Dir: Edward D Wood Jnr | Cast: Bêla Lugosi, Tor Johnson, Tony McKoy, Loretta King US Horror | 69’ 1955
During the sixties Orson Welles had at one point planned to end his version of Don Quixote with a nuclear explosion, a goal in which he was preempted by Ed Wood by ten years.
Talking Pictures preceded this afternoon’s screening with the disclaimer that viewers might find this film disturbing. But anybody perplexed at the brevity of Bela Lugosi’s final screen appearance in ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’ will not be disappointed with this earlier film he made for Edward D. Wood Jr.
Wood on this occasion doesn’t show his tendency to sermonise, even demonstrating a little imagination with some mumbo-jumbo about the origins of the Loch Ness Monster. Lugosi is given a much more substantial role, top-billed as whip-wielding mad scientist Dr Erich Vornoff hiding out in a cottage in the middle of a swamp whose most extravagant feature is an enormous laboratory in the basement where he keeps a pet octopus to which the good doctor and his mouth-breathing assistant Lobo by feeding it guests. @RichardChatten
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