Neil Gray
Editor’s note: All throughout October, the vibes get spookier and the nights get longer. It’s the perfect time of year to watch horror movies, whether you’re a year-round horror fan or you just like to watch horror flicks to get into the Halloween spirit. This year at Horror Obsessive, for our 31 Horror Classics Revisited series, we’re giving you one recommendation for a classic horror film each day throughout the month of October. What do you think—is this film a horror classic? What other horror films do you consider to be classics, and what films do you make sure you watch each October? Let us know in the comments below!
Bride of the Monster is, in my opinion, a film that every fan of the horror genre should watch at least once. Also, if, like me, you are a connoisseur of trash cinema, then I truly believe that Bride of the Monster should be in your monthly rotation of terrible crap that you watch, if not your weekly one. It is arguably Ed Wood‘s best-worst movie and has all the hallmarks of the mad genius liberally sprinkled throughout its making and its hour and ten run time.
Originally written by Alex Gordon—a man known more for his work as a producer than for his work as a writer—the then-titled The Atomic Monster never got off the ground as nobody had any interest in making it. It would sit on a shelf for the next year until Ed Wood, someone who Gordon had worked with before, started shooting it as The Monster of the Marshes in 1954. Ed Wood being Ed Wood, the production ground to a halt as he had nowhere near the funding required to follow through on his plans, and it would take him until 1955 to find someone who he could convince to stump up the remaining cash. That someone was a meat packing plant owner named Donald McCoy. But working with McCoy came with a couple of catches.
First off, McCoy would only write a check if Wood agreed that his son Tony, a man with zero acting experience, was cast as the hero. He also wanted there to be an atomic explosion at the climax of the Bride of the Monster, for reasons only known to himself. Perhaps he just liked big bangs? Wood thought about this for around the grand total of about two seconds, I would’ve guessed, and agreed. And lo and behold, at Centaur Studios in 1955, Bride of the Monster was finished and released upon the world.
Warning: Spoilers Ahead
Bride of the Monster starts with a massive thunderstorm, a terrible-looking model of a house, and a couple of huntsmen trapped in the woods. Not wanting to either A) be drowned in a potential flood or B) get fried by some errant lightning, one of them suggests that they take refuge in the old, “abandoned” Willows House. I write “abandoned” because as soon they lay eyes on it, you can see that there are lights on inside and that someone is blatantly home, no matter how much Hunter #2 tells Hunter #1 that there’s nothing to worry about.
They knock on the door and are greeted by Dr. Eric Vornoff (Bela Lugosi) who in no uncertain terms tells them to bugger off. Not taking the hint, our two brave—if somewhat incredibly bloody stupid—woodsmen try to convince the good doctor to allow them entry, and when that fails they try and force their way inside. This leads to the appearance of Lobo (Tor Johnson) who must have mad ninja skills as neither of our soon-to-be-very-dead cannon fodder hear him coming. Considering that Lobo is built like a brick outhouse and moves with the grace of an elephant on roller skates, that’s quite an achievement. Running screaming from the house, the two men start crying about the monster of the marshes, in relation to Lobo, to which Dr. Varnoff tells them they’re wrong, but they will meet the beast soon enough.
Ed Wood loved stock footage. It was a cheap way for him to pad out his movies without the need to pay for such pesky things as special effects, and Bride of the Monster goes all in Wood’s favourite mantra. We see the creature, a giant octopus, in an underwater scene that is obviously from a nature documentary where the cameraman was face to face with the animal. If it’s not, then the marshland where Dr. Varnoff has decided to make camp somehow has a coral reef attached to it. Releasing it into the wild, it stalks our hapless victims before grabbing Hunter #1 in its tentacles and pulling him into the water. I say grabbing him, but what actually happens is that he falls over, wraps the rubber arms around him, and starts thrashing about. He also emits two screams that Wood decided to just either cut and paste or take from a soundbank at the editing booth, that are so blatantly the same two sounds repeated over and over, as the actor involved hams himself to death, that you can’t help but laugh.
His partner fares no better, as while his friend is being eaten—I’m guessing?—Lobo shows up, bashes him on the head, and drags him back to the house. Coming to, he finds himself strapped to a gurney with what looks like an old camera with a toilet roll tube attached to its lens, pointing at his head. As any sane person would, he asks Dr. Varnoff what he’s doing, to which Varnoff informs him that he’s about to turn him into a giant with the strength of 20 men, or he will be dead. Well, if you guessed he will be dead then congratulations, you win first prize in the Ed Wood Horror Movie Game. Give yourself a cookie.
After this opening bloodless bloodbath, we’re whisked to the local police station where Captain Robbins (Harvey B. Dunn) and Lt. Dick Craig (Tony McCoy) are sitting around having a good old chinwag about the 12 missing people who went out to the marshes and were never seen again. It is here that we see the true brilliance and scope of McCoy’s acting, and it amazes me that it took his father financing a film for him to get his break in Hollywood. Not really. He’s more wooden than a fricking forest and has the acting range of a dead badger. That’s been run over. Repeatedly. Still, we soldier on and find out that Lt. Craig’s fiancé has been stirring up trouble at her day job as a news reporter for the local rag, by claiming that there’s a monster out there, eating people.
As if on cue, she enters and we are introduced to Janet Lawton (Loretta King) and her amazing 1950s bra that is pointier than the Seattle Space Needle. She’s a sassy, no-nonsense dame, who says what she thinks and means what she says, and the police aren’t going to stop her from getting to the bottom of this juicy scoop. Even if that means she has to threaten to call off the wedding to Lt. Craig to get what she needs. Lt. Craig reacts with all the emotion of a filleted haddock at this news, but she’s only bluffing and instead decides to head out to the old Willows House herself to do some snooping.
What follows has to be my favourite part of Bride of the Monster as for some reason lost to the cutting room floor, Janet Lawton does exactly what she says, but she’s driving as if she’s possessed by the ghost of Al Unser himself. She comes careering into the shot as another strange thunderstorm breaks, totally out of control of her car, and then looks surprised that she suddenly gets a flat that sends her up an embankment and into a tree. Climbing to safety she’s then spooked by a stock footage shot of a snake and passes out just before Lobo shows up, smashes the rubber Boa Constrictor against a tree, and takes her back with him.
While all this has been going on—and on it does go—Captain Robbins and Lt. Craig have met Professor Strowski (George Becwar) who is a monster expert and wants to go and investigate the marshes. The Captain agrees under the condition that Lt. Craig goes alone with him as they don’t want anything untoward happening. This should be the least of Becwar’s worries as, by all accounts, Ed Wood hated him and would quite happily have bumped him off himself. This stems from the fact that after Becwar had finished his one day of work on Bride of the Monster, he went running to The Actors Guild, claiming he’d been underpaid and this, in turn, saw Bride of the Monster shut down while they looked into his claims. According to Wood’s longtime friend, John Andrews,
Eddie hated, loathed, despised, wanted murdered, George Becwar. I’m not overdoin’ it man, I’m telling you straight. He hated George Becwar to the day he deceased, and I mean with a passion.
Even though Wood might never have gotten to rain down his fury and terrible anger upon George Becwar the man, at least he did to the character of Professor Strowski. Not being whom he seems, Strowski heads to Willows House without his chaperone where he meets up with Dr. Vornoff and tells him it’s time to come home. It turns out Strowski is a Russian scientist—I mean, I think he’s Russian, but Becwar’s accent is all over the place like your drunk Uncle at a Christmas party—and that he and their Government were wrong about Varnoff’s attempts to breed a race of atomic supermen. This leads to a fantastic bit of dialogue that is brilliantly delivered by Lugosi:
Home? I have no home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal! The jungle is my home. And I will show the world that I can be its master! I will perfect my own race of people. A race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world!
See what I mean?
When it becomes obvious that Vornoff has no intention of helping his country and wants it all for himself, Strowski pulls a gun on him, gets clobbered by Lobo, strapped to the gurney, and zapped, pow’d, and ker-splatted to death. So with Strowski out of the way, and Janet Lawton under Vornoff’s hypnotic power—yeah, I don’t know why he has that ability either—it looks like no one can stop the mad doctor from exacting his evil plan. No one that is, except for Lt. Craig. Don’t worry, I’d forgotten all about him, as well.
Lt. Craig shows up at the marshes looking for Strowski who missed their appointment and while searching for the missing Professor, notices that Janet Lawson’s car has crashed and that she’s nowhere to be found. This leads me to believe that Lt. Craig is the worst fiancé in the history of fiancés. He was told by Captain Robbins that Janet had called to cancel their dinner date the night before, as she had a headache, and did he call her? Did he go over to her house to make sure she was alright? Did he bollocks. The first he finds out about the woman he’s supposed to be marrying going missing is by sheer luck when he stumbles across the wreckage of her automobile.
Eventually, Lt. Craig manages to luck his way into not only finding the Willows House, but also the secret passage that Dr. Vornoff uses to get into his laboratory, only for Lobo to slap him about a bit and chain him up so that he can watch as Vornoff turns the women he loves into an atomic super monster. Yet Lobo has a secret, and that secret is he loves Janet Lawton. You can tell by him constantly sniffing her hat that he pocketed after he saved her from the crash. Distraught and distressed, Lobo turns on Vornoff and no-sells six bullets to the chest and head, before freeing Lawton and strapping the doctor onto the gurney where he turns on the machine that pops, fizzes, and bangs and barbeques the hell out of him. Or does he?
It seems that after many attempts and failures to start his race of atomic supermen, all Vornoff needed was to use himself as the template, as he is reborn as a giant of a man, with the strength of 20 men, and incredibly bushy eyebrows. Seriously, those things put Cara Delevingne’s caterpillars to shame. He proceeds to kill poor Lobo, before picking up Janet Lawton and heading for the hills. I say “he,” but even Stevie Wonder could see that it isn’t Lugosi. I mean, if it is he’s grown about a foot and a half and has suddenly developed a strange compulsion to cover his face at every opportunity.
A chase scene follows and Bride of the Monster ends with Lt. Craig pushing a very convincing and not at all plastic boulder down a hill onto Vornoff, sending him into the swamp where he wraps himself up in the rubber octopus, thrashes around a little, and causes an atomic explosion so goddamn big that it would’ve wiped out all of America, but with a little bit of suspension of disbelief, you can fool yourself into thinking that it was all just contained to a small mud puddle and nobody got disintegrated because of it.
I love Ed Wood. I make no bones about it. I’ve even written about the subject here on Horror Obsessive, so if you were expecting anything other than glowing praise for Bride of the Monster, well you came to the wrong place. It’s almost impossible to explain to someone who isn’t a fan of the man just why we love him so. Everything he did was wrong. His ambition outstripped his ability. He couldn’t direct, edit, or run a film set without it being closed down due to a lack of funds at least once per shoot. Yet, he inspired everyone he worked with to stick by him no matter what and give it their best when most normal people would’ve told him where to stick his bouncing checks.
There is an argument to be made that Bride of the Monster is the quintessential Ed Wood film. It’s full of all his greatest hits. From stock footage to people who can’t act. From fake rubber monsters to a script that makes about as much sense as slamming your head in a car door. Yet underneath it all is a wonderful little film that is about as terrifying as a kitten in socks and about as funny to watch as one that skids across a laminated floor.
Personally, Plan 9 from Outer Space will always be my favourite Ed Wood movie, but that’s only because it was my introduction to the mad genius himself. Bride of the Monster runs it a close second, and if you add Glen or Glenda to the mix, you have the three Ed Wood movies that every horror fanatic should see, if not own.
Don’t go into Bride of the Monster expecting scares, as you won’t get any. Go into it expecting to get a peak into the mind of a true movie-making outlaw. A man who didn’t care what people thought and did whatever he could to see his crazed vision on the silver screen. If you do, I promise you that you’ll come out of the other side a convert to the Ed Wood cause.
And there’s always room for one more in the Ed Wood family.
