Bride of the Monster (1955)

There's a lot that's been said about Bride of the Monster, and most of it is true. It is ineptly made and it has seams -- including mismatched interior and exterior sets and scenery that shakes during the fight scenes -- that show a mile off. And it has a script that's a mix of clichés from mad-scientist movies and hardboiled reporter lingo, interspersed with some of the strangest incidental dialogue that anyone had ever heard in an English-language movie up to that time -- at least, one made in an English-speaking country, but therein lies its charm. Bride of the Monster was the biggest-budgeted movie ever made by director Edward D. Wood Jr., and is, along with the crime-thriller Jail Bait, his most accessible film. Although it has continuity problems (a pencil behind the ear of a newspaper morgue clerk won't stay put from angle-to-angle -- although, to be fair, no less a director than Alfred Hitchcock had those same kind of problems in movies like North By Northwest) and badly matched footage, it is a smoother movie than Wood's magnum opus, Plan 9 From Outer Space. In contrast to Plan 9's ultra-cheap surroundings, which gave it an almost other-worldly look throughout, like a nightmare in slow-motion, Bride of the Monster follows the conventions and expectations of a B-movie crime-thriller and horror story, giving the viewer some familiar points of reference to work from. The typical Wood sexually tinged argot is also muted somewhat in the dialogue, and what is here manages to be entertaining without diverting the viewer's attention from the plot. This movie was as close as Wood ever got to making a successful film, although he had to compromise in many areas of the production to get it shot. Wood's significant other, Dolores Fuller, who ended up with a tiny scene in the film, would have been a better lead, but would-be actress Loretta King played the female lead because Wood had thought she had a significant amount of money to put into the production (she didn't). Tony McCoy, the male lead, isn't bad for a non-actor. Wood got financing from McCoy's father, a meat-packing magnate, who insisted that his son play the lead and also that the movie end with a huge nuclear explosion as a warning about the atomic bomb. There is a lot to laugh at in the movie, most of it unintentional, although one attribute that is a complete myth concerns Bela Lugosi's dialogue . His accent is very thick, as always, but in describing Tor Johnson's Lobo, Lugosi does NOT say "he is as gentle as a kitchen." The movie was the first of what was ultimately a trilogy of horror films from Wood -- the others were Plan 9 From Outer Space and Night of the Ghouls -- all linked by one common character (police officer Kelton, played by Paul Marco) and their plots, which mix elements of police procedural and horror films. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide