Movie Title: Necromania
Written and Directed by: Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Starring:
Maria Aronoff ... Madame Heles
Rene Bond ... Shirley
Ric Lutze ... Danny
Sooner or later we had to cover him. But this is no Plan Nine from Outer Space. This is no Glen or Glenda. This is not even The Violent Years, the hilarious girl-gang melodrama he wrote but didn't direct.
No. This is porn. Porn written and directed by Edward D. Wood Jr.
ED WOOD PORN, y'all. DO NOT PRETEND YOU DON'T WANT IT. DO NOT EVEN FRONT.
This thing is pretty much as described in this New Yorker article. (Pause for a moment and boggle at the idea of The New Yorker committing column inches to an Ed Wood porn flick. Go ahead. I'll wait.) An unmarried couple that is pretending they're married goes to a house where, apparently, mystical sex transpires to help couples with their sexual hang-ups.
Rene Bond, the prolific porn actress who died in 1996 of cirrhosis, plays Shirley, who's bored with her flaccid boyfriend Danny (Ric Lutze). The couple is greeted by the freckled Tanya. ("I am Tanya." "She is Tanya.") Danny tries but can't get it up for Shirley. Tanya takes an overeager minion to bed ("I don't want to wait! It must be now!" the tumescent guy whines) and gets him off in record time.
Shirley wanders off and meets Barb, who engages Shirley in a hallway licking session in front of a stuffed wolf. Barb is quite the spitfire, judging by how she ululates when Shirley's tongue gets anywhere near her nipples. Meanwhile, Tanya seduces Danny.
Did I mention there's brilliantly inappropriate music playing during all the hardcore sex scenes? Finger-picking polka, cha-cha, stock music that sounds like Stravinsky's The Firebird -- you name it. Everything but the wacka-wacka-bowww music you expect to hear in a 1971 porno.
A gong interrupts the festivities, and it's time for Shirley and Danny to meet Madame Heles (Maria Aronoff, who later appeared with Rene Bond in Richard Franklin's 1976 Australian skin flick Fantasm), who emerges from a coffin. Shirley is ready to devote the rest of her life to sex and nothing but sex. Danny, with his quaint red jammie bottoms, is not quite ready. So he's forced into the coffin with Madame Heles, who helps him get over his squickiness about making fuck in a coffin. She blows him (with her herpes mouth sore and chewed fingernails really adding to the eroticism, let me tell you), he squirts, and that's it. The End.
The whole thing takes up 54 minutes of your life (51 minutes if you watch the softcore version; the Fleshbot DVD contains both). There's ghastly interior decoration, including obvious paint-by-numbers owl paintings, a fake orange fur comforter, and a bronze skull that gets rubbed against various nipples. There's only-in-an-Ed-Wood-film dialogue, including a reference to Bela Lugosi. There's gasping and moaning ("Lick me! Taste me!") that don't match anyone's lip movements.
It is, in short, an Ed Wood porn film, as inept and nonsensical as you'd imagine, though with no particular cross-dressing references. (Wood favored angora sweaters, let's remember.) The sex is strictly man-woman and woman-woman. Of some tiny interest is the script's female-centered emphasis, its remorseless dissing of male sexual performance, and its surprising-for-1971 assumption that women are the more savvy gender sex-wise while men are gormless, fuzzy-assed dorks in red pajamas. As a porn director, as in his closeted life, Ed Wood was sort of one of the girls.
Necromania was released on DVD in 2004 by Fleshbot. It is now, sadly, out of print, though I'm sure you can find a copy if you're determined enough.
