| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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BRIDE OF THE MONSTER
aka
BRIDE OF THE ATOM
Rating: 
USA. 1955.
Director/Producer – Edward D. Wood Jr, Screenplay – Edward D. Wood Jr & Alex Gordon, Photography (b&w) – Ted Allan & William C. Thompson, Music – Frank Worth, Special Effects – Pat Dinga, Makeup – Louis J. Haszillo & Maurice Seiderman. Production Company – Rolling M Productions.
Cast:
Bela Lugosi (Dr Eric Vornoff), Tor Johnson (Lobo), Tony McCoy (Lieutenant Dick Craig), Loretta King (Janet Lawton), Harvey B. Dunn (Captain Tom Robbins), George Becwar (Professor Vladimir Strowski)
Plot: Police, along with trouble-making journalist Janet Lawton and a world famous monster specialist all converge to search the swamps around Lake Marsh after dead bodies start to be found, reputedly killed by a monster. In the swamps Janet is captured by Dr Eric Vornoff, an exiled scientist who is attempting to perfect a series of experiments that will create a race of atomic supermen.
Bride of the Monster is one of the essential items in the cult surrounding Edward D. Wood Jr, the notorious ‘world’s worst director’, famed for his cross-dressing, his surrounding collection of oddballs, and of course directing the cult classic bad film Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959).
Bride of the Monster is probably the closest to a good film (as opposed to an enjoyably bad film) that Wood ever made. The traditional view of Bride is simply of it being another unintentional Wood laugh-fest and it is labeled as such simply because of the Wood name. Contrarily though viewing it might instead suggest that much of this was intended upon Wood’s part. And not to deny that lots of amusing Wood-ian low-budget gaffes do exist, but it does appear to have been made to a formulaic competence. Certainly it doesn’t really come with any of the hilarious pretensions that make either Glen or Glenda? (1952) or Plan 9 from Outer Space, the two other essential entries in the Wood cult, so unintentionally funny.
Wood was a horror movie fan and the film gives the impression of being intended as a grand jape upon the mad scientist formula. And within the domain of what he sets out to do, Wood succeeds rather well. He throws in the most entertaining stew of elements possible. Bela Lugosi is on grand form as a mad scientist living in the swamps, replete with a hulking mindless lab assistant whom he keeps in shape by beating with a whip, a lab with secret doors through a fireplace in the living room, and an octopus for throwing interlopers to. When the heroine is brought out to be experimented on she is dressed in a bridal gown. Everything goes up in an atomic bomb blast at the end, which was randomly inserted as an end to things simply because the film’s financier wanted to include a message warning against atomic war. And of course there are many moments of Wood’s typical unintentional hilarity – the photo enlarger that stands in for a radiation machine; the totally mismatched cuts between Lugosi looking out a glass window to stock footage of an octopus and the rather hilarious scenes of people wrestling with inanimate octopus arms in a shallow pool – which only add to the fun of the exercise. (There’s the famous behind-the-scenes story of how Wood and associates stole the mechanical octopus from the Republic Studios prop warehouse but failed to take the motor that made it go, leaving the octopus totally inanimate and the actors having to pretend to wrestle with it).
Of course Wood’s ace in the hole is Bela Lugosi who has probably the most fun he has ever had with one of his mad scientist roles. Lugosi has a grand speech: “My dear Professor Strowski, twenty years I was banned from my homeland, parted from my wife and son never to see them again. Why? Because I suggested to use the atomic elements for producing super-beings, beings of unimaginable strength and size. I was classed as a madman, a charlatan, outlawed in the world of science which had previously honoured me as a genius. Now here in this forsaken jungle hell I have proved that I am alright. No, Professor Strowski, it is no laughing matter ... Home? I have no home. Hunted! Despised! Living like an animal. The jungle is my home. Then I will show the world I can be its master. I will perfect my own race of people, a race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world.” Lugosi performs every syllable of the soliloquy with every muscle of his face. Apart from The Black Sleep (1956), this was Lugosi’s last real acting role (you can’t really count the few moments in Plan 9). And such a magnificent B-movie soliloquy was surely the best possible way for someone like Lugosi to go out on.
Edward D. Wood Jr’s other genre films are:– the quite surreal transvestitism documentary Glen or Glenda? (1952), the script for the ape-human love saga The Bride and the Beast (1958), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), the medium film Night of the Ghouls (1960, released 1983) (which continues on several characters from Bride of the Monster), the script for the nudie horror Orgy of the Dead (1966, released 1983) and the softcore Necromania (1971). Wood’s unique lifestyle, his friendship with Bela Lugosi and the making of Bride of the Monster was portrayed in Tim Burton’s biopic Ed Wood (1994).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1996
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