Ed Wood didn’t make movies for people to watch, he made movies for him to sell. Marx called it the difference between “use value” and “exchange value.” If you are buying the ingredients to make a coconut cream pie you intend to eat or “use” you look for the best quality ingredients. If you are buying ingredients for a pie you intend to sell, you look for the cheap stuff. Mr. Wood was probably not too familiar with Marxist theory but he knew how to make a buck out of the cheap stuff. Eddy didn’t direct Revenge Of The Virgins, he wrote the story and the screenplay, but the film surely bears his mark. You can blame Peter Perry Jr. for actually directing it.

The actors in Revenge Of The Virgins were actually tricked into making the movie. Actors were told that they were making a straight forward “Western.” It was to be a classic tale of gunslingers, prospectors, and Indians. It probably only took a couple of days to film. The plot was simple enough. All they needed was some footage of people wandering around the desert looking for gold and saying things like “I wanna make money, big money!” And “Course with me as a partner, you know, sorta look, uh, keep an eye on things around here for ya, Mista, you’d be ridin’ high on the hog!”

The actors were told that the Indian scenes were being shot separately. Which indeed they were. This of course explains why the Indians never appear on screen at the same time as the cowboys. It also explains why it seems to switch from day to night and back again every time there is an edit.

Then on a separate day, some cynical soul must have been sent out to round up four or five down-on-their-luck Hollywood ingenues and drive them up to the hills. Someone then had to convince them that this was the easiest way to get a SAG card and then dress them all in loincloths and wigs, give them some bows and arrows, and voila the fabled tribe of topless babes who lost their men to wars with the white man. It probably only took a couple of hours to get enough footage of them shooting their bows and wandering around looking concerned.

Then all that was left to do was edit the two sets of footage together and they had created an offensively exploitative but salable product!. Bela Lugosi had died by the time they made Revenge Of The Virgins so there was no need to add a vampire to the mix, its a pity really.

It seems as though something always goes wrong with the sound on these low budget productions. Many scenes that were obviously meant to have sound have narrator dubbed in, but this was not a concern when it came to the female Indian tribe. None of them had any lines anyway. They were not picked for their thespian talents.
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Revenge Of The Virgins is in the public domain now. There’s no more money to be made from it. It has gone from a trashy commodity shown in drive-ins, to a treasured piece of, ironic schlock only available to those who quested for it, to an obscure thumbnail on Youtube. As of the date, this review was written it has 7,496 views. If Ed Wood and Peter Perry Jr. were alive today they would most likely be shocked to find that the video isn’t even monetized. 7,498 views is probably more than the number of people who saw it in its day if it ever had a day.

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