Orgy of the Dead (1965)

It's often said that Ed Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is the worst movie ever made.

Whoever said that obviously has never seen a film that Wood merely wrote by the name of "Orgy of the Dead."

Yes, that most infamous of schlockmeisters has the screenwriting credit for this film, "based on his novel," we're told. It must have been a short one, because this film's narrative could fit on a business card, with room to spare for a recipe for queso dip.

In a nutshell, the plot: a young couple, a writer named Bob (William Bates) and his girlfriend Shirley (Pat Barrington), head out to a spooky cemetery. Why are they going to a cemetery in the dead of night? Well, Bob monotones, graveyards are the best place to get inspirations for ghost stories, which Bob is writing (and he goes into a long monologue about how he's written all different types of stories, and only horror seems to sell).

On the way, the couple get in a car crash and are ejected from the car, right in front of their cemetery, where coincidentally The Emperor (Criswell), a blond-coiffed pretty boy of a villain, and an Elvira clone known as "The Black Ghoul" (Fawn Silver), all gray makeup and black beehive hairdo, are conducting the orgy of the dead, which isn't zombie group sex but actually some kind of half-assed inperpretive dance routine.

The ghoulish duo capture Bob and Shirley and tie them to two stragetically-placed gravestones, and force them to watch the dancers, all the while telling them of their impending doom.

The majority of the film is women, one at a time, taking turns doing almost the exact same dance for an excruciatingly long time. Most of them start in some sort of costume or prop representing each woman's sins (one killed her husband on their wedding night, so she starts in a wedding dress and veil; another was greedy, so she is showered with money).

What acting is there is of the second-grade-school-play, if the play had been translated from Chinese to English by someone who spoke neither language. At the film's outset Bob and Shirley are talking while they drive, and Bob leans in to give Shirley a quick kiss and says "Your puritan upbringing holds you back from my monsters, but it sure didn't hurt your art of kissing."

The film does pick up slightly when a badly-masked mummy and wolf-man show up to further menace our "heroes." Their dialog is obviously dubbed in later, though at one point it was piped in from offscreen (presumably their masks obscured their voices).

Later, as the dance routines continue, the two monsters can be seen joyfully dancing to the music, which turns the feel from a nude ballet recital to the American Bandstand for the Undead, the movie's only moments that can even be called entertaining, at least once the novelty of the naked women flopping about wears off (and it does quickly). But alas, it was ever so fleeting a moment.

If only they'd all come out for a last little sockhop at the end, "Slumdog" style, and danced together, from the Emperor and The Black Ghoul to Bob and Shirley. THAT would have been fun.