The Sleazemania videos offered viewers a crash course in sex and sin. |
Harry and Michael Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards brought Ed Wood unlikely posthumous fame in 1980, naming him the worst director of all time and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) the worst film, but that doesn't mean Ed's movies were instantly accessible to fans who wanted to watch them. In the early 1980s, you generally had to rely on revival houses and late night television to see Eddie's work. And even then, you weren't in control of which movies were being shown or when you could see them.
Fortunately, the home video revolution helped change that. VCRs helped bring a dizzying variety of entertainment into people's living rooms—not just recent blockbusters and Hollywood classics but all kinds of specialty titles, too. Pornography and horror famously flourished on VHS, but so did exercise videos, concert movies, vintage TV shows, and low-budget cult flicks that hadn't been widely seen in decades. This proved to be great news for Ed Wood fans. (Too bad Eddie himself wasn't around to enjoy it; his death in 1978 came at a terribly inconvenient time.) It really cannot be overstated how important VCRs were in bringing Eddie's movies to the masses in the pre-internet era.
One of Rhino's Sleazemania videos. |
Leading the charge was Rhino Entertainment, a Los Angeles-based company that started in the 1970s as a quirky record label specializing in novelty songs and reissues. By the 1980s, they had branched out into the burgeoning home video market. By focusing on kitschy oddities from the past, Rhino proved a natural home for the work of Edward D. Wood, Jr. It was a marriage made in cult movie heaven—or trash movie hell, depending on your point of view.
Although far from the only home video distributor of Eddie's work in the 1980s and '90s, Rhino was arguably the most prominent. The company released its own editions of Plan 9, Bride of the Monster (1955), Night of the Ghouls (1959), Glen or Glenda (1953), Jail Bait (1954), Orgy of the Dead (1965), and The Violent Years (1956). Rhino even produced and distributed Ted Newsom's colorful documentary Ed Wood: Look Back in Angora (1994). As late as 2000, when DVD had replaced VHS as the home video format of choice, Rhino reissued Love Feast (1969) under the title Pretty Models All in a Row. A whole generation of fans, including me, got their first exposure to Ed Wood's movies through Rhino.
While we're talking about the subject of Rhino and Ed Wood, though, we should really discuss the original Sleazemania videos that the company released in 1985 and 1986. These strange, highly enjoyable tapes were compiled by the one and only Johnny Legend (1948- ), aka Martin Marguiles, a rockabilly musician, pop culture historian, wrestling manager, and film producer who has played a significant role in popularizing the films of Edward D. Wood, Jr. and other low-budget directors, including Stephen C. Apostolof.
With his Rasputin-like beard and flashy wardrobe, Legend is most famous for writing and producing "Pencil Neck Geek," a 1977 novelty song by wrestler "Classy" Freddie Blassie. Blassie and Legend also teamed up for the infamous pseudo-documentary My Breakfast with Blassie (1983), starring comedian Andy Kaufman and distributed by (you guessed it) Rhino Video.
The Sleazemania videos, each about an hour in length, consist of movie trailers for exploitation and sexploitation films from the 1930s to the '80s, supplemented with a few burlesque shorts and drive-in advertisements. If this sounds to you like the typical fare released by Seattle's Something Weird Video, you're right; much of this same exact footage turned up on SWV tapes and discs in the years to come, But back in 1985, SWV didn't even exist, nor did video-sharing sites like YouTube, so these trailers and other clips were not commonly available to the public.
I'd balk at calling the Sleazemania videos "documentaries." Legend deliberately opted not to have any explanatory narration in these compilations, and the clips are not presented in any particular order, either chronological or thematic. The second entry in the series, Sleazemania Strikes Back (1985), uses the movies of Ed Wood as somewhat of a connecting thread, but even it feels like a jumble of random footage designed for pure sensory overload. In his liner notes for a 2009 DVD rerelease of the original trilogy, Legend explains his stylistic choices:
At the time (1985), there were only a handful of trailer compilations, usually specific to one genre like horror and hosted by the likes of John Carradine and Elvira. I decided on no talking heads, hosts or whatever, and went straight for the jugular, pure sleaze and exploitation. In the ensuing years, most of the classic titles appeared on labels like Rhino and Something Weird (Pin Down Girls, Curfew Breakers, Jailbait, etc.), and I premiered many of these myself on the various labels.
In other words, the Sleazemania videos are extremely bare bones, right down to their quaint, homemade-looking credit sequences. Johnny Legend lets the clips speak for themselves, which is a wise decision. The trailers tend to be fast-paced and action-packed, so no embellishment is needed. Sleazemania III: The Good, The Bad, and The Sleazy (1986) includes a tongue-in-cheek title sequence inspired by Rocky III (1983), but that's about as fancy as this series gets.
What can Ed Wood fanatics get from these Sleazemania videos? Probably not a great deal that they haven't seen elsewhere, but these compilations do provide some interesting context for this material. As you make your way through these compilations, you'll see trailers and clips from Ed's movies interspersed with trailers and clips from lots of other directors' movies. These filmmakers were Ed Wood's contemporaries and competitors in the marketplace, and they were going after the same dollars that he was. As idiosyncratic as Eddie's films may seem to us now, it's important to remember he spent his career following entertainment industry trends and trying to produce commercially viable work. In other words, he was trying to fit into the American film marketplace. Through Sleazemania, you'll get an idea of what that marketplace was.