Bride of the Monster (1956)

Since this is Swedish wrestler turned monster movie actor turned bestselling Halloween mask Tor Johnson's death day anniversary, I thought, since I've already tributed and homaged him in a previous review of the Golden Grail O' Gram of unholy Hollywood mishaps Plan Nine from Outer Space, that I'd take a few moments to talk about the second of the Woodian "Kelton Trilogy" (the last being the unreleased for decades Night of the Ghouls, starring Kenne "I'd Like to Chew on Your Tits" Duncan, and Valda "He Wants to Chew on My Tits" Hansen, whom, you might have guessed was the putative tit chewee in this whole hypothetical and highly controversial arrangement. (All that according to Rudolph Grey's excellent, excellent--did we mention that it was, in point of fact, excellent?--book Nightmare of Ecstacy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr. (1990, Feral House), which I read as a wee tot of twenty, twenty-one maybe. A long time ago, when punk rock was still radical and could be acquired on audiocassette. Back then, you still went to the video store to purchase all of your memorable movie nightmares and ecstacies, whatever those might happen to be.

Bride stars Bela Lugosi as Dr. Eric Vornoff, who lives down at the "Old Willows Place," and who has a slave in the giant, bald, hulking Lobo, who wears a kind of Caribbean castaway Banana Bay outfit with no shoes, and has weird sort of eyes. Or maybe I'm getting this and Plan Nine confused, but anyway, Vornoff wants to "perfect a race of atomic supermen" using a photo enlarger and a spaghetti-strainer for a helmet and captures some hicks going fishing, and then Tony McCoy (that's his real name) and his girlfriend Janet Lawton (Loretta King) go down there to the Old Willow's Place where Bela has his mad scientist's lab and feeds people to a giant stock footage squid that could probably fit in the lobster tank at Needler's Supermarket (where all the bourgeois people go shopping for inexpensive off-brand toothpaste), but it's all okay because the thing lives in the lake or river or whatever and, just like in the movie, someone forgot the octopus motor. (I mean the Ed Wood movie about Ed Wood, starring Johnny "Here's a Knuckle Sandwich, Bitch!" Depp, who looked and acted nothing like the actual Ed Wood, and directed by Tim "I Look Like I Should Have Been a Backup Singer for The Cure Sometime Around 1988" Burton.)

So Bela has to splash around in the river at the end of the movie, grabbing the rubber octopus legs and sort of moving them about. Which must have been degrading for an "ex-boogeyman" turned morphine addict living on the skids as an even spookier character than any he ever portrayed on screen. Now, Criswell isn't actually in this bitch (right now, he's in another dimension, his earthly remains having been in a box for quite, quite some time; but, did you know, he was actually BORN in the back of a funeral parlor?), nor is Maila "Misfits Rule!" Vampira Nurmi, but we do get Paul Marco as Kelton the Cop (it is, after all, the "Kelton Trilogy") and some guy playing The Chief with a canary on his fingers.

So someone Ed Wood wanted to put out a hit on named George Becwar (his actual name) comes from some distant (read: communist) country, to bring home the escaped mad scientist Vornoff/Bela, but first Loretta "She Could Take No Liquids So How Did She Live?" King, aka "Janet Lawton," gets off one of my favorite lines about "What's this, a pogo stick?," while holding out a rifle, and says something before that holding out another thing, but I'm too groggy from withdrawal symptoms to remember it right now. But it is a memorable line, dadgummit.

"No tank-town jail can hold me! I'll be outta this here rat trap in twenty-four hours!" says some guy that looks like the bastard child of Lou Costello and a Tijuana crack whore. And then Paul "Why Do I Always Get Hooked Up With These Spook Details" Marco, aka Kelton the Cop says, "Vagrancy will hold you for seventy-two hours!" Har. Har-har. Pirate hars!

And then there is the famous speech. George Becwar tells Bela that "I have come to bring you home."

Bela replies: (and this one's a real tear-jerker, so hold on to your socks and pull upward in a gradual manner):

"Home? I have no home," Bela says tearfully, his emotions stirring, rising to a crescendo, like Dracula rising from his coffin for a midnight repast. "Hunted, despised, living like an animal! The jungle is my home! But I will show the world that I can be its master! I will perfect my race of people, a race of atomic supermen, that will conquer the world!"

And then Bela rises. And then he falls.

But that is a bit too poetic.

"Home? I have NO HOME."

Anyway, the movie is good and fun and wholesome and "gentle as a kitchen." It's monster movie madness (albeit, in an even more third-rung, Ed Woodian sense) from a different day and age. And it has a giant octopus with no motor. Tor Johnson as Lobo. It has Tony McCoy playing someone whose character was so unimportant I can't even remember what his name was, but he looks like a young Abe Lincoln and gets his shirt ripped off William Shatner style. Dolores Fuller does a cameo, Loretta King can't distinguish a rifle from a pogo stick, and Bela Lugosi uses a photo enlarger to try and conquer the world. With a spaghetti strainer strapped to his head. What could go wrong?

In closing, I'd like to send m best wishes to Tor Johnson over there on the Other Side. I hope he's happy as a clam, eating Swedish meatballs, being a monster movie mask for all time. And wondering just what in the hell he was thinking ever to agree to be in such scandalous fright flicks.

Love and napalm, monster movie maniacs!

Bride of the Monster is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN (A concept certain major media-sharing video platforms seem to have a problem wrapping their corporate heads around) and can be viewed for free at You Know Where.