★ 4 / 10
An Ed Wood sex movie, which is as slipshod and funny as it sounds
Bare-ly a movie!I love how much Michael Donovan O'Donnell is just grinning ear to ear like an adolescent constantly spying behind not at all conspicuous large…
Bare-ly a movie!I love how much Michael Donovan O'Donnell is just grinning ear to ear like an adolescent constantly spying behind not at all conspicuous large plants inside of every naked woman's room.This was around the time when from all reports Ed Wood went deep into the world of smut movies and got deeper into alcoholic waste, but you frankly wouldn't know that it was made by a desperate man so much as my a gleeful if untalented showman.It is never quite rises past being inept in the ways of, you know, how a film can or should be shot or framed or lit or edited (if Godard saw this he might have regretted starting off the Jump Cut style, and that amuses me), but the majority of the performers seem to be having vivacious (largely softcore) sexual situations and just having a generally fun time, as if Wood off screen was getting jubilant the more they were dancing and falling over one another.Practically all of the scenes that should involve hardcore sex look hilariously like, at least when it is man on woman, when you were a kid and smashed your action figures together to simulate then having sex with each other. It also gets positively kinky and manic in the final ten minutes and that is much appreciated. Other times when it is lady on lady, it is a little more sensual and almost truly erotically charged - as opposed to over-long and kind of icky when it is the guys and their mangy hairy mugs - probably because Ed just let them do what they wanted (many a pool table is used well to put it that way).The highlight of this largely slipshod Hippie-Free-Love-adjacent *Detective mystery* story, which only remembers its plot by around the one hour mark and makes Inherent Vice look like the most lucid piece of filmmaking ever, is Wood in his few minutes on screen. He knows what he wants from himself and can deliver his campy lines with commitment; I wonder if he had lived past the 1970s if John Waters might have picked him up for parts in his ensemble.
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★ 2 / 10
At least Plan 9 was semi-entertaining.
selfdestructo
I can't sit here and say something obvious like Ed Wood was an incompetent filmmaker. It's like common knowledge. But it's all here: Continuity errors galore…
I can't sit here and say something obvious like Ed Wood was an incompetent filmmaker. It's like common knowledge. But it's all here: Continuity errors galore, zero motivation or plot, lapses (swan dives) in logic, botched lines, bad lighting, you name it. All this "fun" stuff, frankly, takes a back seat to exactly how incredibly dull this pure exploitation picture is.
Plot goes: Rich parents' daughter Shirley goes missing. They hire Mac McGregor, about as low rent of a "gumshoe" as you're going to find. They trust this guy so implicitly, that he travels the globe, via groan-inducing quantities of stock footage planes taking off and landing, on their dime. Mac works on, well, Ed chose to not make that clear. He has no clues, his interviews are futile, and there's no explanation as to how he gets a lead. At the midway point, he (somehow) figures out where the missing girl is. Says the name of the location, specifically. Instead of going to find her, he subsequently visits a cross-dressing couple, and has a, um, rather unpleasant (for the actress) encounter with a blonde hooker. Add a few dozen more dollops of nudity at the brothel, to, you know, establish SHIRLEY WORKS HERE. Which is something that could've been laid out in a sequence or two. Add to that, it's made abundantly clear from the beginning where she is, so it's no mystery.
Take It Out in Trade (a giveaway of the ending) is, front to back, gratuitous nudity. Definitively gratuitous. So gratuitous, it's BORING. And I'm the last guy to complain about naked ladies. How many shots are there of women walking up and down the shag-carpeted stairs, nude? Oh, it's a lot. Every male in this movie is repulsive, cross-dressed or not. Any young woman in the movie who had to put their lips or tongue on that toad of a detective, deserves a freaking trophy. Detective trots the country and globe, to spy on naked ladies... from entirely unrelated locations (between him and the woman). In one sequence, he spies on a naked woman doing yoga (or something), cut to footage of a plane taking off... then he spies on the same woman having sex! For all I know, the brothel was in the same town as the parents. No sense of place, even when Woods has the nads to film a myriad of posters with countries' names on them (cue the stock footage). This film is mind-bogglingly inept and boring. Sure, there are unintentional laughs to be had (hence the extra star), but the allure of Wood's brand of filmmaking eludes me. Even as a lark.
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3.8/10
290
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hi, i have the downloading in 99% for three months. could it be fixed?