tried his amateurish best behind the camera, it’s sad to say, in more ways than one, that he’s no Ed Wood. Orgy of the Dead is a fairly gloomy spectacle with little of the weird campiness that Wood brought to his films. While much can be made of Wood’s often inept attempts, Apostolof lacked the energy and offbeat, if unintentional, humor of his screenwriter. All he keeps is the dialogue, and any fan of cult cinema knows that was not one of Ed Wood’s strengths.

Bob and Shirley are just an average, everyday 1960s couple, driving down the road in their convertible and looking for a cemetery. Bob is a horror novelist, after all, and gets his best inspiration sitting in a graveyard. Shirley (stripper Pat Barrington, appearing here as “Pat Barringer”) isn’t quite so keen on the idea, but a car crash ends their argument and they wake up in an empty field.

It doesn’t take much wandering before they find Bob’s cemetery after all, but he has little time to reflect upon his next masterpiece as the pair are captured by a werewolf and a mummy and forced to watch the spirits of the dead engage in banal striptease acts while supposed psychic The Amazing Criswell engages in languid narration.

I pause here to note that I might be making Orgy of the Dead sound more interesting than it actually is.

Because this flick is dull as day-old dishwater. Criswell looks like he’d really rather be back on the Jack Paar show, the strippers, aside from Barrington and Texas Starr** as the cat girl, appear to be bored out of their minds, and William Bates, who plays novelist Bob, is completely incapable of acting. In fact, he’s so bad that he almost makes the rest of the cast look nearly competent in comparison.

Orgy of the Dead might be most remarkable for launching Apostolof’s film career and somehow not completely ending Wood’s. Indeed, the director continued churning out sexploitation flicks throughout the 1960s and reunited with Wood in the early ‘70s, with the pair turning out another half-dozen movies with titles like Drop Out Wife and The Beach Bunnies. Apostolof even tried to garner interest in a sequel to Orgy of the Dead as the Seventies drew to a close, but that project never came to fruition.

Which means I’m not on the hook to review it! Honestly, that’s the best news I’ve gotten all day.

*Directing here under the pseudonym A.C. Stephen.

**Lorali Hartt, who also appeared in a couple of the Naked Gun movies in later years.

Intermission!

• Criswell looks barely awake at times. I wonder if he predicted how bad this flick was going to be? That would have been easy to foresee.
• Pat Barrington was a well-known striptease artist at the time, and appeared in several low-budget flicks as well as a few studio films, including Marlowe, which starred James Garner and a young Bruce Lee!
• Barrington does double-duty here, appearing as Shirley as well as the stripper in the bad blonde wig who gets thrown into the vat of liquid gold. Looks like someone saw Goldfinger.
• The mummy sounds like he’s talking into a bucket. The werewolf just screeches. They’re the comedy relief.
• The cat girl scratches the tombstones like scratching posts. The werewolf is totally into it.
• Although he didn’t direct, Wood was still very involved in the making of this movie. He rounded up the cast and did production work on it, but was unfortunately also inebriated for much of the shoot.
• According to IMDB, William Bates paid Apostolof $15,000 to be in Orgy of the Dead. According to Wikipedia, the film’s budget was $10,000. There’s some real Hollywood accounting going on here.
• I know, I know. I didn’t screencap any of the dancers. Look, I’m trying to work my way out of the Mutant Basement, not get buried under it!