Ed Wood

Ed Wood

There is no doubt that during his run as a filmmaker, one Edward D. Wood Jr. was without a doubt the WORST director in cinema history up to that time. Atrocious. A classic example of a so called “LA Weirdo” with big dreams and ambitions, but who was in reality an alcoholic, cross dressing, heterosexual transvestite male who hung around with a similar assortment of strange and unusual types, Wood nonetheless fancied himself as (or deluded himself into thinking that he was) an auteur with so many great stories to tell all while he continued working well into the 1970s, becoming known for his rigidly pointed dialogue that was so severely bad that it became almost surreal to listen to. After he died of a heart attack while jumping up and down in front of the TV during a football game, his work started getting rediscovered by later generations for just the very same qualities that made them so bad to begin with, boosting them into an ultimate cult status that has made them continued to be seen to this very day rather than to be forgotten which many expected. Of course, it can be argued that Wood was the beneficiary of some very good luck after he died by having his name put out there as many can argue that there were even WORSE directors working during his time and certainly ones that came in the decades after who made him look like a complete maestro. But the one person who benefitted even more from Wood’s notoriety (and whose own name ironically helped these people take notice of his films as cult classics) is none other than Bela Lugosi himself, having since become even more of a legend for acting his way through Wood’s epics to the point of being a bigger cult / horror brand name than even Boris Karloff (who made far more films and had a much more prolific career), and even today still epitomizes not only the definitive performance of Dracula but also gothic / camp horror in general. Wood certainly moved amongst a freakshow crowd though, and many believe that it was this possible aspect of a non judgmental attitude when it came to choosing his friends that may have led Tim Burton to put together this 1994 biopic that many consider to be his most underrated work, putting his old standby star Johnny Depp in the role of Wood, but the film’s biggest problem is in the one dimensional performance that he gives here, as the real Wood was said to be quite morose and despondent while drunk, but all we see from Depp here is this chipper, ultra enthusiastic young man who will say and do anything with a smile on his face and a positive attitude to get his movies made. The film covers Wood’s career over the making of his three most famous films: Glen Or Glenda, Bride Of The Monster, and what many consider his true masterpiece of “bad” filmmaking, Plan 9 From Outer Space, all shot in glorious black and white intended to recreate the look of Wood’s movies in that era. This is also the time that he met up with, became friends with, and worked with Bela Lugosi on these films, and as played by Martin Landau, we certainly bear witness to an amazing performance by a guy who doesn’t much resemble Lugosi (the real Bela was a bit more gaunt), but who achieves the attitude and grandeur of the actual individual he is playing (whom despite his hammy tendencies could actually be a really great actor when properly motivated) and who also gets Lugosi’s accent and speaking voice absolutely pitch perfect correct. That Burton felt confident enough in Landau’s performance that actual still photos and film clips of the real Lugosi when he was younger are interspersed throughout the film, and moreso, that Landau came out on top in one of the most hotly contested Oscar races ever for Best Supporting Actor (beating out career best performances by Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction and the impeccably peerless Gary Sinise in Forrest Gump, in this reviewer’s opinion truly the best of the bunch) just goes to prove that not only was 1994 a great year for acting, but that Landau got his win even more deservedly so against the best possible competition, and this is still in spite of the protests of Lugosi’s own son about certain aspects of the portrayal such as Bela swearing like a sailor (in some of the funniest scenes) when he and many others insisted that Bela carried himself like an old fashioned European gentleman and NEVER used profanity, and also the exclusion of the fact that he had a (much younger) wife at the time of his death. What is accurate were his habits of being a junkie who was addicted to morphine (among many other things) and his time in a rehab facility while detoxing from his drug use, so nightmarish in so many ways that one might say that Lugosi actually lived in his own personal horror movie. But his roles in Wood’s films (including Plan 9, for which he only shot about 5 minutes of actual footage with the rest of it being completed long after he died) literally managed to make him legendary for far more than just the Dracula role. But the truth is that Wood had connections to all kinds of bizarre LA types, and this movie revels in making them all part of his little entourage. Among them we have Criswell (Jeffrey Jones), the notoriously inaccurate TV psychic (who knew that he was a fraud) but yet jumped on board to appear in Plan 9 and lend his own portentious style to the proceedings, Bill Murray as Bunny Breckinridge, a parasitic seeming 1950s homosexual whose exact involvement in Wood’s life as a “friend” is never made entirely clear (unless Wood was a straight transvestite who also liked to hang out in gay bars), Lisa Marie perfectly embodying the essense of 50s horror host Vampira, who looked to be the goth Elvira type of her time but who in reality was just a hipper than thou beatnik chick who always seemed completely bored with everything despite her great beauty, and wrestling legend George “The Animal” Steele playing the 50s wrestler Tor Johnson who due to his monstrous size and strength became a fixture in the B movies of Wood and others. Even more interesting is the contrast between the two women in Wood’s life, each being featured as they are in the first and second half of the film. The first is Delores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker), an actress who like Wood carries big dreams, only to see them dashed first by appearing in Wood’s awful plays (complete with the irony of Sarah Jessica Parker reading a review and asking “Do I really have the face of a horse?”) and then by costarring in both Glen Or Glenda and Bride Of The Monster, in the process becoming so humiliated and embarrassed to be associating with such weird people that the decision to walk away from Ed becomes an easy one. Then while watching over Bela in rehab, Ed meets his future wife Kathy (Patricia Arquette), seemingly a simple girl who nonetheless makes an easy peace with his crossdressing tendencies and even moreso is very accepting of both him and his friends’ bizarre qualities all while coming across as being very “normal” herself. All of this is tempered by the fact that Burton seems almost intent on making a dark humored comedy first and foremost and a dead on accurate biopic second, but the story itself (real or not) of an outcast filmmaker and his iconoclastic circle of friends is nonetheless still very appealing in many ways, not the least of which being the somewhat strange cameo towards the end by Vincent D’Onofrio as Orson Welles whom Wood is shown meeting in a bar by total chance, punctuated by the very noticeable fact that D’Onofrio is obviously not using his own voice and is being dubbed by a Welles impersonator and also that this (probably fictionalized) meeting between the two men one of whom is considered to be the best filmmaker of all time and the other the worst underlines the point that on a strictly creative level they both suffer from the same misfortunes. But in the nutty style of Tim Burton, that is the way that things are, with Wood managing to be the first real life figure to join his gallery of misfit main characters, itself a fitting tribute for a man whose disjointed lack of talent still succeeded in putting smiles on the faces of millions of people…

9/10

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