The Pink Smoke podcast
Ep. 151 Devil Girls
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"'It doesn't seem important anymore.' Her eyes held a vacant stare which bothered Dee. They appeared to be looking but not seeing anything. 'I didn't think I'd ever want anything more than I did, gold and good times and excitement. I guess I lived it day and night. Gold! Bread! Loot! I quit school to get it. Money was the only thing that was important in the whole world to me and I didn't care much how I got it. And I liked it so's I could buy fly juice and powder! Pot! Hashish! Now it's all changed. I don't want any of it. Why fly when there’s no place left to fly?"
In celebration of Edward D. Wood Jr.'s 100th birthday, The Pink Smoke dives into one of the many pulp books the venerated "worst director of all time" churned out in the last decade of his life. In spite of being overstuffed with characters and subplots, Devil Girls from 1967 is also packed with the kind of half-clunky/half-poetic dialogue and potboiler action sequences that made his films so entertaining.
Devil Girls tells the story of The Chicks, an all-female gang of juvenile delinquents involved in drug running within their kill-crazy gulf port town. Between jazzing on the big H, heisting soda shops and taking part in hazy orgies with the local thugs, these young troublemakers also arrange the murder of a schoolteacher and kill a parent or two. Which of them will see the light and follow Reverend Hank Steele's path to salvation? Which will end up under a boat propeller? Listen to this episode before you light another fix candle - your life might depend on it!
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Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"
- Broadcast on:
- 09 Oct 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Pink Smoke Podcast. I'm your host, John Kribs, and we are celebrating 100 years of Mr. Edward D. Wood Jr. I'm coming to you live from Poughkeepsie, New York, which is where Edward D. Wood Jr. was born and raised, as a matter of fact, and got the hell out of here to become a legend, 'cause nobody stays in this crummy town. They go off to get famous, obviously. That's what they do. We're doing a few different things to celebrate Edward. We're gonna be doing a list of 100 great Edward moments up on the website, but one thing I wanted to do was check out one of his books. We haven't done a book episode in a while for one thing, and I had never read any Edward books before, so I invited my good friend, Mr. Martin Kessel to join me on this. Martin, had you read any Edward books? - I had, but I had read a non-fiction book that he wrote. So this was a little bit of a different experience, but I'm pretty jazzed to be diving into some Edward fiction. - You came up with three possibilities that you were able to find, and just kind of based on the titles. I mean, they all sounded like they would be pretty fun to talk about, honestly. I thought we'd go with devil girls, just because I thought naively thought it might be a horror or something, because devil was in the title. And I was like, oh, and it'll be October. It's perfect. Let's tie everything in together. But of course, this isn't a horror or anything. This is a juvenile delinquent melodrama, which is also good. No, I'm happy we read this one. This was a fun one. I'm just gonna say I had a fun time reading this one. - Me too, it's very enjoyable this book. - I thought going into this, not having heavily researched Edward up to this point, knowing mainly for the Tim Burton movie, as many do. So I kind of assumed he was doing books first. You know that he was kind of publishing pulp novels or maybe having stories published in magazines. So a surprise when I grabbed Nightmare of Ecstasy, the great wood biography and found out that, this is actually later in his career. He's already made all of his famous movies at this point. He's already done. Glenna Glenda, he's already done Night of the Ghouls, Plan Nine from Outer Space, Pride of the Monster. And so we're well into the 60s at this point. - I don't know how indicative this is of his other pulp novels, but it feels a lot like, I wish this was a movie. I don't have the money to make this as a movie. I'm just gonna write it as a book. And it at times reads a little bit like, I won't say like a screenplay, but it has that kind of cinematic quality where you could picture what the movie version of this probably would have been. - This comes out in 1967. He has started to publish books in the mid '60s and pretty much publishes books up to his death in 1978. He's just churning out half a dozen books a year, basically. And somewhere between like 50 and 70 novels, he ends up publishing some pretty prolific. - Some people don't know if some of the pen names are him or not. I can't verify all of them. It's pretty much what he's doing because he does obviously get into the kind of soft core porn and then one porn and things like that. But he doesn't really make another movie. The people celebrate the way they do his early cult films. So writing books is kind of his second career. - Well, and also the tone is so different than those early films that are really beloved cult movies. I think like a lot of people around our age, I got into Edward through the Tibetan movie. I saw that and loved it and wanted to know about the real guy. And if you're checking out his films, you sort of get the impression, especially from the movie that he was this sort of enthusiastic naive, almost child-like naive person who just wants to really make movies and he loves his spooky ghost stories and he just wants to put him up on screen no matter what, if he doesn't have the resources. And then I read his book, "Hollywood Rat Race." That was one of the first things I could get that had his name on it. And the voice was so different than what I'd imagined from the "Temberton" movie. It was somebody who was very kind of cynical and jaded and his advice for how to make it in Hollywood was basically don't come to Hollywood. It'll crush your dreams, it exploits you and destroy you. And that also got me really kind of interested in him because you get a sense of the disappointments in his career and the sort of bitterness or the cynicism that kind of crept in and it's interesting looking at this novel 'cause I think this was written around the same time as "Hollywood Rat Race." It's interesting seeing where his mind was at compared to stuff like "Bred of the Monster" and "I Know From Outer Space" and "Out of the Ghouls" and all those films. - Well, a big thing that the Edward movie leaves out, you know, is the alcoholism, obviously. - I think like at the very end, it's like, and also he descended into alcoholism and died very sad. - So he's dead? - Well, good night, everybody. - Well, these, and in credits, I mean, I don't know if you read or heard the story about him dying where it's like, you know, "Give me some booze or I'll die." No, and then he dies, I'm like, oh my God. I know like Dolores Fuller talked a little bit about being a health nut and kind of keeping him on the street in Harold when they were together. I won't say it gets like character assassinated in the movie, but they make it seem like, oh, she's just the normal person who can't tolerate his weirdness. And like, no, he sounds like he was probably kind of but intolerable person to be in a relationship with. - She was really indignant. She was like, it's not like I didn't believe in his dreams. I wasn't like the wet blanket here. It was intolerable. - You get it because it, like that movie has no antagonist. You know, you need the forces of conformity and the forces of reality kind of like crushing his dream. So, you know, it makes sense to kind of turn her character into that, but the real Dolores Fuller was not, not quite like the Sarah Jessica Parker version. - I love, love, love that movie. But you obviously, you watch just a few Ed Wood movies and you kind of see, you know, how it is a different character. It is a fictional character of this real person. Even if you just see the reenactment of the end of Glen or Glenda in the movie where he has that like gleeful smiles. He's holding the Angora, you know, that's been offered to him. And then compared to the real footage where it's completely different. You're just kind of sitting there very stoic and doesn't have that kind of freakishly happy look on his face. In fact, if you watch the movie, Glenda, I discovered, you realize that the movie Ed Wood has not set you up at all for what this movie is like, you know. - It's very strange. I think even by, even by the standards of cult movies. And I mean, it's sort of, I know it's like a little bit depressing where his career ends up, but I do kind of like that, for the most part, if you kind of exclude some of the pornographic films. Well, if you kind of let one of the pornographic films slip in there, it's like his career sort of bookended by Glen or Glenda and take it out in trade. And I always think like his character dressing in women's clothes in Glen or Glenda. And you have his character in drag in, take it out in trade. And like they're so different. You would expect these personas to be sort of similar on screen and like they're wildly different. And it's interesting because Ed Wood is such a weird kind of confluence of qualities, you know. Like it's funny both watching his movies and also reading the book. I'm like, he's such a square. And he's also such a like authentic outsider at the same time. He's both, you know, there's this sort of strange mixture of somebody who kind of was a little bit maybe born in the wrong decade. I'm not quite sure which decade, but I mean, to me, that mixture of being the straight, regular conforming, you know, I want to appeal to the conformist forces of the 1950s and 60s. And also I can't because I'm just too weird. I think like that is to me more charming than, you know, the character, Ed Wood, who's like this sort of eternal optimist. I think like, you know, there's something charming to me about Ed Wood's inability to reconcile. You know, I want to make mainstream entertainment and also I can't be capable because my own sort of fetish and impulses are just like too strange for me to bury. And I'm trying to mold them in a way that can be presented to an audience. I like that about Ed Wood, maybe more than anything else. And there is like, you know, the strangeness of God that dialogue sounds so clunky, it's poetic. I get why he had this big cult following because, you know, you had a lot of other filmmakers making B movies around that same era, maybe few with less money than he did, you know, but I think like also, you can kind of see the trajectory of something like planet from outer space to, you know, carnival of souls to night of the living dead. It's like, okay, it's not, it's not as good as those, but you can kind of see like, you know, there are pumpkins coming out of the same patch, I think to some degree. And, you know, some of those filmmakers made it and kind of could continue their vision. And maybe the obvious thing is that he didn't have very much money to make what he wanted, but, you know, some of those other films didn't have much money either and they were successful. - Yeah, it was funny to compare him to other filmmakers of the time because I won't, I won't say it's another disservice that the Tim Burton movie does to him, but this idea that like, he was too incompetent to make a good movie is kind of nuts because when you watch something like Jailbait, his second film, which, you know, was ignored by the Burton movie entirely. - That's the one that's closest to like a conventional film, but it's also very strange. - It is, yeah, but, you know, it's strange, but like, you watch and you think, well, there are 30 Roger Korman movies that are worse than this, you know, like there are definitely B movies that are just as bad, if not worse, in terms of just, you know, how it's filmed. - Like a lot of films that get these tags of being bad movies where it's like, it's kind of just a competent genre film that you're enjoying in the ways that you're supposed to. Like, that's a lot of films that get called bad. You know, maybe the only thing I think is like genuinely bad about Edward's movies is that they clearly didn't have enough money to be as what they should have been. He had that title of like worst filmmaker for a long time. Like, I guess until really like Tommy Wiseau came along who's somebody who's, you know, even stranger and even more desperate to kind of appeal to conformist values. Now I guess like Tommy Wiseau is the person people point to and I almost feel like the kind of cult of Edward has dissipated a little bit in the past 20 years. Maybe it's because like, there's more distance from the Tim Burton film and from, I mean, we're talking about somebody who was born a hundred years ago, but it feels like maybe in the past 20 years, like his films don't come up quite as much as I remember them. - It's a generational thing too. I feel like my daughters, their generation, like the charm of old B movies, cult films, is lost on them in a big way, you know? I think people used to, not used to going out to the theaters and like discovering movies at a video store are at a huge disadvantage. - I mean, it was even on Seinfeld, like, oh, we can't be late to go and see Plan I from outer space. Like that was, I think an episode, have that in it. I don't know how much it was involved, but like, you know, that was the thing people did. - It was a big 90s rival, for sure. - Yeah, it was a little bit like, well, I mean, there were a couple of these like sort of midnight movies called movies that people would go and watch on a regular basis. I guess Rocky Horror Pictures shows, probably the most famous, but like, I think that's kind of disappeared. - I think it's disappeared in a big way. I mean, I showed my daughter, the Burton movie. - Yes. - Because I knew she probably wouldn't sit through Plan I from outer space or right at the monster. - I think you almost need the Edward movie first. Like, that's a kind of perfect starting point. 'Cause after you watch that, you're like, oh, now I want to watch the whole thing. And like, what do you mean? There's like a crazy, there's stuff they didn't even show in the movie that's crazy. Like, I think that's a good gateway or a springboard to get into his films, but-- - No question. - Yeah. - But kind of while we're speaking of this, these kind of outdated genres and the kind of movies that they were making back then, the thing that kind of struck me right away about this book was that it's this juvenile girl gang, Hot Boiler, published in 1967, which seems so late for that kind of thing. - It is, but also like, you can kind of start to see like a little bit of that 1970s meanness creeping in, which I like too about it. Like, you know, I always think it feels like such a big snap when you look at, you know, the youth violence kind of movies that were popular in the 1950s and 60s, you know, biker movies, things like that. And then you look in the 70s and you get like, you know, I spit on your grave and last house on the left. And like, how do you get from there to there? Because it feels like such a short span of time, really, if you look at how much it changed. You know, you can kind of look at the new Hollywood and stuff like that. But it was funny even, even just reading this book, there were phrases like, "Oh, I spat on her grave." And, you know, I was thinking a little bit of, not Texas Chansamasker specifically, but I think like just the setting and stuff like that made me think of films that did come a little bit later that were a little bit harder edged than this. You know, I could see this being like an early 70s exploitation movie without really changing too much. - No, I agree. I think the thing that I finally realized after getting over it, like this is a very like 50s kind of genre thing, is that the "Girl Gang" movie is actually, the "Girl Gang" genre has really survived a long time. I think from the 50s, all the way up into the 70s and 80s. And that's why, for my apparently pick, I'm kind of bookending it with two "Girl Gang" movies when that was released before "Devil Girls" and one that came after. I'm doing a teenage doll at Roger Korman film from 1957, which is about a girl gang called "The Black Widows." The leader is named Hell, which is short for Helen. There's also a boy gang called "The Vandals" and they have their own subset of girls named "The Vandalettes." It's great 'cause "The Vandals" have like a dumb waiter. You have to take to get into their secret underground fortress and stuff like that. Much like "Devil Girls" it has, starts with a death of a woman that we don't see, right? That kind of sets up everything and kind of like gives you the idea of like what the stakes are here. The people are actually gonna get killed in this story. You've got Barbara Morris playing an older sister character, not like Lila from this story at all. But she is herself moving up, kind of realizing that her body is a commodity and she can use it to kind of move up in the world by seducing her boss. So there's kind of that cynical kind of take on it. It's not a good movie, but it's, you know, like any Roger Korman movie, there's a lot of fun to be had and it has this kind of silly social messages like showing each of the girls in their, you know, home habitat and what dysfunctional families they come from and kind of trying to breaking down the syndrome of the teenage delinquent, especially these young girls who will, at the drop of a hat, pull out a switch play and try to murder each other. Nobody sadly murders, he tried to murder each other with a stick of dynamite disguised as a candle. We'll get into that. But I think this is definitely, I think, what Edward had in mind. - Yeah. - And whether it's, you know, your theory's correct that he had actually maybe written a script for devil girls at some point, hoping to kind of get in on this craze, this teenage doll type craze, who knows? But I could see that happening and one way or another, I think he definitely was taking inspiration from these kind of films specific. - I think I'll go the same route and recommend that people check out Stray Cat Rock female boss, one of the Stray Cat Rock movies. - Nice. - With Mikokaji, the one and only Mikokaji from the female prisoner scorpion movies and Lady Snow Blood, most famous stare in all of cinema, maybe, I don't know, you know, there's switch blades, there's biker girls, there's girl gangs, you know, it was an international genre, you had them all the way in Japan coming out of Nakatsu. You get your choice of female gang movies from around this era. I think that one's probably early 70s, like that's sort of the kind of thing I'm thinking of, but the Japanese, they're so stylish. - Yeah, they almost got like a second wave of the female gang movie with the Hormans, big bird cage movies, Demi's cage teat and films like that. So, yeah, it's definitely kind of kicking in again. Like I said, it's a genre that when you think about it, surprisingly has lasted a long amount of time. - Earlier in Edward's career, he didn't direct it, but he wrote The Violent Years, which was like, that's the 1950s version of this, where it's much tamer. You know, if that's a film, you can go and check out. And like even the girls are a little bit, they're not as extreme as these characters, but you can kind of see them falling into the certain archetypes. I think like the opening scene, there's this big chalkboard that's like good citizenship and it's like one after another, kind of like waving it away and, you know, get out of here with your self-restraint and politeness and the loyalty. So, you know, Edward, he had some experience with this genre before, but I kind of get the feeling like it was maybe not his favorite genre because it feels a little bit, you know, like he's picking this thing for commercial reasons. But at the same time, you can tell, like he just loves writing these characters and putting in all these strange ideas. And there are like little, you know, it's not horror, like you mentioned, but they're little whiffs of like, you know, the funeral home. And I think at one point, one of the girls propositions the Reverend to like have sex in a coffin. And I'm like, that feels like such a really Edward thing to. - Yeah, there's offer up. - And that would stuff the pops up throughout this. - And Western stuff too. Like I know he really loved Westerns that doesn't come across in his cult films as much, but you know, there's definitely like a strong element of like somebody who grew up in the pop culture of the 1930s and 40s, like he's like harkening back to that in his own ways. - So Devil Girls takes place in Almanac, Texas, which is a kill crazy desert town in Gulfport. - It may not be a real place. - Filled with beer bars, bottle shops, hamburger joints, theaters showing double horror bills and of course, a red light district. There's also Jockey's Place, the only pure place in the town which is uncorrupted by the various gangs, you know, at odds with each other. And as I said before, it opens with the death of this schoolteacher, we found out was a, she was an informant for the cops specifically for Sheriff Buck Rhodes, who was ruggedly handsome. And they make sure that you know that. - I just love right off the bat, the revelation of this teacher dying. Three paragraphs in, he just hits us with her being raped and murdered by a gang of sadistic juvenile delinquents. They did her up but brown, which is a phrase I really had to run through my brain several times, they did her up but brown, B-U-T, brown, when she was annually raped? What are you trying to say with this phrase? - There are a lot of phrases in this where I'm like, I think you just made that up. I mean, where like, you know, it sounds like something who maybe gets the lingo like a little bit off. I mean, there's definitely lines that are kind of funny today. Like, are you smoking a marijuana and stuff like that? You know, especially when they're talking about like the heroin and when she blows up the boys and the boy gang with the dynamite, it's like they're flying higher than we ever flew on age. And there's a lot of little phrases like which are, some I think maybe have are authentic but there's a couple where I'm like, I think Edward's just making stuff up. - Yeah, I wouldn't give him like credit as being like an Anthony Burgess who's like coming up with his own language here. I think he's just throwing out stuff like that. - He's throwing out stuff that like, I think maybe he doesn't completely know what it means. - Like the school teacher got a jazz in. She got jazzed right out of this world. I'll tell you the one that drew me the most, right? Reverend Steele who later on has revealed his first name is Hank even though it never comes together. So his name is Reverend Hank Steele who is also known as Holy Joe. He's like the Carl Moulton character, right? The like good priest in this town. He's described as a holy schmucker, holy schmucker. SMU CHER and I've never heard the word schmucker. - It's a thing. - That's a word. Is that a word? I know schmuck is a word. - Schmucker. - Schmucker, I've never heard. Schmucker. You've heard this in daily use? You're telling me? - Well, not daily, I've heard it before. Well, tell me what it is, I don't know what it means. I don't know, Google's trying to autocorrect to Amy Schumer. Yeah, I tried to look it up on Google. I got nowhere. - I've heard it, nowhere. I got nowhere, only you and Edward have heard this word. - All right, well, nothing's coming up. - I swear I've heard it before. I was like, that's a-- - It's a Canadian thing, I get it, Martin, I believe you. - No, no. - Anyway, so in this town of Almanac, we got these two gangs, right? We've got the chicks led by Dee, who is the big, she got the big H grabbing into her flaky land, but fast. Don't call her Dee Dee, she will beat you up. We've got Bab's Halpin, who is a lesbian who kills because she enjoys it, she's a real nut. And then we got Rhoda Perdue, the pretty one, the Nymphomaniac, former church girl turned Tramp. And then we got-- - She likes the Nymph part, but not the maniac. - She doesn't, she's offended by the maniac part because she's not a maniac in any way. And then we got the boys gang who don't really get a name, but they're kind of led by this guy, Lark, who's a lousy crumb bomb bastard, Lark. He is like a step above everybody, like kind of a grade above everybody else, 'cause he's dealing heroin from Mexico. He's running it up in his boat, and he's trying to get the chicks to move it into town for him. And so he's kind of the, I guess the main villain of this big thing, the villain of the piece, although I think we could both agree, I hope we both agree. The best character, right? - Yes. - The great Lila, I love her so much, she is pretty amazing. - She's a plus. Her escape, I think, is like the best part of the book maybe. Lila is Rhoda's older sister who we're told is in prison and I guess it's revealed for murdering their father. Is that the reason she's in prison, right? - Yep. - She's killed their father. She's the former leader of the chicks. And in the middle of the novel, she breaks out and tell us how she breaks out Marta is a great thing. She ties up a nurse who ends up getting killed because she suffocates and she steals the nurse's outfit and just walks out the front door, which she later jokes about. - The best part, she comes out and she's trying to figure out which car fits the nurse, because our guard is watching her. She doesn't want to have to walk from one car to another now that she has these keys. And she can tell by her outfit that she belongs to this. - Use a little bit of deduction. - Use this cherry hot red car. (laughs) - So she takes off with that, she parks it and then she gets picked up by a guy and she comes up with a story about like, oh, she just had a fight with her guy and she's sort of seducing him as he's taking her in the direction that she wants to go. And she's like, oh, do you have a bottle of whiskey, which he gives to her? There's a lot of detail about him like feeling her breasts through her sweater in the intro Edward fashion. While he's groping her and feeling her up, she whacks him on the head with the bottle of whiskey and may or may not kill him. She's like, ah, maybe he's dead, who knows? I don't think we ever find out. I don't think they say, that's a great chapter. And she comes back to Almanac with a vengeance. She wants to murder her mother and escape to Mexico. Her mother's the one who's sold her out to the cops. She blames her. She has got vengeance on the mind. And kind of the big setup between these gangs that's mentioned earlier in the book and is the big climax is that they're going to be going on to Lark's boat, the Phantom, a solid black troweler. And there's gonna be-- - That's so 1930s like-- - It really is. - Like, was that coming out right from a serial magazine? - Yeah, that feels very kind of old-fashioned. - But they're gonna have a nice soda pop and milkshake party for the girls on board the boat. The broads go in with size 32 baziers and come out with size 38s 'cause they're gonna be carrying all the drugs. - Smuggling all the drugs. - Some of the descriptions of the drugs are kind of funny. Like, the big one in the book is heroin. Like that's the real focus. That's like the main narcotic. But like, when it's talking about like little baggies under their fingernails and like hiding pills here and there and just, you know, a little bit of cocaine. - There's some really great descriptions. I don't know if anybody's ever-- If you're listening to this and if you find like, "Rifferbattness" funny, you might get a kick out of this book. I don't know, but there's a really good payoff at the end to like all this kind of drug use. - They also, they're also smoking pot, which is funny because at one point, I think it's lilas, somebody is saying, you know, listen, pot's not like a big deal. It's not addictive, it's for lightweight. But we have been treated to a whole scene where an orgy breaks out because the innocent girl, well, the more innocent girl, wrote to her sister, gets engaged with all these people because she gets so high on weed, right? They're all passing around. The M, the marijuana. So it does lead to debauchery. We should mention the gangs have a orgy/murder cabin somewhere in town, but they like to go to have sex and also to off their victims. So that's always convenient to have a nice cabin like that where you can get up to all kinds of bad stuff. - I was messaging you earlier, the character D, I just started reading all her lines like with Caitlyn Olson as a D from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia in mind. And it just made everything so much funnier. And like, especially by the time where they get to the part where you're like, shut up, do you stupid shitbird? Like, stuff like that. Like, that's such an It's Always Sunny line. Like, especially like if you just read everything in that kind of deadpan rapid fire, it made it so much funnier to me. - And I wish you had told me right in the middle of me reading it 'cause then I could not see Caitlyn Olson playing that character. Although D is the most dis serviced character, I would say. I feel like she's really set up almost as like the main character. And then she kind of disappears by the end. She, you know, obviously she's usurped when Lila returns and takes back over the gang. She beats her up, she gets her arm broken. And you think like she's gonna have the big vengeance at the end, but even that kind of ends up getting... - No, she's just, she turns into the punching bag. Like, even though she's, yeah, she's basically the punching bag for the whole. - She's the one who Lark is like dealing with first, you know, setting up this fake party where they're gonna be smuggling all these drugs. It's set up the Chi, obviously is, you know. - You'd be a hit before I die and go damn street. - Right, she's desperate for herself. So she even like gives herself over to the red light district of these women, these junky women who I just imagined looking like the junky prostitutes from high and low. When, you know, he goes to buy heroin in that movie. They just all seem like zombies, like monster zombies who will do all kinds of horrible things to her in exchange for giving her drugs and she'll do it. She will do it because she wants it so bad. I gotta quote here, she snapped to him with the glazed eyes which demanded immediate action. Now Lark, now, goddamn it, now you got my girls, you got me, we'll get you stuff. Now, damn it, get me the stuff now. Do whatever those whore bitches want. Aw, kiss them, they can kiss me, they can screw me, they can jazz me, they can whip me. I'll take the high heels on my back, my stomach. I'll take the whip, the paddle. They could kiss my ass for all I care. Just get me a fix. Get me a fix before I die right here on the sidewalk. And yeah, I totally, that was my best Caitlin Olson, by the way. (laughing) - You sent me the picture of the one where the episode where they're hooked on crack and the visual image when it was perfectly. (laughing) - There's a couple of other characters we didn't quite mention. - Well, there are a bunch, yeah. - Yeah, there's a bunch. Like there's Jenny Rodriguez, who's the girl who's in jail. - For killing old man hemp. - Yeah, cut his throat, one slice. - Oh, there's a weirdly reverend Hank Steele has not heard about yet, which seems weird to me. We're like, he's reminiscing with his old pal, Buck Rhodes, the sheriff. And he's like, I gotta go visit Jenny Ramirez. She's in juvie. And Sheriff Buck Rhodes is like, well, did you miss 'cause she killed, she killed little Amos, hemp. And the reverend's like, why hadn't heard of that? How did that, it's like a small town. How did you not hear about this murder of this beloved shopkeeper? It's surprising. - I'm the kept it out of the papers. - Yes, he's a different reverend. (laughing) - You think when someone dies, certainly violently, he would be one of the first people. - Old man hemp was a devout Satanist. He had nothing to do with the church. (laughing) - You also have Mrs. O'Hara, the new, or O'Hara, the new teacher. - June O'Hara, right, taking over for the dead teacher. - She's got a really fantastic scene in this, the game of chicken. - That might be the best scene in the whole book. I have a-- - It's really-- - That's from that as well, yeah. - It's like genuinely, really well written. (laughing) It's gonna be a test. - Cool, so we got a jockey, owner of Jockey's Glace. Jockey in chief, I'm like, where's the next Jockey in chief book? I'm gonna read it right now, these characters are fun. - Yeah, Jockey, you already mentioned that he runs the, you know, the clean joint, keeps the drugs out, and he kind of becomes one of the heroes by the end. Like, there's even a line in there that he's got the heart of James Bond, or the courage of James Bond, something like that, that was cute. I don't think it says specifically that he's smaller, but like-- - No, it does, he's a former horse jockey. - Yeah, he's a former horse jockey, but like, yeah, you sort of infer that he's just like this, you know, little guy with the big heart, big courage, and like, to kind of offset that in the duo, he's got his giant 300-pound bald-headed, native sidekick, Chief. - He adopted off the street, right, Chief's told him he would, he would clean dishes for a meal, and the line is, it would take a lot of dishes to pay for one of his meals. - He'd give him a job as a cook, and Chief is kind of like the muscle. - Tiny guy, and this gigantic, huge obese guy, and jockey's really like the Mickey Rooney character, right? If this is like made in the '50s, this would be 100% Mickey Rooney playing this guy. - Well, and Chief talks in like that dated, stereotypical, TV, Honto kind of a way. - No, like him, fire water is literally one of his lines. - It's literally one of, you know, you know, me land Indian, me no water Indian, stuff like that, if mine is just waiting for the whole book for the reveal that like, oh yeah, he's not actually native. He's, I've heard people use the phrase, pretendian. I can't, also just the description, and knowing that it's coming from Edward, I'm like, there's no way he didn't write this thinking of Tor Johnson, right? You know, I don't know if he was like hoping to sell the books, rights to become a film, and say, hey, I know the perfect guy to play Chief, or what, but I'm like, it's so clearly meant to be Tor. - That's certainly what Rudolph Gray, writer of Nightmare of Ecstasy believes, and his little write up on Devil Girls, he said, that's got to be a part for Tor Johnson. So yeah, I think you're not the only one who made that connection, and so it's probably true. - But, you know, I was just imagining like, you know, having Tor Johnson, who is not Native American, play that character, and then at the very end, like the, I sent you the picture on Twitter, but that's Simpson's episode with Michael Jackson, where at the end it's like, my name's Leon Kompowski, I'm a bricklayer from Madison, New Jersey, I was just waiting for that moment to come from Chief, because it's like, the dialogue is so cliche, like that would have been sort of the cherry on top for that character is to, you know, reveal that he's not actually Native American. But otherwise, if you'd taken a face value, like the person that you would clearly want to cast is that character, if you're making it as like a 70s, you know, last house on the left, kind of a, well, not that extreme, but that kind of a movie in the early 70s, the guy you want to get is Will Sampson from "One Fleur with a Cuckoo's Nest." - Which funny enough, they have a Will Simpson from "One Fleur with a Cuckoo's Nest" character in that same Simpson's episode when Homer is in the asylum. - And I'm pretty sure his son shows up on, it's always sunny in Philadelphia, so there's some kind of full circle thing going on. - Doing his dad from "One Fleur with a Cuckoo's Nest" and helping Frank get out of the asylum. Frank, of course, being played by Danny DeVito, who was in "One Fleur with a Cuckoo's Nest." (laughing) - Yeah, Will Sampson would be his character. - Danny DeVito, big collaborator with Tim Burton, who directed Edward, we've just keep going in circles with this stuff. - We could just do this for the rest of the episode, man. - I'm bad for being that kind of film person where it's just like you keep pointing out connections and then like it goes on and on. It's like, this doesn't mean anything. - Oh, I got chatted down on the podcast. I was on recently for doing exactly that. Yeah, they were like, "All right, we get it enough." - Well, luckily, this is your podcast, so we can just go out. - Everybody can shut the fuck up. This is our podcast, man. What other character do we miss? We got the other, oh, boys, we set a lot. - Who is wearing a pork pie hat and like picking at his nails with the switchblade, which is just a great image. Again, that feels like a little bit dated, but like it's kind of fun. And of course, like he's sort of the main threat to chief. And eventually, he gets his like spine crushed by him. - He's kind of like Lark's lieutenant. He's sent in jockeys to like try to muscle him and get him in on the heroin transaction that they're up to and gets his ass thrown out the window by chief when he tries. And we've got Danny and Rick. And then we got Lonnie, who gets a little bit more to do. Lonnie, I just was Arch-Hull Jr. all the way for me. I just imagine this tiny little guy with this tiny meshed up face and like slicked back blonde hair. This is a little rat of a guy, but like his big moment is that they're destroying the schoolhouse. That's another thing that we should mention when the school teacher is killed. They also set her car on fire and trashed her school classroom just to show that even beyond the grave, you know, you cross us, you know, we're gonna come back. - Your small town has become a hellion. - But they're trashing this school room and one of them, Danny or Rick or somebody, grabs an American flag and Lonnie tells him, "Put it back." - Yeah, I like that part. - Don't mess up the American flag. He's a patriotic delinquent. - And well, again, I feel like that's, Ed Wood kind of letting his square side show through. Like, you know, the guys, he's fine with like juvenile delinquency and narcotics and all that stuff's like fun to write about. But like, I think just him as a creative person draws the line at somebody destroying the American flag. It's like, you know, it's like he's a World War II vet and he's somebody who believes in his country, right? - Yep. - So he's showing the evil, even the villains, even the hopped up, they've got their limit, you know, they'll rape and murder a woman and burn down a schoolhouse and blow up her car, but, you know, leave that American flag alone. - Which is so casual. - I like that. - Every kid in town was involved with the rape and murder of this poor woman. Just a school teacher trying to, you know, help out. - I like those little moments where it just gives them like a little bit of extra something. It's, you know, Jack Nicholson in Batman being like, leave this one alone, Bob, I kind of like it. Those kinds of moments I always like with characters who are otherwise pretty one-dimensional. - Yeah, no, I love that. I love that about Lonnie. But Lonnie does end up taking the new school teacher, Miss O'Hara on this ride, where it's not your traditional game of chicken in any way. It was, they're both in the car. He undoes the brakes, he goes under the car and like, attaches the brakes and goes down this hill going 60 miles an hour, straightened towards a wall. And he says he does this all the time. And whoever jumps out first is the chicken who loses. Yeah, right? Whoever jumps out first loses and he's never lost. - Yep. - He doesn't believe that June O'Hara is gonna be any different, that she's gonna chicken out, she's gonna jump out of this car. And like you said, this is a really, really genuinely great moment in this book. It's a great piece of prose. I'll just read one of the paragraphs from it right here. As they're hurling toward this wall in this car. Every crack, every indentation in the ancient highway hit the speeding wheels with a force impact of a pending major disaster. The singing tires, the thundering pipes of an engine, the whistling air is erased by fused into a terror of sound, a terror the teacher had never dreamed of, a terror she could not admit except to herself. But all that couldn't be completely hidden from view. Bede's perspiration began to dot her forehead, the hand which was locked so tightly to the seat, I'd become wet and clammy. She wanted desperately to wipe it dry, but she couldn't seem to unlock it from the framework. Right held at motionless. She looked from her straining white knuckles across to Lonnie. The excitement was splashed generously over his face. There was no mercy for life or machine as he held the accelerator to the floorboards. His eyes, a glare of madness in them, held steady on the road. He clenched the marijuana butt between his teeth, but the excitement of the ride didn't permit him time to inhale. The gray smoke drifted aimlessly up around his head and tore the open window where it was quickly dispersed into the rushing air. He laughed dryly without opening his mouth. As a jackrabbit stood in the road ahead, transfixed hypnotized by the headlights. One second it had been living, breathing animal. The next, it was a bloody pulp on the road behind them. (laughs) - So evil. - He looked at the part where he laughs. (laughs) - But dick. - But of course, the big surprise is that he loses. Jenny so paralyzed that she can't actually get out of the car. And he decides she's crazy and he bails out, giving her time to like pop off the accelerator and grab the steering wheel so it spins and she is only injured and does not die when the car hits the wall. - The description's great too, where it's like the tires popping and like it's such a vivid image actually. And she survives it, but she's so injured that they just assume she's dead. Like she's got like a, I think a leg pointing the wrong direction and they just kind of take off. - Badly mangled, yes. - Yeah. But she survives. They make a point to tell you that she survives. - She survives and with a few surgeries, maybe her face would be pretty again someday. Maybe she'll find a great surgeon like the one in the jail bait to reconstruct her face. - That guy was a great surgeon. (laughs) - I love how the trademark Ed Wood Lightning makes an appearance at the start of chapter 10, right? - Yes. - I love the Ed Wood Lightning. I'm a big fan of-- - The star footage is in the-- - I'm a big fan of cheap simple metaphors for emotions like just lightning crashing as it doesn't so many of his films. So I love that he has a whole paragraph. The Lightning zigzagged its way, earthward accompanied by earth shaking thunderclaps and rumbles. Then the rain hit in the sudden deluge. Reverend Steele prayed all would be clear by 10 so he could conduct the funeral services with the dignity he felt only sunlight could afford, but his prayers were not to be answered. If anything, the rain came down harder and the lightning show and the lightning show in the sky became more intensified. Big emotions are these characters, right? The whole earth is-- - Well, again, that's a little bit of that, like just a touch of that kind of gothic atmosphere and stuff like that from under the ghouls and burn of the monster. It's like there's just a little bit of that kind of creeps over into this, which I like. It's got just a dash of that flavor. - I love that. And I love that. And again, this is only coming from watching all of Edward's movies now that we're working on this list of 100 moments together, but there's a part where Jenny crumbles up her paper cup at the water cooler and curls away angrily. And that's right out of Glen or Glenda. That happens. - Not only that, it's a motif that crumbled up paper cup shows up again in the last chapter. - Yeah, that's right. - Yeah, there's a little something going on with that. I already complained about the Reverend not having an awareness of like someone in his town who was horribly murdered, had his head blown off by a teenage delinquent. So it's funny to me like have these little criticisms of an Edward book, you know? Like he has some kind of like narrative agency at all, but I love that after the sheriff is forced to deputize the fire chief, he tells the Reverend, what the hell else has he got to do unless there's a fire and how many of them do we have around here? Dude, you literally just witnessed a fire, a car being set on fire and internalized concern that quickly spread and burned the house down possibly the whole town. Of course there are fires around. Don't you have an awareness of that, Mr. Sheriff? - I mean, they do make a point to kind of talk about how understaffed he is and how kind of sprithenious and it's like, you know, he can't keep up with all of this, but. - Yeah, that's why the-- - But also like it's kind of interesting that the sheriff is not quite the hero of the story. He's sort of like this moral perspective, you know, him and the Reverend are sort of the older guys looking at this with like morality on their side to the sort of like voice of reason or authority kind of looking at this story, but they're not really the heroes. - This book has a trouble identifying its hero, I think. - Well, it's 'cause the true hero shows up in Enslyla, let's be honest. - Well, that's the thing is like a lot of these juvenile delinquent stories. The characters who are supposed to be bad, that you're supposed to like frame in that moral way of like, they're bad, therefore they need to be punished or the fun ones, the ones you want to spend time with. - Of course the one. - And the moralizing adults in the story are boring as hell. - And you can almost feel like the interest in Lyla growing like the fact that she only shows up not halfway, but like maybe like a third of the way into the book. You know, it's like, oh, you get all these bad kids. Now here's the real bad one and she's gonna do this and that and she's coming back to Killing Cold Blood and she doesn't even care who she kills. And like, you can feel Ed would fall in love with this character as he's writing her, which I think is fun and she kind of like takes over the book to some degree, which I'm fine with because she's a neat character. - And she's pure torsetana, she's the kind of character that John Waters would fall in love with as a young man. - Yeah, I mean, I don't mind the big ensemble, like it's sort of, I mean, I was thinking a little bit about reading this, partly I think it was the Texas setting, but I was thinking about like filmmakers today who make throwbacks to this sort of thing. You get guys like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, maybe Rob Zombie more than anyone else, but like, you know, the sort of Texas stories where maybe the story's not that coherent, but it's kind of just an excuse to bring in like all your favorite people and, you know, have a lot of fun with these characters saying dialogue that you wrote and they're, you know, you get to hang out with all your, you know, horror convention people. This book had me thinking about like, Ed Wood is almost a precursor to guys like that where that's not crazy, right? I feel like if you asked Rob Zombie, you'd probably be like, "Oh yeah, it's great." I think he, I don't know if he would have read this, but you know, I think like there's something similar in, you know, Ed Wood putting in Bella Lugosi in his films as, you know, Rob Zombie putting like a Sid Hake or something like that. - Well, sure. - Or do, well, you know, like it's that kind of like horror convention circuit person who, you know, you could probably get pretty cheap if you're gonna make a film like that and, but you know, they have a certain appeal and a certain appeal to like a kind of cult. A lot of those Rob Zombie Tarantino, Rodriguez films just kind of feel like excuses to have long pages of dialogue and to put your fetishes up on screen. I mean, you know, Tarantino people always joke about the foot fetish, like that's not a, that's not a world away from just like, I'm gonna write a whole scene to talk about like a hand groping a breast through Angora. Like, I don't know, like this book in particular just had me kind of thinking about those guys and how, you know, if you, if you try to make devil grills today would be like a, like a devil's rejects or like a grind house or, you know, one of those kinds of movies. - Well, I'll go even further here to compare him to a different filmmaker too. I mean, Lila entering the book in the middle and not just having all of that stuff be relegated to D as a character, I think gives it like a little bit of a, opens up the world a little bit, you know, has, I enjoy all the characters too. And this particular like take on these women specifically that, you know, it's, you know, drugs and promiscuity, you know, is corrupting them. Maybe realize that like David Lynch and especially the portrait of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks is a very like coming out of like watching movies like this, you know, this kind of like specific kind of teenage delinquent who is just hell bound with her hedonism, you know? - I was almost scared to bring it up because of the whole like lynching thing being overused. But I think that's a really good comparison actually of the sort of small town of the violence and the kind of weird, like there's an anachronistic quality to a lot of Edward stuff where it feels like, you know, you can be reading this in the 60s and 50s and it feels earlier and it's like, again, there's sort of that weird mixture of the, you know, ultimate square, small town, Americana, apple pie quality and also mixing in like weird gothic stuff. And like, you know, I also really love European castles and, you know, weird overlays a buffalo, you know? And I think like, not to say that like he has a ton in common with David Lynch, but I think like those basic qualities. Yeah, you can definitely see some commonality between extremes of the wholesomeness and the kind of squareness. I need to come up with a better word for that. But, you know, I think like - The aspects of Lidg that are overrated overused, you know, I think are stuff like, oh, he's got a monkey in the desert plain symbols or whatever. Like I'm a little more interested in like, his influences and kind of what he's thinking about when he makes movies to kind of connect something like Twin Peaks or Wild at Heart to, you know, old juvenile delinquent B movies, I think is really interesting. And what you were saying earlier about how Ed Wood, if he was born at a different time, certainly Lynch is a superior filmmaker, but like if he like come up in the 70s or 80s, he might've had a Lynch-like career. You know, under, under, I think even not that much later, I think like, you know, if also, I don't know how much the reputation of his movies in the 50s kind of killed career prospects later on. You know, if you tried to get stuff like this off the ground, which probably, you know, 1967 would have been a perfectly fine exploitation B movie. You know, it's well written by the standards of that genre. You know, there's a lot of familiar tropes, but if you don't like familiar tropes, you should stay at a pulp. You know, I think, you know, this would have been a fine film and he probably could have directed it competently and it probably would have done okay, but you know, it's probably hard to go and ask for funding for something like this when you're the guy who made "Plan I" from outer space and people that attached your reputation, I don't know. But I was just gonna say, I think Mel Brooks described David Lynch as Jimmy Stewart from Mars, right? You could probably say something similar about Edward. He's got a little bit of that kind of quality to him too. Yeah, there's like a weird mix of like extreme wholesomeness and extreme kind of violence in a lot of this stuff that I think, you know, I'm sure you're right about David Lynch drawing on these 1950s kind of delinquent stories. You can see a lot of that in Twin Peaks where the characters, some of them feel like right out of 1950s, they don't feel like of the era quite, although like small towns, it always kind of feels a little bit like going into a time warp. Like I've lived a lot of my life in small towns and like it's funny, you know, I lived in Chelmsford, Ontario for a while and now they like shoot films in Chelmsford somewhat frequently. There was like a Northern Ontario film grant but they're always shooting movies that are sitting like the 80s or 90s in Chelmsford. And my friend was asking me why I'm like, it's because it looks like it's out of the 80s. Like nothing's changed. You know, the people, the fashion, like a lot of that stuff is kind of frozen in time and away and, you know, maybe there's some of that. You look at Wild at Heart or Blue Velvet and, you know, even though those are later, they've got like one foot in the 1950s. - Yeah, no question. I mean, even the Audrey Horne character from Twin Peaks feels like this fetishized 50s girl to like a young boy, you know, who would be watching one of these B movies like in the theater and just finding her just so romantic and so tragic at the same time. And I think it would probably had that same reaction when he was watching movies like this. - It's funny reading this book too, how you can definitely tell like there's nothing in this that Edward couldn't have shot, you know? - Yeah, I think that's the thing. You know, I sort of said it's like a little bit like a screenplay, but not quite. I think that was sort of my thinking is that, you know, you have internal monologues, you have what the characters are thinking. So it's not quite like a screenplay in that way, but it's, it feels like somebody writing something that they should be able to go out and film. You know, the cast is relatively, there's quite a few characters, but I think like altogether, it's maybe like 13 speaking parts for the whole thing. And it feels very filmable with not a very large budget and you could probably make this as a movie without tweaking very much. Or you could have at the time anyway, today I think it would be a weird odd achievement, but you know, in the era that it was written in 1967, I think like I could see somebody going out and making this with a pretty small budget and turning out to turning out a real movie. - I think he could have done the chicken sequence. I think he could have made like a perfectly serviceable version of that scene if you'd filmed it. I think he could easily do a stock footage explosion when the boys are sabotaged in their heroin den, their cabin where they pull out their fix, their stuff. And the fix candle is in fact a stick of dynamite that devious Lila has switched with an actual stick of dynamite and just put wax over it to make it look like a candle. I mean, probably the stuff that would be hard to film is on the boat at the end because shooting on a boat's a pain, but. - I mean, that boat doesn't have to go anywhere, you know. - Yeah, no. (laughing) You do the old trick of just like, gonna point the camera this way and the boats never gonna be seen from the other side. - Right. And as you've already mentioned, if we're imagining Tor Johnson already as chief, the moment he grabs Claude and just crushes him in his arms, I mean, that's something Tor Johnson does constantly in it would movies. That's not hard to imagine at all. - You know what, somebody could do the budget for this. You need your sugar glass when the guy goes through the window, you need your hot rod to get crashed in the seat. Like, I think you could add it up and it would be something pretty, pretty reasonable, which makes me curious about some of his other books because he would think if Edward was putting aside filmmaking and getting more into bulk fiction writing, he could do stuff that he wouldn't be able to film, stuff that he would done the budget for. But that's kind of what makes me suspicious that he maybe, he could film this someday or he could sell it to be filmed because it doesn't feel like there's anything in there where it couldn't be a movie. But I'm curious if some of his other pulp fiction is more outlandish or would demand a larger budget or I don't really know, I'd have to delve in further. - Well, even the spectacular death of Lila, which does not disappoint. I was really worried at first that she was just gonna get killed by D or by some character just kind of getting a shot in the back of the head. But of course not, she goes out spectacularly with her fatally wounded mother grabbing her on the dock, falling into the water and being destroyed by the propeller of the boat meshed together into a pulp under water. - It's another good description. - It's terrific. - Especially like the mother, like the strength pushing the gun up into the air so it shoots harmlessly and like all that stuff. It's good. Like, I think if there's one quality of Edward that I think is positive, even in his most kind of bare-bones films, I think it's the writing, you know? I think there's something engaging about his prose. And yeah, I think like when you read a novel, you don't have to worry so much about the budget, it's not. - But even that, to film that scene, I just watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. I watched the unrated version of it. - Right. - And they still cut away when they're about to bash a guy's head in with a mallet and I was like, "What? I can't believe it." So an Edward movie would certainly, you know? They thought on the boat, cuts to everyone reacting to it. No problem. - I feel like that era though of slasher movies, like the censorship was so anticipatory that you were gonna put something in that like you couldn't get away with anything in like Texas Chainsaw Massacre III or like the front of the 13 sequels. Like you look at them and like, I think, is it the one where Jason fights the psychic girl where there's like no violence in the movie. Like some of them are, you know, they got cut down so much because of pressure from the MPAA and stuff like that. It's like, you couldn't really get away with much. - Yeah, but this was the unrated version I was watching. - I guess so, I guess so. - You gotta have the head splatter if it's the unrated version. I'm just saying, it could have definitely gotten away with it. - Oh, well, the 70s were like gnarly or late 60s. Like, you know, that's when you start seeing stuff where it's like, "Wow, that's kind of shocking." - I just keep thinking of it as him making in the 50s though, you know, like maybe it being in the-- - It's hard to picture him, like what is filmmaking. I know there's like the pornographic films and there's the closest you kind of get is Meet Cleaver Massacre, which was not really his movie. He sort of stepped in as like a last minute replacement for another director. And I think like shot it in two days or something like that or five days, I forget what now. But like that movie is kind of the closest you get to something like a real film from that era towards the end of his life. But, you know, I don't know how much his filmmaking might have changed or what, because again, like there's sort of a cynicism that creeps in and there's more violence and there's people adding a level of profaneness or, you know, there's characters in the era. - It moves away from like fun exploitation, violence to like gritty grind house kind of stuff. All I got left here is just a few quotes that I really liked from this book. Let me see, I've got, Lark didn't bother to answer the girl. He felt it was most unimportant. I love that. It reminds me of Parker from the Richard Stark novels where it says Parker, I didn't have anything to say to that. I love this like tough guy cynicism of like, no reason to respond to what that person said. I love that. Here's another quote I'd never heard before. Now, ain't that the king's balls for you? (laughing) - There's a couple of really good phrases. - I heard that one around the pool house. - The past couple days, I've just been saying jazz for everything. I think it's so funny that it's using jazz as a euphemism for, you just been jazzing all left and right. Another one I really like is when Lark is talking to Lila and he says to her, "Maybe you'd like to write out "to the boat with me for a while. "It's better than a map. "My power launches under the pier." And she says, "Why not?" She liked his invitation and knew what it meant. Oh, really Lila? Did you pick up on that? That was some pretty subtle innuendo there, I'm surprised. - A lot of the lines are like, you know the tag lines that you see on pulp novels? - Yeah. - And she knew what it meant, that kind of thing would be like on the cover. There's a lot of passages like that that feel like they're written of things that should be on the cover of some pulp novels inside the novel. - She drove it hard and liked it like that. - Yeah, there's a lot of that kind of stuff in there which I liked, that's kind of what you want out of a pulp novel of this era. - And here's just a bit that I like a little exchange that I enjoy. If we're going to have, you know, the really bad stereotype TV, Native American character chief, it's Claude talking with Jockey and Jockey says, "What makes you think one bullet can stop a big hulk of an Indian like him?" Claude says, "I'm an excellent shot." And Jockey says, "So is General Custard." - That's a good comeback. - It's a good line. - It's a good line. - It's kind of interesting looking at the drug use in this book. It's sort of a tongue and cheek, obviously, or, you know, playing in that exploitation, telling people what they want to hear 'cause it's lurid. But like there is some genuine kind of perspective on, like, you know, when you see a character with the needle marks trying to find the vein and you're thinking about Edwards association with Bella Lugosi, who famously struggled with drug addiction around the time that he was making films with Edward. You know, it feels like some of that carries over to this book in an authentic way. Like, not everything with the drug use is authentic. And in fact, a lot of it isn't. But there were a couple of moments that I thought sort of rang true and felt kind of thoughtful or considered in how it was used. And then the very end of the book, the way it sort of punctuates everything is the sheriff sort of saying like, "Oh yeah, like addiction's pretty terrible." And then he takes a big drink of alcohol. He crumbles up the little paper cup and drinks from the bottle. And knowing that Edward struggled with alcoholism as his addiction, you know, it felt like, oh, there was a pretty kind of poignant bit of irony to end this book on. That's all about sort of drugs and addiction. Like, oh yeah, isn't that heroin really awful? And I'm gonna take a big drink of this whiskey. Like, I think there was something sort of self-reflective in there. I thought at least a little bit of something or, you know, you can feel that there was at least some sort of personal reflection on that level in the book. I thought, anyway, I don't know if you agree with me, but. - Yes, I mean, it's hard to say just because if you get drugs, just play such a huge part in exploitation films, you know, that he's aping from that era. It's just hard to say like, how much of this is like from his personal experience and his own alcoholism and, you know, things like that. I mean, certainly, I'm sure there must have been some part of him that had an awareness of like his own fault. - It's like 20%? - 20% is there, 20% or 25% is there. - 25% maybe. - Yeah. - So it's just like enough to, you know, you're having fun with a lot of this kind of like, fly high on the big age kind of talk and, you know, sort of silly. - And like literally wedding your pants and anticipation of getting high. - Yeah, yeah. You know, there's a lot of that stuff that we just clearly like just exploitation fodder, but there's like, you know, one or two moments where I thought, yeah, it wasn't all 100% exploitation fodder. - Yeah, no, I'm sure. I mean, like I said, one of the reasons Glenner Glenda is such a crazy experience is obviously, you know, about his own, you know, interest in cross-dressing and his passion for it and how he really felt, you know, persecuted to an extent and how that all comes out in this movie, which is, you know, on one hand, this is just very straightforward kind of, you know, educational film about cross-dressing on the other hand. - That's a thing that always kind of interests me about like someone having a literal breakdown, like a psychotic breakdown over like their received persecution. - It's interesting to me because he sort of came about at a time when the exploitation, filmmaking, writing had to be sort of couched in that educational, moral lesson language, you know, you see somebody like pseudo-portographic films where it's like, let me show you something really bad, you know, made the 1950s or 60s and then it's like, oh, here's a cross dresser smacking around a guy for 20 minutes and it's clearly like a lot of fun and then, you know, the filmmakers are enjoying it and it's a blast and then at the end, you know, you have the guy at the desk who's like, see, wasn't that really bad? We showed you this so we can show you how bad it is and, you know, I think about that kind of framing, you know, today it feels like a lot of the films that are coming up now have to be this sort of moral. Morally correct framework and, you know, it does make me wonder how people will be, we'll use that as an excuse to be deviance. And, you know, even though he's kind of outside of that by the late 60s, it feels like he still has to sort of appeal to that morality, that sort of, you know, not educational, but it's like, here are the horrors of who truck you's, even though he's not taking it seriously at all and, you know, I think like maybe the big difference between, you know, the filmmaker and writer he was and, you know, what he might've been if he was born 10 years later is, I don't know if he would have necessarily had to appeal to that, but at the same time, you know, that would kind of take away what makes him interesting, I think, or at least what makes him charming. I think like, you know, if he was born 10 years later, he would probably just be like another exploitation filmmaker, you know, in a crowd of exploitation filmmakers in the 1960s, '70s, '80s, you know, I think he would just be, you know, he'd be a piece of hay and haystack instead of a needle in a haystack. - Do you think that there's an Edward fan out there who's read all 50 to 70 of his rapidly produced alt books? - I would imagine so. There's gonna be some kind of like Edward fan club and, you know, I'm sure there's somebody out there who's done it, who's read them all. Maybe somebody's read them all and didn't even know it. I mean, it was just-- - I mean, it was a very quick read. Easy to get through, even the parts that he's clearly not interested in, like the moralizing parts where it seems between the sheriff and the president. - Yeah, yeah, I might read another one on my own time just for fun. - Yeah, if I have some-- - That was my takeaway from this is I would read another Edward in a very good-- - Death of a Transvestite, or? - One of the 60 or 70 books that he wrote. - Yes. - All right, so dessert pairings. As I said, the girl gang kind of thing went for quite a while and kind of morphed into like the women in prison film, as I already said, you know, Big Bird Cage and things like that in the '70s. And then in the '80s, you've got the Concrete Jungle, you've got women's prison massacre, reform school girls. This is like the last true exploitation subgenre, I think, to like last that long from like the '50s all the way up into like our time, right? So the one I chose to kind of bookend this is "Chained Heat" by Paul Nicholas from 1983, which stars Linda Blair and has the excellent supporting cast of John Vernon, Sybil Danning, Tamara Dobson, Stella Stevens, Monique Gabrielle and the very sleazy Henry Silva. So you're in for a good time, obviously, and it's about these women's gangs behind bars and the poor innocent Linda Blair, who is between them. I'm just going to quote from my own review of the film, you've got rampant drug use, you've got rising racial tensions, hate crimes, multiple murders, including one in a bathroom stall. You've got non-consensual communal shower breast examinations, corruption to such an extent that includes amateur prison pornography, you've got the off-site prostituting of female prisoners, numerous instances of conspiratorial rape of the inmates of prison guards and officials and a dope ring run within the jail by the infamous sleaze ball, Henry Silva. So right there, you've got this great subplot of drug running within the institution that kind of slides into this women's gang slash women behind bars, kind of movies. - There's that whole area of very fun and sleazy. - Of those Linda Blair movies, where she goes topless and I get so uncomfortable, like, and this is unfair to her, I know it is, but at the same time, it's like all I see is that little girl from the exorcist and I get really uncomfortable every time she is like, like a nude scene or a topless scene in a movie, I'm like, oh, like, you just want to fast forward. - I have the same, I think, reaction to Natalie Portman. And this is before I found out that she was being sexualized already in the professional, but because she was my age when the professional came out, I always thought, you know, it's kind of weird, wrong. I don't think of her as being this teenager, and I don't know if I can like her when she's 25 or 30 years old, but I know exactly what you mean. - I'll go the opposite direction. I'll go into the past. I'll say people should watch the violent years. If you want to see something written by Ed Wood that's a little bit of a precursor to this, I'm looking on Wikipedia now. Apparently had a budget of $38,000, which yeah, I mean, even in the 1950s, that's not very much money, like that's, but yeah, it's a quick and fast watch with girls being trouble. So, you know, between the-- - Girls being girls being girls. (laughs) - Between the two, you know, if people decide to watch your dessert pairings as a double feature, that's, you know, that's a whole history of a genre kind of sandwiched in between there. - There you go. Another one I would include in this genre more recent that I would talk about more, but I actually haven't watched it recently is "Spring Breakers, The Harmony Corinne Film." - Oh sure, sure. - You know, more girls, you know? - That's it, yeah. - Definitely, you know, harks back to the old, you know, bad girl exploitation kind of film at its heart. So, and it is a really good movie, really good movie. - Yeah, yeah. Movies, movies will break your heart, just try to book. (laughs) - Why not? I like that he shared that with Sam Fuller, you know, and he couldn't get the money for movie. Yeah, I just make a novel out of it, why not? - Yeah. - Martin, my holy smucker. (laughs) - This has been a lot of fun. It's been fun. We're still doing it. We're still watching "Edwood" movies and collaborating on these moments. Any last thoughts on "Edwood"? Are you a fan of "Edwood" at the end of the day? - Yeah, yeah, I say it. I think like I've never really got into like the cult thing with "Edwood" because in some ways, because I like his movies too much. Like, you know, I'm never somebody who would wanna kind of be in an audience with people yelling at like "Plan 9" because like, honestly, I kind of like "Plan 9." I know it's like barely held together. It's barely a movie, but you know, I'm like, oh, those, like you want 1950s flying saucers. Those are the ones on the string and everything that's exactly how they should be. And, you know, if I want that kind of weird 1950s pulpy dialogue that's kind of, you know, "Edwood" is one of the people I'll turn to when I'm thinking about writing my own stuff like that. And, you know, I used to fall asleep too right at the monster because that hissing noise just conked me right. So I like "Edwood" to, you know, with all his faults, kind of wrapped up in that, yeah, I like him. And, you know, it's sort of funny going from that Tim Burton film all the way around his career. I think I'm probably gonna celebrate his 100th birthday by just watching the Tim Burton again. - It is a great movie. - It's a great, I've said it before. The only role I would want to see, like, washed up Johnny Depp in now at this point is as "Edwood" in his "Devil Girls" era, in his "Take it Out and Trade" era, like that's the one thing I would want to see Johnny Depp in at this stage in his career with like, you know, everything that's going on is just like the cynical, boozing himself to death, Edwood, who's just like bitter about having his dreams crushed by Hollywood, and I think like, you know, you wouldn't do it in "Black and White" would have to be in like John Waters' color, you know, sort of look to it. - Yeah, it could be the rum diary to his fear and loathing in Las Vegas, right? - There you go, it was like a more rounded portrayal of like, under S. Thompson, that early cartoonish movie was. - Yeah. - Yeah. - I could see it, I could see that. - Now to come back a farewell to his career maybe. - I would say, I would hold "Bride of the Monster" up against Eddie. - "Bride of the Monster" is, is, is competent. It's a fine little B-movie, it's, I know like, you can-- - "The Burton" movie makes it look like it is. - You know, you can laugh at like, the octopus not moving and stuff like that. - That's fine, but like, for the most part, it's just like, yeah, this is a, this is a little, you know, atomic age horror movie. It's somebody who, again, like, not to dredge up the Tarantino, Rodriguez, Rob Zombie kind of comparisons, but like, I think there's something about Ed Wood harkening back to like an older era in the filmmaking. Like, he's clearly somebody who grew up watching and loving James Whale and "Taught Browning" and like, you know, that stuff's already like a little bit passe in that era, but, you know, I'm still gonna try to incorporate it into my movie and the atomic age stuff is kind of just the excuse to have, you know, we're running from a storm and we open the door and who's answering it? Dracula, you know, I think like, he's clearly somebody who just loves that sort of stuff. And I feel like there's some similar thing with like that kind of group of filmmakers. You know, I was like, there's a version of "Devil Girls" that gets made by Quentin Tarantino where, you know, it's got like Michael Parks as the sheriff and, you know, it would be easy to kind of imagine it as like, you know, death proof or from "Just Till Dawn" kind of a movie. - Well, we should mention there that "Devil Girls" did get adapted into a film in 1999 by a director named Andre Perkowski. - I saw this, I couldn't find a copy. I have a feeling that like it's probably very low budget. - It's like 72 minutes, so who knows, you know, I couldn't find it either. It does look very low budget, but-- - I think I like, I looked on eBay and it's like, you can buy a DVD or like a VHS copy for $3,000. I was like, no way. (laughing) - The first letterbox review does say, shockingly faithful adaptation of the Lord Edward, Edward Jr. pulp novel. So it's good to know that he at least, you know, kept to the page. Hopefully it's a loving homage. But yeah, I will say one thing that the biopic gets right is that with "Bry of the Monster" he gave Lugosi a great final role. Lugosi's really genuinely great in that movie. - That's much as his parents in "Glennor Glenda" is very strange. He works in "Bry of the Monster" and yeah, that scene that they have him do again in "Martin Landau" performance in the "Edwood" movie is great. Like he really delivers the hell out of that scene. He's good throughout the entire film, even thrashing the octopus's arms around. And I love, I do love the poetry of his movies. I genuinely think that Chris Wells opening "Monologue" in "Plan 9" where he says, you and I are interested in the future because that's where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. I think that's a genuinely profound line. - There is a sort of, you know, I love the sound of it, you know, again, there's something a little bit awkward about it, but it sticks in your mind and, you know, I think that's cool. You know, I definitely, like, if I was gonna write something set in the 1950s, "Edwood" is probably one of the first people I would look as far as trying to deliver dialogue that felt kind of interesting and true to the era. - "Edwood" is cool. His movies are cool. "Double Girls" is cool. I'm assuming his other books are awesome. Check 'em out, everybody. Good night. - We're not out. - Good night. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)