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The four films collected in Severin’s new set Hard Wood chronicle a seismic shift in cult filmmaker Ed Wood’s oeuvre. They see him moving from utterly idiosyncratic mashups of sci-fi and horror like Bride of the Monster and the immortal Plan 9 from Outer Space (not to mention the mockumentary delirium of Glen or Glenda?) to other perhaps less reputable pastures in the land of exploitation filmmaking. Starting with The Sinister Urge in 1960, except for one reasonably charming excursion into cornpone comedy, Wood largely confined himself to working within the increasingly explicit realm of sexploitation films.

Wood co-wrote but did not direct 1963’s Shotgun Wedding, a prime example of the hicksploitation craze that swept the nation in the early ’60s after the runaway success of the TV show The Beverley Hillbillies, which, in the world of exploitation filmmaking, bore fruit like Herschell Gordon Lewis’s gore-laden Brigadoon riff Two Thousand Maniacs!

The enduring legacy of campy cult favorite “Ed Wood” is still celebrated 30 years later.

The beloved 1994 film was directed by Tim Burton and starred Johnny Depp as the filmmaker known for helming B-movie greats, most infamously 1959’s “Plan 9 from Outer Space.” Wood’s other features include “Orgy of the Dead,” “Glen or Glenda,” and “Bride of the Monster.” He was awarded the Golden Turkey title of Worst Director in 1975.

Burton’s 1994 biopic “Ed Wood” was written by Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, and co-starred Bill Murray, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Martin Landau, who won an Oscar for portraying Bela Lugosi.

“Ed Wood” producer Denise Di Novi detailed her own love of the film three decades later, explaining why “Ed Wood” is one of the most personal projects for both her and longtime collaborator Burton to date. After working as the creative consultant on David Cronenberg’s iconic “Videodrome,” Di...

Hello again, dear readers! We’re back for another look at this week’s horror and sci-fi home media releases, and there are quite a few titles headed home tomorrow. So, if you have any last-minute shopping you need to get done, there might be something listed here that could be helpful in that regard.

Probably the biggest release of this week is Arrow’s brand new 4K 2-Disc Limited Edition set celebrating one of the best monster movies ever, Tremors, and Warner is showing some love to The Curse of Frankenstein as well. In terms of recent horror, we have a ton of brilliant genre fare to pick from on Tuesday, including The Wolf of Snow Hollow, The Beach House, Don’t Look Back, and The Call, and Full Moon has resurrected Orgy of the Dead as well.

Suffice to say, there’s a little bit of something for everyone this week,...

Horror films in the '60s took a dramatic turn for the shocking, morbid, and salacious. Due to the lifting of certain censorship, the decade saw the rise of experimental films like Orgy of the Dead, and the sight of Janet Leigh taking a shower in Psycho. Audiences were exposed to ideas and imagery they'd never seen before as hulking fiends like Frankenstein's Monster gave way to the creepy Norman Bates or the loner Mark Lewis.

Related: 10 Classic Horror Movie Tropes & How They Were Subverted In The 2010s

In the '60s, stripped of insects filling in for aliens, bizarre lizard men, or attacks by 50-foot women, horror became uncomfortably close, like a stranger stepping from the shadows to breathe across your neck. Its thematic elements drew on the psychological and the supernatural, which parallels much of the current genre. Here are 10 '60s horror movies that are still terrifying today.

By Rob Hunter

We take a look at 'Psychos In Love,' 'Orgy of the Dead,' 'Trip with the Teacher,' and more!

The article Vinegar Syndrome’s Latest Bring Blood, Love, and Other Bodily Fluids Home appeared first on Film School Rejects.

As we inch our way closer to the holiest of months, October, this final Tuesday of September boasts an eclectic array of genre-related home entertainment releases, including several great movies I fell in love with earlier this year: The Devil’s Candy, It Stains the Sands Red, and 47 Meters Down. For you cult cinema fans out there, it’s going to be a busy week for your wallet, as we have an array of horror and sci-fi titles heading home, including the SteelBook edition of Bride of Re-Animator, the director’s cut of Cannibal Ferox, Lucio Fulci’s The Devil’s Honey, as well as Orgy of the Dead and Psychos in Love from Vinegar Syndrome.

Other notable releases for Tuesday, September 26th include After Midnight, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (in 4K), A Quiet Place in the Country, The Stake Land Collection, John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. on Blu-ray,...

Gabriel “Skuzzy” Zolman is a St. Louis promoter, DJ, writer, performance artist, and movie nut who produces and hosts a monthly show at the downtown nightclub The Crack Fox. He calls his show Subversion and describes it as a “post-industrial variety show”. Subversion features music, magic, comedy, burlesque dancers, and more and every month he has a different theme. One month the theme was Ed Wood and he recreated, on stage, some dance numbers from Orgy Of The Dead. He once dove into a box of hypodermic needles to recreate a scene from Saw 2. Needless to say, Mr. Zolman is devoted to his art (or just nuts)!

This Friday (March 14th) the Subversion show is called Sideshow of the Pharoahs and it’s got a Egyptian theme! Of course you can’t have a Egyptian-themed show without Mummy Movies so I’ll be teaming up with the Subversion crew and...

Top 10 Aliya Whiteley 23 Apr 2013 - 07:43

The Exorcist celebrates its 40th birthday this year, which had Aliya wondering, what other horror films came out in 1973? Here are 10...

Some movies become so famous, so iconic, that they rise above the time and place from which they sprang. The Exorcist is one of those movies. It doesn’t need any explanation and it doesn’t seem to age. Whether you love it or hate it, it stands above other horror movies.

It’s too easy to view influential films as if they were made in a vacuum, but when we talk about The Exorcist as possibly the best horror movie ever made, it got me thinking – was it part of a great year for the horror genre? What else was out there in 1973? Were all the horror movies of that year along similar themes, or were they all still dealing in physical rather than psychological horror?...

This article was originally posted in February of 2010 but is being reposted here with updates and to tie in to next week’s Wamg Top Ten Tuesday List “The Best of Russ Meyer”.

Mondo Topless (1966) is Russ Meyer’s send up of the swingin’ 60′s, a pseudo-documentary portrait of San Francisco, and most of all, a tribute to Meyer’s favorite subject; naked women! The 61-minute sort-of-documentary is sparse, even by Russ Meyer standards – just a rock soundtrack by The Aladdins accompanied by an overexuberant announcer who provides double entendre narration as stacked women dance about displaying their figures. Mondo Topless, which seems relatively wholesome now, was definitely a product of its time and requires historical perspective (and, despite the name of this column, it Is available on DVD).

With today’s endless cornucopia of internet porn, it’s hard to believe that less than 50 years ago, there was an...

Attention all you Jive-ass Cornpone Peckerwoods!….Blood Kwanzaa is this Friday night!

Gabriel “Skuzzy” Zolman is a St. Louis promoter, DJ, writer, performance artist, and movie nut who produces and hosts a monthly show at the downtown nightclub The Crack Fox. He calls his show Subversion and describes it as a “post-industrial variety show”. Subversion features music, magic, comedy, burlesque dancers, and more and every month he has a different theme. One month the theme was Ed Wood and he recreated, on stage, some dance numbers from Orgy Of The Dead. He once dove into a box of hypodermic needles to recreate a scene from Saw 2. Needless to say, Mr. Zolman is devoted to his art (or just nuts)!

This Friday (December 9th) the Subversion show is called Blood Kwanzaa and it’s got a Blaxploitation theme! Of course you can’t have a Blaxploitation-themed show without Pam Grier so...

I want to say right off that Britt Ekland‘s dance scene from The Wicker Man (the original!) is my favorite of all time. Even though, from what I’ve read, a Scottish woman acted as a body double for all the shots of her lower half (no point in letting facts ruin one’s fantasies, though). I think the Flickchart blog caps off at PG-13, so I can’t actually show you a clip from the film. You should watch the whole movie if you haven’t seen it, anyway, since it’s one of those classics that all upstanding movie aficionados should have under their belt.

I know a lot of you out there immediately thought of Salma Hayek‘s snake dance in From Dusk Till Dawn when you saw that this article was about horror dancing. Sure, I get twitterpated over Hayek as much as the next guy.

For their 5th annual event, which is set to run Sept. 8-11, the Sydney Underground Film Festival is looking a little more demented than ever. And that’s saying a lot for this scrappy, still relatively young fest, which typically offers ample twisted cinematic offerings.

The fun kicks off with the Opening Night film, the demented superhero comedy Super, written and directed by former Troma go-to screenwriter James Gunn (Tromeo & Juliet); then ends with the Closing Night wallowing in Sydney’s seedy underbelly, X, by homegrown filmmaker Jon Hewitt.

Crammed between these two excursions into violence and depravity is a lineup filled with perverse visions, scandalous public figures, sickening horror, experimental pop culture remixes and more.

For Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film, the highlight of the fest is Usama Alshaibi‘s Profane, a complex psychological, psychosexual, spiritual morality play about a Muslim sex worker who endures a “reverse...

Chicago – Would I love Ed Wood as much without Tim Burton’s amazing film of the same name? Probably not. I’ll admit that I can’t watch “Bride of the Monster” and Not think of Martin Landau’s Oscar-winning performance and I smile when thinking of Wood directing some of his awesomely-bad features but I’m really picturing Johnny Depp more than the actual filmmaker. Does it matter? For whatever reason you enjoy the king of Z-movie cinema, the 6-disc “Big Box of Wood” set is a treasure for cheesy movie fans.

DVD Rating: 3.5/5.0

Where does one even begin to review the filmography of Ed Wood? He was a Horrible director. And yet there’s something about his most beloved works (“Plan 9 From Outer Space,” “Bride of the Monster,” “Glen or Glenda” [which is, sadly, not includes in this 13-movie set]) that reflects the overwhelming love for cinema held by their director. Ed Wood loved movies. He...

There was only one Ed Wood. To call the man different is a bit of an understatement. One thing is for sure though ... for better or worse, Ed has become a legend, and a new box set is on the way that celebrates the very best (and worst) from the world's most infamous filmmaker.

From the Press Release

Ed Wood was an American screenwriter, director, producer, actor, author, and editor who often performed many of these functions simultaneously. In the 1950s, Wood made a number of cheap genre films (and attempted a number of failed TV pilots), now enjoyed for their technical errors, unsophisticated special effects, large amounts of ill-fitting stock footage, idiosyncratic dialogue, eccentric casts and outlandish plot elements, although his flair for showmanship gave his projects at least a modicum of critical success.

Wood's popularity waned soon after his biggest "name" star, Bela Lugosi, died. He was able...

On July 12, S’More Entertainment will issue Big Box of Wood, the most comprehensive group of movies by the renowned bad moviemaker Ed Wood Jr. (Plan 9 from Outer Space) ever released in a single DVD collection.

Vampira lives in Ed Wood's deliciously bad Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Clocking in at nearly 17 hours, the six-disc Big Box of Wood DVD includes 11 films and two TV specials spanning Wood’s 24-year filmmaking career. It will carry a list price of $49.98.

Included in the box are six of Wood’s later exploitation films from the Seventies, including two that have never before been released on DVD: 1972’s Snow Bunnies and 1976’s Beach Bunnies.

Here’s a list of everything that’s included in the collection:

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1958)

Jail Bait (1954)

Bride of the Monster (1955)

The Violent Years (1956)

The Sinister Urge (1960)

Orgy of the Dead (1965)

Drop Out Wife (1972)

Fugitive...

Mondo Topless (1966) is Russ Meyer’s send up of the swingin’ 60’s, a pseudo-documentary portrait of San Francisco, and most of all, a tribute to Meyer’s favorite subject; naked women! The 61-minute sort-of-documentary is sparse, even by Russ Meyer standards – just a rock soundtrack by The Aladdins accompanied by an overexuberant announcer who provides double entendre narration as stacked women dance about displaying their figures. Mondo Topless, which seems relatively wholesome now, was definitely a product of its time and requires historical perspective (and, despite the name of this column, it Is available on DVD).

With today’s endless cornucopia of internet porn, it’s hard to believe that less than 50 years ago, there was an entire industry based on a glimpse at women’s breasts. In the 1950s, when healthy male movie fans wanted to see females naked on-screen, their only choice were ‘nudist camp movies’ – a genre...