Orgy Of The Dead is trashy, offensive, and downright stupid, but I love it. It was written by Ed Wood, so you know it had to be bad, or had to be bad in a good way, or good in a bad way? I can’t tell the difference anymore. It’s a movie and it is very entertaining.
The plot is pretty straightforward. A nice white couple crashes their car during a full moon and end up stranded in a graveyard. They are kidnapped by the Wolf Man and the Mummy and forced to watch an evil ritual through half a dozen fog machines on full blast. It could happen to anyone.
The ritual is overseen by a female vampire and some dude who looks like the no-neck narrator from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Actually, the dude is played by none other than Jeron Criswell King AKA The Amazing Criswell. He played the lead alien in Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, but with a slightly different hairdo. According to Wikipedia, Criswell (1907 - 1982) “was an American psychic known for wildly inaccurate predictions.” How inaccurate you ask? He was Mae West’s personal psychic, and he told her that she would one day become the president of the United States. He claimed that he grew up sleeping in a coffin and that he never spoke until he was four. If you’re interested, he left behind several books and recordings of his predictions.
The Amazing Criswell and the low-rent Vampira (the real Vampira wanted nothing to do with the film) sit in front of a couple of stone columns, watching a series of women do interpretive stripteases designed to illustrate their sins. Criswell’s character turns out to be the devil. There’s no red skin or horns, but he does have a silk cape and a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken tie. He judges each striptease, and if he is not pleased by their performance, the souls of the dancers are damned. If he is pleased, I’m not sure what happens. The premise is, of course, just a loose framework to justify a series of bad stripteases, but Stephen C. Apostolof, the director, and Mr. Wood were committed to it, and the result is… I don’t know what it is, but it's enjoyable.
The female vampire announces the first stripper and out walks a white woman in brownface, dressed like a Native American. Faux Vampira explains that this woman “died in flames and all her lovers died in flames.” After being introduced, the woman begins a striptease interpretation of the genocide her people suffered. Actually, to be more accurate, it is a white actress performing a minstrel-like parody of the genocide her own ancestors committed while she simultaneously debases herself through the objectification of her body. Is that punching up or down?
While she sways in the fog and wiggles her bottom to remind us of the Trail of Tears, Indian drums and chants play in the background. Then, to place the offensive cherry on this nasty, little sundae, Apostolof overdubs an echoey chorus of men singing “Heya ho, heya ho” over and over again.
After the sexy Manifest Destiny routine is over, a woman appears who I assume is/was a prostitute. Vampira introduces her thusly, “One who prowls the lonely streets at night is bound to prowl them in eternity.” I didn’t know they had lonely streets in eternity, or prostitutes for that matter. Anyway, our “street prowler” flirts with a biology-classroom-skeleton for a while and then disappears back into the stone mausoleum from whence she came.
I’m not going to go through each sordid dance, but there are a few others worth mentioning, in particular the golden girl! This poor woman was obsessed with gold in life, and so is given a golden shower, of coins, while she does her dance. Then, two beefy fellas dump her in a cauldron of boiling gold, but instead of her body being horribly disfiguring, the molten metal just forms a shiny sheen over her skin and she is then carried back to her mausoleum and sealed back up.
Pat Barrington is the actress who performs the golden dance, but Barrington also plays the horrified Shirley standing on the sidelines. You would never guess Barrington played both roles because Apostolof was clever enough to have her switch wigs. This results in some kind of Lacanian, meta-psychoanalytic, post-structuralist metaphor of a woman watching herself do a striptease that horrifies her. You know how cerebral Wood can get.
The next young lady is dressed in a cat costume with a window cut out of the front for her breasts. The devil explains to Vampira that, “A pussycat is born to be whipped.” Take note, all you pet owners. This, of course, means that we get to watch her being whipped while we listen to some very upbeat lounge jazz.
There is a Spanish dancer, a Hawaiian-looking “native girl”, a very happy-looking murdered bride, and more. None of the strippers remove their bottoms, but some use flesh-colored G-strings to simulate nudity.
All the while, we keep cutting away to Shirley and Bob watching in horror. There is some occasional “dialogue”, if you want to call it that,
(To be recited as if you were a second grader zonked out on a double dose of Ritalin)
Shirley: “I’m frightened, I’m so frightened.”
Bob: “Hold on just a little longer, Shirley.”
Shirley: “Be careful, oh please, be careful. We’ll never get out of here alive. I know it. I just feel it.”
Bob: “You do?”
Shirley: “Yes, I feel it in my bones.”
Bob: “You’re talking nonsense.”
Shirley: “Oh no, I’m not.”
(The absence of exclamation points is intentional.)
The stripteases are way too long, and some are performed without much enthusiasm, but the sheer ridiculousness of it all carries you through. Each dance is cross-cut with assorted reaction shots of the onlookers, although it’s hard to tell how the werewolf and mummy are reacting under their cheap rubber masks.
In a movie as superficial as this one is, there is little or no thought given to the subtext being presented. The movie is an excuse to look at naked ladies, but there is definitely some moralism about women, sin, and sex. Orgy of the Dead sets up a kind of Greek Chorus where each woman's striptease/trial is commented on by Bob, Shirley, The Devil, Vampira, the Mummy, and the Werewolf. I guess that’s pretty close to what Ancient Greek choruses were originally composed of.
Each woman is made to "repent" for her sins by pleasing the sexual whims of The Devil. It isn't really repentance, it's more like reveling in their misdeeds, but it is a kind of reckoning. The devil wants them to fully indulge in their own destruction. If they please him, he will spare them from damnation, but surely, they will not be sent to heaven. Maybe they will go to the devil’s harem, or some horrible purgatory like New Jersey.
Bob and Shirley embody white-bread society’s disapproval of the strippers and their sins, but as the audience, we are encouraged to align ourselves with The Devil. We are here for the same reason he is. If Bob and Shirley had their way, the ritual would be stopped and the movie ruined.
The result is the same old double-bind that women have found themselves in for centuries. It is the dissonant directive telling them to be sexual, while simultaneously reproaching them for it. There is, however, something deeper underlying this bind. At its heart is a core belief that women are inferior to men. God made Adam with his own hands, Eve is just an offshoot made from a piece of the primary original. Women are not only seen as “less than”, but they are obligated to make up for their deficiencies. These stripteases are performed as payment for the debt they incurred by being born female.
What we have in Orgy of The Dead is a tribunal overseeing the punishment of women by Satan. Satan is the audience’s entry point, but we are not meant to entirely identify with him. It is really the mummy and the werewolf that are our proxies. They stand on the sideline, cracking jokes and gaping at the spectacle, waiting to see what comes next. In a choice between prudish white citizen or lustful evil demon, we are given a middle ground. We can be a cursed, but horny lycanthrope, or a rotting, but horny specter of the undead. Next time you are in a theater, look around and see who is who.
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