Author: Geoff Arbuckle

It only took 510 B-Movie Enema reviews to finally arrive at the King of the B-Movie Films, Edward D. Wood, Jr.

This week, we’re going to review 1955’s Bride of the Monster. Before we do that… The story of Ed Wood is kind of interesting. For the most part, we know the major story beats of his life. Wood wanted to make movies. He made bad movies. He struck up a friendship with down-and-out Bela Lugosi and gave him work for the last few years of the Hungarian’s life. He liked to wear women’s clothing.

It’s a little more than that, honestly. Wood really WAS heavily into the performing arts and pulp fiction. Lugosi was an early idol of his. The story you heard in Tim Burton’s wonderful 1994 film, Ed Wood, about how the filmmaker was dressed as a girl by his mother when he was a child, was true. She did want a daughter, and for several years, little Eddie was her sole child, so she would dress him up in girls’ clothing as something of a coping mechanism. According to his second wife, Kathy O’Hara, that was the origin point for his continued crossdressing for the rest of his life and his particular affinity to feel angora against his skin.

Wood served in the United States Marine Corps from 1942 to 1946, where he faced considerable combat against the Japanese. He had his teeth knocked out by a Japanese soldier, and he’d pop his false teeth out for a big toothless grin to make Kathy laugh. A story told in the 1994 Burton film by Johnny Depp’s Wood about how he was terrified of being wounded and then discovered he was wearing women’s underwear by the field doctors was true. It sounds like something for a joke, but it was true. You gotta love it.