There is no Ed Wood-directed film in the IMDb Bottom 100

Posted on March 2, 2010
Filed Under Ed Wood

The users at IMDb say Ed Wood’s worst movie is The Sinister Urge (1960), his pornography-racket drama and last legit film before sliding into exploitation and porn. The voters score it 1.9. Anything under 3.0 is a real stinker; below 2.5 is Bottom 100 territory. The Sinister Urge is spared a place on the list because the Database requires that a film receive at least 1,500 votes to make the Bottom 100, and at the moment The Sinister Urge has only about half that number.

I’m 80 percent confident I’ve seen all the MST3K episodes, which means I’ve probably seen The Sinister Urge, but I have no memory of the episode or of the film as usually described. I’ve seen the rest of the canonical Wood films more than once—I’m a fan—and wouldn’t score any of them as low as the voters have scored The Sinister Urge. The worst Wood-helmed film I’ve seen is his next-to-last legit feature, Night of the Ghouls, the disassociated old-dark-house shambles he lost to unpaid lab fees. Voters have Night of the Ghouls at 2.8. No argument here. It’s a bad movie. Occasionally charming, but bad.

Here’s how IMDb users grade Wood’s work:

Glen or Glenda (1953): 3.6 [4,012 votes]

Jail Bait (1954): 2.6 [1,257]

Bride of the Monster (1955): 3.6 [2,916]

Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959): 3.6 [17,691]

Night of the Ghouls (1959): 2.8 [1,130]

The Sinister Urge (1960): 1.9 [819]

I cannot bring myself to say, “Ed Wood was a pretty good director,” because he really wasn’t, but the average of the above scores is 3.0, well above Bottom 100 territory. Compare his career to that of the forgotten Bill Rebane, whose 10 feature films produce an average user’s score of 2.5; his Monster-a-Go-Go (1965) checks in at #5 on the Bottom 100. Jerry Warren is best remembered today for The Incredible Petrified World (1957), which IMDb voters have graciously granted a score of 3.1, but Warren’s 11-feature oeuvre rates an average score of 2.0, and The Wild, Wild, World of Batwoman (1966) is #32 on the Bottom 100. The rankings are fluid, but the leader in the clubhouse at the Worst-Ever Open is Coleman Francis, whose three feature credits have earned an average IMDb score of 1.5.  All three films are in the Bottom 20; voters deem Night Train to Mundo Fine (1966) the second-worst movie ever made.

Some of this is the work of Joel, Mike and the bots. Most of the titles mentioned above were featured in episodes of MST3K, whose contemporary authority in the Bad Movie discussion far outweighs that of The Golden Turkey Awards, the 1980 book by the Medved brothers that—naively, it turned out—crowned Ed Wood the worst director of all-time. MST3K devoted episodes to The Sinister Urge and Bride of the Monster.

Jail Bait is underrated. It’s Wood’s most accomplished movie, with the best cast he ever had playing the most coherent script he ever filmed. It’s painfully clunky, but the story is told directly, without narrator or flashbacks, and there is only one non-sequitur insert (a well-shot two-and-a-half minute vaudeville blackface act). The simple business of low-budget visual narrative—people getting in and out of cars, cops sitting at a desk, players walking from one room to another—is executed with considerably more aplomb than is typical of Wood. The sets aren’t made of cardboard; a couple of scenes are even shot on location in an police station. The day-for-nights are better than usual, and Wood essays a few nighttime location exteriors, including a car chase. Aside from its Twilight Zone-ish plastic-surgery twist ending—Wood executes the reveal quite well—Jail Bait has no supernatural or sci-fi elements, and thus no laughable effects. The snappy robbery-and-escape sequence is probably the best seven minutes of film Wood ever shot.

Of course, for all those reasons it isn’t a representative Ed Wood movie. Jail Bait demonstrates Wood was capable of churning out watchable grade-Z programmers—but had he made six movies like Jail Bait, Tim Burton would not have made his biopic, and today he would not today be the object of a religion. Criswell, Lugosi, mismatched footage, cardboard sets and marvelous surreal incoherence are the core of Wood’s continuing appeal, and they are embodied in Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space—the most-voted-upon and highest-scoring films on the above list.

Jail Bait aside, I broadly agree with the voters’ ranking of Wood’s films. The energetic charm and sheer joy of his best work can’t disguise its fundamental lack of competence, and while he’s surely not the Worst Director of All-Time, he has some claim to worst-ever screenwriter. The Sinister Urge would enter the Bottom 100 somewhere in the 50s at its current score, and I won’t be surprised if someday Night of the Ghouls makes it, too, but set against this is that people will be watching Plan 9 From Outer Space until the end of time. I think Wood would be content.

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Related: Death of a Transvestite.

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