Ed Wood: King of Smut?

by David Hayes



Edward D. Wood, Jr. has been called "The Worst Director of All  Time" and is a winner of the Golden Turkey Award. He has made some of the most laughable, and entertaining, films to ever come out of the independent Hollywood  scene. With classics like the hastily constructed Plan 9 From Outer Space (1958) and the  surrealistically autobiographical Glen or Glenda (1953) Wood has placed an indelible mark on the art of film production resulting in a big-budget life story by movie giant Tim  Burton, titled Ed Wood (1994). There is a lesser-known sidelight to Wood's career as a  producer-writerdirector-actor, almost another career entirely. Edward D. Wood, Jr. is one of  America's most prolific short story writers and novelists.

Beginning in 1963, just to make meager ends meet for his wife Kathy and himself (insert: "booze"), Wood began to write for some of the major California smut publishers (this does not include Wood’s unpublished, 1948 novel The Casual Company, a Marine comedy that led to his disastrous stageplay of the same name). He would continue to write novels, short stories and essays for the next fifteen years, until his death on December 10, 1978. In that time, Wood, under quite a large number of pseudonyms, is known to have penned at least 80 novels, hundreds of short stories and a slightly lesser amount of non-fiction. There are more Wood-writings discovered every year, usually under another of his many pseudonyms. Publishers like Gallery, Pendulum, Calga, Pad and others would publish sex, smut and sleaze novels at a breakneck pace through the sixties and seventies, and Wood, by all accounts, was the largest on staff "producer," meaning the volume of his work was a great deal more than his fellow writers. At the same time, Wood wrote many soft and hard core porn screenplays for A. C. Stephen, Jacques Descent and Joe Robertson.

Movie Review: Shower of Blood (2004)

by Hayden Davis

Wow. That’s it. Wow. This shot on video vampire epic had more gratuitous nudity than this humble reviewer has seen in many a moon. In a nutshell, 5 teenagers (all played by thirty and forty-something non-actors) are driving to a concert. They decide to spend the night at the home of one of the girl’s uncle. Unbeknownst to the group is the fact that Uncle Marty (Martin Shannon) is an ages old vampire, who happens to be the horniest man on the face of the planet.

Buy Shower of Blood on DVD

Before we’re even 10 minutes into the film, we have already had full frontal nudity, more penis jokes than you can shake a stick at, a vomiting stripper and the debut of the completely over the top Uncle Marty. It just gets better. Characters start to die and come back (it really doesn’t matter in what order) and EVERYONE gets naked. The cast is comprised of a Penthouse model (Robin Brown), a tight real-life fitness instructor (Lia Montelongo) and a Troma Tromette, a girl that was in an ad in the back of Playboy and a few other local strippers.