"The film that will satisfy every over-sexagesimal adult!"

From the mind that brought us what is possibly the worst movie ever made, Ed Wood gives us a forward-thinking 1965 movie that predicted Girls Gone Wild! The sleeve calls it (and I am not making this up), "A bizarre bouillabaisse, blending beautiful naked ZOMBIE GIRLS, VAMPIRES, VIXENS, WANTON WEREWOLVES, TORTURED TEENS in bondage..." The term 'bouillabaisse' is inaccurate, however, as one must expend far more effort in its creation than seems to have been put into making this movie.

The plot goes something like this: a horror writer with a sense of timing that would make M. Night Shyamalan cry (Bob) decides to take his huge-haired girlfriend (Shirley) with him on a late-night cemetery outing. They get into a car crash and then stumble upon the lord of the dead (Wood regular Criswell) watching damned women dance for some reason. They get captured by a mummy and a werewolf, are forced to watch more dancing, and then Criswell doesn't notice that the sun is coming up and everyone else turns to bones.

The focus of the movie is the damned women dancing naked - and by this I mean that it must be fully 80% of the movie's screen time. I've never been a huge fan of sixties strippers, but these are damn entertaining strippers - even though these girls don't really strip as much as they lose their costumes when Wood cuts away from them. One of them loved gold, so she dances and then they shower her with gold coins (never mind that actual gold coins wouldn't go 'clink-clink' against each other but 'thud-thud' against her skull), and then dip her into gold - I hope the James Bond people didn't sue. There's another one whose boobs don't seem to follow the laws of physics, with one of them remaining stationary as the other spins about. And yet another in a cat suit dances around while a guy flogs plants behind her for some reason.

The dialogue is classic Ed Wood - Criswell has such winning lines as "Torture, torture! It pleases me!" and "It will please me very much to see the Slave Girl with her tortures!" His busty pre-Elvira Princess of Darkness sidekick introduces the damned girls with a quick rundown of why they're damned, spawning lines like "To love the cat, is to be the cat!" and "She lived as a zombie in life, so she will remain forever a zombie in death." Bob and Shirley have Attack of the Clones quality exchanges:

SHIRLEY: I'm so frightened.
BOB: Well we certainly can't stay here. C'mon.
SHIRLEY: Where?
BOB: In there.
SHIRLEY: It frightens me.

The mummy and werewolf are our Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for the film - when they're not pointing and faking conversation in the background, the mummy babbles on about his "native" Egypt (so why does he speak english and why is he in America?) while the werewolf can't talk, so he grunts and howls. Kinda like C-3P0 and R2-D2, really, only the robots were a cuter gay couple than the monsters.

The cinematography in general is also classic Wood: "night" shots are often shot in broad daylight, the cameramen are jerky (I think one of them sneezed at one point), Criswell is obviously reading from cue cards (he actually moves his head to follow the words at some points), a smear of blue pool cue chalk is the only "wound" makeup in the whole movie, and there's no doubt in my mind that every dancing scene was shot in one take. In the end though, as with all Ed Wod movies, a room full of wiseass friends and a copious amount of alcohol make this movie completely enjoyable.