Edward Davis Wood, Jr. (October 10, 1924 – December 10, 1978), better known as 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 run of cheap and poorly produced genre films, now humorously celebrated 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, Béla Lugosi, died. He was able to salvage a saleable feature from Lugosi’s last moments on film, but his career declined thereafter. Toward the end of his life, Wood made pornographic movies and wrote pulp crime, horror, and sex novels. His posthumous fame began two years after his death, when he was awarded a Golden Turkey Award as Worst… read more
..puppy dog tails and big fat snails....pull the strings....beware.... The whole charm of Wood's deliciously bad film is just how earnest it is. It seems Wood really thought he was making an important document of transexualism. Yet the campy acting, wooden sets, bizarre cut aways and Bela freakin Lugosi make it pure camp. This sounds like disdain but its anything but.Love this picture and return to it time and again.
The shrewdly way he mocks modern society, anthropology, and psychoanalysis is delicious. People are nothing more than puppets, today they forgot the truth about their inner desires and instinct. Also, they think they have free will, but in the end is the ominous demiurge Trickster who's pulling the right strings in chaos...Yep. That's Bela. The film is funny, surreal, cunning, and terrible ironic. Pull the string! Pull the string!
It's funny to see that, in the middle of the Hays Code, this Wood guy had the guts to make a film about transsexuals, where mainstream cinema would have to wait 30 or 40 years to think about showing it at last.
Ed Wood’s opera prima is way ahead of its time. A sensationalist take on the controversial matter of transvestism and sex change, but that doesn’t keep it from being absolutely nuts and hilarious… read review