Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 183: "Domain of the Undead" (1972)

A scientist disrupts the natural order and pays the price for it in Ed Wood's "Domain of the Undead."

There are few pleasures greater for me as an Ed Wood fan than finding one of Eddie's short stories that I've never reviewed or studied. Maybe I ignored it, forgot about it, or never knew it existed in the first place. Who knows? Somehow or another, it flew under my radar. But when I finally discover it, that story gets my full and undivided attention. I found such a story recently, and I am excited to share my thoughts about it.

The story: "Domain of the Undead," originally published in Horror Sex Tales, vol. 1, no.1, Gallery Press, 1972. Anthologized in The Horrors of Wood (Ramble House, 2001) as part of the Woodpile Press series. Credited to "Kip Gebakken," which is Dutch for "fried chicken."

The contents of Horror Sex Tales.

Synopsis: Professor Thorndyke, who has been doing some experimental research in extending human life, travels to the home of a wealthy and beautiful woman named Carlotta. She has agreed not only to fund his controversial work and provide him a fully-staffed laboratory but also to take him to new heights of sexual ecstasy. This last item especially interests the professor, who has not had sex in the seven years following his wife's death.

Thorndyke arrives by chauffeured limo at Carlotta's hilltop mansion, bringing his incredible machines with him. He is taken by servants to a strange underground throne room containing an altar-like platform where he is to do his work. This suits him just fine, and he is especially pleased when Carlotta seemingly makes good on her promise and offers her incredible body to him. However, while performing cunnilingus on his benefactress, Thorndyke realizes he has been drugged and falls into unconsciousness.

When Thorndyke regains consciousness, he makes some terrible discoveries. Carlotta is the leader of a demonic sex cult and wants to live forever. Worse yet, his head has been severed and connected to one of his own machines, replacing the chimp's head that had been there previously! If Thorndyke wants to survive, he will have to continue with his research and experiments. In the meantime, forever tethered to the terrible device, he will be forced to watch Carlotta's orgies in the throne room.

Wood trademarks: Secluded mansion where strange sex rituals take place (c.f. Necromania, The Only House, "The Whorehouse Horror," "Breasts of the Chicken," etc.); words "lovely," "pink," and "soft" (three of Ed's favorites); ellipses (Ed's signature punctuation); looking at oneself in a full-length mirror (a persistent motif in Ed's writing, e.g. Drag Trade); wealthy woman obsessed with youth (c.f. Elizabeth Bathory in Bloodiest Sex Crimes of History); scientist interfering in natural order (c.f. Bride of the Monster, Venus Flytrap); sheer nightgown (c.f. Glen or Glenda, many of Wood's stories and novels); drugging someone during sex (c.f. The Erotic Spy) .

Excerpt: "As the last of the blur left his eyes, Thorndyke watched the tall black chauffeur, now naked but for a tight loincloth, stride quickly from the room. Seconds later, he returned with the butler, similarly attired. They were carrying the naked body of a fantastically beautiful young girl. The sight made the Professor’s eyes open wide, but he felt no physical surge of excitement in his body. Instead, he felt only a vague, empty feeling of acute longing. It was the way he had sometimes felt upon seeing a particularly lovely girl in one of his classes at the university. It was an agonizing feeling of frustration, of longing, of desire."

The perfect job for Ed Wood.

Reflections: It's a damned shame that Ed Wood didn't live long enough to work on Tales from the Crypt (1989-1996). That cultishly beloved HBO anthology series took its inspiration directly from the ghoulish horror comics of the 1950s, specifically the ones published by EC, but added the sex, profanity, and gore that modern audiences have come to expect. The show's producers—a mighty roster including Robert Zemeckis, Joel Silver, Richard Donner, and more—were successful filmmakers who had grown up on comic books and exploitation movies and wanted to pay tribute to their roots. I'm certain they would have known of Ed Wood and even given him an opportunity to write or direct an episode of the show if he'd still been around in the '90s.

One of the unspoken rules of Tales from the Crypt is that its characters can gleefully violate the laws of God and man, just as long as they're punished sufficiently in the end. Typically, the punishments (or "just desserts") will fit the crime perfectly. Often, the transgressor will fall prey to the same kind of cruelty or perversity he inflicted upon his victims. Had The Human Centipede (2009) been a Tales from the Crypt episode, for instance, it would have undoubtedly ended with Dr. Heiter (Deiter Laser) finding himself as the middle link in one of his own ghastly creations. Failing this, the characters on Tales from the Crypt will usually meet a dreadful fate that in some way comments on their own faults and failings. They reap what they sow.

This kind of thinking abounds in Ed Wood's works, both cinematic and literary. Wood movie characters who get what's coming to them include Dr. Vornoff (Bela Lugosi) in Bride of the Monster (1955), Vic Brady (Timothy Farrell) in Jail Bait (1954), and Dr. Acula (Kenne Duncan) in Night of the Ghouls (1959). These men violate the natural order and suffer in ways that are commensurate with their respective crimes. Acula, for instance, falsely claims to be able to communicate with the dead, so the dead rise up and attack him. Brady seeks to change his identity and "succeeds" in the worst way possible. And Vornoff becomes the final subject of his own ghastly experiments.

But this theme is even more prevalent in Eddie's writing, especially his short stories. While reading "Domain of the Undead," I was reminded of "Breasts of the Chicken," the truly gruesome and twisted tale Eddie wrote for Gold Diggers in 1972. That was about a businessman, Rance Wilkerson, who goes to a strange cannibal restaurant... only to find himself on the menu. Dr. Thorndyke's ominous voyage to Carlotta's mansion is very similar to Rance's trip to the sinister restaurant. And I suppose they're both inspired by Jonathan Harker's (or Renfield's) perilous journey to Dracula's castle. Also like Rance Wilkerson, Professor Thorndyke is indifferent to the suffering and death of young women. Both men are too driven by their own sexual lust to consider the moral implications of their actions. And look what it gets them!

If there's ever another anthology of Ed Wood's short fiction, "Domain of the Undead" is a prime candidate for inclusion. How it evaded me this long, I can't say. But it's Wood at his Woodiest, complete with some of his classic tropes and themes. Perhaps in some parallel world, there's a Tales from the Crypt-style anthology series based on Eddie's stories, and "Domain of the Undead" is one of its best-known episodes.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 182: Fred Olen Ray's Deep Red (2023)

Director Fred Olen Ray has written an Ed Wood-inspired horror novel.

One of the reasons that Tim Burton agreed to direct Ed Wood (1994) was that he identified with the title character in a number of ways. Like Ed, Tim had received his share of brutal reviews, especially for his first couple of features, Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) and Beetlejuice (1988). More significantly, Ed had the privilege of working with his idol, Bela Lugosi, right before Bela's death in 1956. Tim could relate, having worked with Vincent Price on both the short film Vincent (1982) and the feature Edward Scissorhands (1990). (Price died in 1993.)

Ed Wood in 1978.

Something similar happened in late 1978 between Ed Wood and filmmaker Fred Olen Ray, only this time Ed got to be the industry veteran working with the up-and-comer. And Fred wasn't exactly an Ed Wood superfan, at least not at the time. Back then, Fred was 23 and embarking upon what would be a long-lasting, incredibly prolific career as a writer, director, and producer of low budget films of every description, from softcore to horror to Christmas and beyond. Ed, meanwhile, was on his last legs, mere months away from being evicted from his apartment and dying penniless.

Fred was eager to work with an industry veteran and was familiar with two of Ed's films, Bride of the Monster (1955) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Fred and Ed met through a mutual friend and began a brief collaboration. I'm not sure exactly how long the two knew each other, but it was long enough for Fred to interview Ed and for the two to hash out the plot for a feature film to be called Beach Blanket Bloodbath, a parody of William Asher's 1965 comedy Beach Blanket Bingo, starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. (That film must have really made an impression on people, since it also inspired the 1975 adult film Beach Blanket Bango starring Rene Bond.)

Fred Olen Ray paid Ed Wood $500 for his screenwriting services, and I am grimly certain that Ed spent the money on alcohol instead of food or rent. Eddie died at the age of 54 in December 1978, having never completed the script for Beach Blanket Bloodbath. Fred might have shrugged off the entire experience if Ed hadn't achieved remarkable posthumous success due to the publication of The Golden Turkey Awards by Harry and Michael Medved in 1980. So Fred began thinking of ways to salvage what he could from his $500 investment.

Circa 1984, Fred used the story he and Ed Wood had devised for a script called Blood Tide. That film never wound up being produced. However, in 1985, Ray used the sets and actors from his upcoming film Star Slammer (1986), to make a short promo for Beach Blanket Bloodbath as if it were a real, completed movie. (Apart from its title, the four-minute film bears almost no resemblance to Wood's story outline.) That promo was then edited into Johnny Legend's Sleazemania Strikes Back (1985) and has popped up here and there as a DVD extra.

Finally, in 2023, Fred used the Beach Blanket Bloodbath outline as the basis for a full-length horror novel called Deep Red. (No relation to the 1975 Dario Argento classic.) Fred is careful in his foreword to the novel to explain that "Ed Wood wrote not a single word" of it. Furthermore, the author makes "no representations as to its literary quality or entertainment value." Nevertheless, I believe that this book represents the best-possible version of the legendary Fred Olen Ray/Ed Wood collaboration that we are ever going to get. That is, unless Fred decides to turn Deep Red into a movie.

A B-movie in the form of a novel.

What we have here is a classic, sleazy drive-in monster movie in novel form. The plot revolves around a vengeful half-man, half-shark character that terrorizes a small Florida town called Pine Level in the summer of 1983. Over the years, I have sat through a great many cheaply-made creature features, and I can assure you that Deep Red contains all the best tropes of the genre. We have: a rugged hero, a sexy heroine, a town of suspicious locals, a mysterious laboratory, a gruff sheriff, a useless mayor, a mad scientist whose sinister experiments defy God, and a hapless creature who was once human. I don't think Fred and Ed missed a trick here. Even the novel's humid Florida setting was very familiar to me, since the Sunshine State became a haven of low-budget independent filmmakers in the 1960s and '70s. As I made my way through Deep Red, I thought of the underpaid actors sweating and squinting their way through Herschell Gordon Lewis' Florida-made movies.

In his foreword, Fred Olen Ray compares Deep Red to The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), the second and final sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). But I was also reminded of the middle film in that trilogy, Revenge of the Creature (1955), starring John Agar, particularly since Deep Red's protagonist, rookie police photographer Mike Reardon, stays in a neon-lit motel, just the way Agar does in Revenge.  But viewers who have seen Zaat (1971) or Sting of Death (1966) or The Horror of Party Beach (1964) will be reminded of those films while reading this book. 

Fred Olen Ray calls Deep Red a "novelization," and it truly feels like the textual equivalent of a movie. The pacing, for instance, is very B-movie-like, with long stretches of exposition between the more exciting monster attack scenes, sex scenes, and sex scenes that turn into monster attack scenes. From a lifetime of watching these movies, I knew there would be a moment in which the good guys examine some strange footprints and wonder what kind of creature could have made them. In fact, Deep Red was so reminiscent of other horror films, particularly the ones about fish monsters, that I actually started having false memories of seeing the damned thing on late night television, even though it was never produced! I could even imagine what kind of film stock would have been used on the project.

So is Deep Red nothing more than a repository of B-movie clichés? Not quite. What makes this novel stand out—and worthy of carrying Ed Wood's name on its cover—are its eccentricities. Fred Olen Ray does not skimp on the quirks here. For instance, the novel features a cute dog named Michelob who goes missing from the aforementioned laboratory. Now, viewers who have seen Revenge of the Creature will rightly fear the worst for this poor pooch. But I was unprepared for the animal's grotesque fate, which seemed like something out of Re-Animator (1985) or The Return of the Living Dead (1985), two of the wilder horror films of the mid-1980s. 

How I picture the shark monster.

And then there are the novel's villains, not just the pitiful shark monster himself but the wildly misguided scientists who accidentally created him. Chief among these is Dr. Sylvia Trent, who heads an initiative called the Triton Project. Our shark monster pal, once named Steven, is an unfortunate side effect of that project. Sylvia never meant to sic him on the world; it just sort of happened. But she doesn't seem the least bit morally concerned about it. She's a surly, arrogant lesbian carrying on an affair with her assistant, Gail. In one of the novel's boldest developments, Sylvia has even involved the story's heroine, an ex-Triton employee named Nicki, in a bizarre sexual blackmail scheme. In his foreword, Fred Olen Ray writes that "the two wicked, lesbian mad doctors are pure Ed Wood."

I thought I also caught a glimpse of Ed in the character of the kooky proprietor of the local filling station and bait shop. Newly arrived in town after having being banished from Miami for sexual indiscretions, cocky Mike Reardon gets his first clue that things are amiss in Pine Level when he stops at a run-down gas station and finds it seemingly abandoned and badly damaged by... something. He briefly chats up the place's owner and returns to the site later in the book to look for clues to the mystery. Longtime Ed Wood fans will see obvious parallels here with The Revenge of Dr. X (1970) and its own pivotal gas station scene. Eddie even played a similar character himself, Pops, in Steve Apostolof's Fugitive Girls (1974).

Reading Fred Olen Ray's Deep Red was a surprisingly satisfying and entertaining experience. The breeziest of breezy reads, it was over before I even realized it. While Fred is much better known as a filmmaker than a writer, his novel has the confident cadence of good genre fiction. Those looking for sex, violence, gore, and perversion will find them here. I'd be halfway interested in seeing this book made into an actual movie. Obviously, much of it would depend on the appearance of the shark monster. I kept picturing the thing as a character from Street Sharks (1994-1997). Fred claims he got as far as making a mask for the character back in the 1970s. I suppose the character might be CG (or at least CG-enhanced) these days. I wonder what they could do with little Michelob in a movie today?

Oh, the possibilities. 

Autographed copies of Deep Red may be purchased here. The novel is also available as an e-book.

P.S. If Deep Red is actually made into a movie, I have two requests: (1) Go back to the title of Beach Blanket Bloodbath. Deep Red is taken. (2) If it's set in 1983, lose the reference to a Bart Simpson beach towel. Bart wasn't around until 1987, and Simpsons merch like beach towels wouldn't hit shelves until 1990.

Podcast Tuesday: "A Whole New Fonz"

Fonzie and the gang ride on a magic carpet with Princess Charisma.

The depiction of the Middle East in popular culture has changed drastically during my lifetime. See, I grew up in the '70s and '80s. Back then, in my mind, the Middle East was a land of mystery, intrigue, adventure, and magic. A story set in Arabia would include most or all of the following elements: genies, magic lamps, turbans, scimitars, flying carpets, camels, harems, the phrase "open sesame," and lots of sexy girls in revealing outfits. And it would be set many hundreds of years ago. Beyond some palace intrigue, there would be no politics whatsoever. And outside of some vague mysticism involving magic words and crystal balls, there would be no religion either.

This was the way it was in American pop culture for years. Way back in the 1950s, for instance, Ed Wood made a short film called The Flame of Islam. Today, a film with such a title would be about the Islamic faith and would likely be the subject of great controversy. But Eddie's movie was simply a filmed burlesque show, and the term "Islam" was merely meant to suggest someplace exotic and far away.

All this started to change in the 1980s  and '90s as the Middle East became more and more of a presence on the evening news. The Gulf War of 1990-91 did a lot to change American's view of the region, and subsequent Middle Eastern wars have only made the changes more profound. The Arabia of old, the land of One Thousand and One Nights, is gone from the Western imagination. Disney's Aladdin (1992) got in just under the wire. (Yes, I realize there have been sequels and a remake since then, but they don't count since they're tied to the original, well-loved movie.)

In short, we've gone from The Thief of Bagdad (1940) to The Hurt Locker (2008). Is this an improvement? I don't know, honestly. The old depictions of the Middle East had nothing to do with reality, but they had a charm of their own.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we're talking about the episode "Arabian Knights." From the title onward, it's obvious that this is one of those dreamy pre-Gulf War depictions of the Middle East. But does that make it a good episode? Click the magic play button below and find out.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 181: Revisiting 'I Woke Up Early the Day I Died' (1998)

Billy Zane (in nurse uniform) leads an all-star cast in Ed Wood's I Woke Up Early the Day I Died.

One of the longest articles in this series—and, indeed, the history of this entire blog—is my review of Aris Iliopolus' I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998), a film based on a script that Ed Wood worked on for years under many titles but never managed to get produced during his own lifetime. Only after Rudolph Grey's book Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) and Tim Burton's film Ed Wood (1994) did this long-gestating script finally see daylight, so to speak.

A poster for the rarely-seen film.

Though it received a critical drubbing in the late '90s and never enjoyed a widespread release in America due to legal issues, I Woke Up Early remains one of the most extraordinary posthumous Ed Wood tribute films ever made. Not only does it boast higher production values than any movie Eddie ever directed, it also features performances by a gaggle of truly random celebrities, including Billy Zane, Eartha Kitt, Tippi Hedren, Karen Black, and John Ritter. The authors of The Cinematic Misadventures of Ed Wood (2015), Andrew J. Rausch and Charles E. Pratt, Jr., go so far as to call it "Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s greatest film" and lament that Eddie himself wasn't around to see it.

When discussing I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, it's easy to focus on the film's gimmicky nature. That's what most of the reviews do, including the one I wrote ten years ago. Beyond the Ed Wood-penned script and the It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963)-style cast, there's also the fact that the story is told without dialogue in the tradition of silent movies of the 1920s and early '30s. Rausch and Pratt even freely compare it to the works of Chaplin and Keaton. 

What's potentially getting lost here is the story Ed Wood wanted to tell with this film. That's why he held onto this script for years, even when getting evicted from various residences and having to ditch his other possessions. As the title character in Ed Wood, Johnny Depp even says, "All I wanna do is tell stories." So how well does Aris Iliopulos' film do that? Admittedly, I haven't spent a lot of quality time with I Woke Up Early in the last decade. But when Woodologist Angel Scott mentioned on Facebook that the film had resurfaced online, I thought it was a golden opportunity to rewatch it and see if I could look past the gimmickry and get to the heart of this material.

Admittedly, the film makes this tough to do at first. We begin with an elaborate, lengthy opening title sequence that highlights all the fabulous guest stars we're about to see. Imagine The Love Boat (1977-1987) gone punk. The credits themselves look like they were typed on a typewriter, reminding us of author Ed Wood's ghostly presence. Even after the credits, Aris Iliopulos chooses to put a scene heading ("1. INT - SANITARIUM - DUSK") on the screen, accompanied by typewriter noises. Excerpts from Wood's script appear as captions throughout the film. So the director definitely puts the gimmickry front and center. Maybe that's why we're five paragraphs into this article and I haven't even started talking about the plot or content of I Woke Up Early.

Very briefly, this film tells the story of a character known only as The Thief (Billy Zane, then at the crest of his fame), a violent madman who escapes from a sanitarium and goes on a multi-day crime spree of theft, assault, and murder in Los Angeles. Along the way, he steals $15,000 from a loan office and impulsively kills one of the employees. He puts the ill-gotten money in a briefcase that he unwisely stows in a coffin at a cemetery. The briefcase then goes missing, and The Thief spends most of the movie tracking down the people who may have taken it, all of them members of a strange Hollywood cult. His journey takes him to a variety of locations: a lighthouse, a carnival, a mortuary, a flophouse, and various bars and nightclubs. Ultimately, he winds up in the same cemetery where he originally hid the money, and there his story reaches its untimely end.

Look, this is not a naturalistic or realistic film in any way. The costumes look like costumes. The wigs look like wigs. The acting is often unsubtle. And the plot progresses in a dreamlike, surreal manner. Those expecting a conventional motion picture will be deeply frustrated by this movie. Instead, I'd say the tone of I Woke Up Early is closer to that of sketch comedy, particularly the short films you might see on, say, Saturday Night Live (1975-present) and Kids in the Hall (1988-1995). I'm particularly reminded of the "Mr. Heavyfoot" films from Kids in the Hall, since those were dialogue-free. With his continual bad luck, The Thief also reminded me of the unspeaking title character in the Pink Panther animated shorts (1969-1978) produced by DePatie-Freleng. 

The point of this experiment was to see whether I could look past the film's stylistic oddness and its numerous celebrity cameos and enjoy I Woke Up Early as the story that Ed Wood wanted to tell for so many years. And, happily, I found that I could. While I'm not so sure I can agree with the authors of Cinematic Misadventures and call it Eddie's "greatest film," I'll say that this movie is the closest in spirit and tone to the breathless, often-ghoulish short stories that Ed Wood wrote in the 1960s and '70s, the ones anthologized in Blood Splatters Quickly (2014) and Angora Fever (2019). If you enjoyed those books, you'll more than likely enjoy this film.

As for the celebrity cameos, I basically stopped thinking about them after a few minutes. Earlier in this review, I compared I Woke Up Early to Stanley Kramer's Mad Mad World. That film, too, boasts an all-star cast, with all the leading, supporting, and even blink-and-you'll-miss-'em roles played by famous comedians. And yet, when I'm watching Mad World, I put that aside and get wrapped up in the story of these desperate middle-aged motorists looking for Smiler Grogan's money. I don't see the celebrities as themselves; I see them as the characters they're playing. The same basic thing happens while I'm watching I Woke Up Early. Sure, it's fun that some well-known folks from TV and film pop up throughout the running time, but it doesn't take me out of the story. If I'm giving out any best-in-show awards, I'll mention Bud Cort as a thrift store owner and Tippi Hedren as a deaf woman. Oh, and Maila "Vampira" Nurmi has a fun little scene where she does as little as possible.

Billy Zane as The Thief.

A lot of the film's success as a narrative is due to the dynamic lead performance of Billy Zane as The Thief. Zane is also credited as one of the film's producers, so he clearly cared about and believed in this project, and his wholehearted commitment to the material definitely shines through in every scene. He captures not only The Thief's brutality and madness but also his utter confusion at the world (remember, he's been locked away in a sanitarium) and even his frustrations with the constant setbacks and indignities he endures along the way. It really helps that Zane looks like he could have been a movie star in the 1930s and '40s. I'd almost want to see a version of this movie that's in black-and-white with only occasional splashes of color, a la Sin City (2005).

But I wouldn't want to tamper with this movie too much, because the other great strength of I Woke Up Early is its eye-popping cinematography. Director Aris Iliopulos and cinematographer Michael Barrow give us one striking image after another, boldly using lighting, composition, and camera angles (including numerous overhead shots!) to expressionistic effect. There is nothing timid or restrained about this movie; Iliopulos goes full comic book, and it pays off. Most of the film was shot on location in various sites around Los Angeles, and it's remarkable how Iliopulos captures the seamy underbelly of the city yet manages to give it a curious glamour at the same time. It's really a shame that he never went on to make another feature film. 

The key question is, would Ed Wood approve of what Aris Iliopulos did with I Woke Up Early the Day I Died? Well, he's not here to tell us, so all we can do is speculate. Eddie was certainly used to other directors filming his scripts. It happened fairly frequently from the 1950s to the 1970s: Steve Apostolof, Adrian Weiss, Don Davis, Boris Petroff, William Morgan, Ed DePriest, and more. He seemed perfectly content to hand off his work to someone else, as long as they paid him upfront, preferably in cash. Occasionally, Ed would even include phrases like "to the discretion of the director" in some of his screenplays, in case someone besides him wound up making them. 

But I Woke Up Early was obviously something special to Ed Wood, not mere work-for hire like some of those other films I alluded to. He spent years on this script and held onto it as long as he possibly could. Perhaps he saw something of himself in The Thief, a desperate man without resources or even a home in Los Angeles. An outcast. A freak. A man on the run. The Thief makes the mistake of pursuing money, and it brings him nothing but grief. But what are his choices? You have to have money to survive in this world. Ed Wood knew that all too well.

Ultimately, I am confident that Ed would have been flattered by this movie. By all accounts, he was thrilled with any attention his work received, even if it were derogatory or parodic, so it would have blown his mind that a script of his went into production 20 years after his own death—with a star-studded cast, no less. Sure, he would have been bewildered by the use of Darcy Clay's snarly, aggressive "Jesus I Was Evil" over the opening credits, but the soundtrack also features more sedate fare by The Ink Spots and Nat "King" Cole, plus a sumptuous instrumental score by Larry Groupé. If nothing else, the cameos by his wife, Kathy, and his old pal, Conrad Brooks, would have warmed Eddie's drunken heart.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 180: Lee Kolima, Hawaii's answer to Tor Johnson

No, that's not Tor Johnson. It's Lee Kolima.

Ed Wood follows me everywhere. It's true. Eddie's career has become the prism through which I see the rest of the world. Whether I'm watching a movie, reading a book, or just scrolling through internet videos, I'm always looking for connections to the weird, wacky world of Wood. That's what you get when you do a series called Ed Wood Wednesdays for more than a decade.

Just this week, for instance, I saw a clip from The Joe Rogan Experience in which British scientist Matthew Walker describes the effects of alcoholism on sleeping and dreaming. According to Walker, alcohol blocks the dream sleep (or REM sleep) that the brain craves and demands. Eventually, chronic alcoholics will begin to dream while they're awake. "It's this collision of two states of consciousness," Walker says. I've often described Ed Wood's writing as dreamlike, and I naturally wondered if this were a result of his severe alcoholism. Certainly something to think about.

Lee Kolima as Bobo on Get Smart.

But there are less serious examples, too. Yesterday, I was watching a September 1965 episode of Get Smart called "Diplomat's Daughter" when I saw something that amazed me. The episode's villain, The Claw (Leonard Strong), had a bald, hulking henchman named Bobo who was nearly identical to the character of Lobo played by Tor Johnson in Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster (1955) and Night of the Ghouls (1959), plus The Unearthly (1957), directed by Wood associate Boris Petroff. 

The names Lobo and Bobo were too close to each other to be a coincidence. However, I knew that Tor Johnson had never guested on Get Smart and had basically retired from show business after his starring role in Coleman Francis' The Beast from Yucca Flats (1961). So who was this extremely Tor-like guy playing Bobo opposite Don Adams? (In fact, Bobo appeared twice on Get Smart; he was brought back later in the first season for "The Amazing Harry Hoo.")

The answer is Lee Kolima (1920-1995), a Hawaiian-born actor who worked in film and television for nearly twenty years and appeared alongside some very famous people in the process. Like Tor Johnson, Lee was a wrestler, having used such names as Great Toto, Kubla Khan, and Royal Hawaiian during his career. His real name, though, was Charles Howard Zalopany, and he was born on November 20, 1920 in Honolulu, meaning that he was already well into his 40s when he started acting. Young Charles grew up in a rather large family; historical records show he had at least five siblings.

His late start as an actor didn't hamper him. Hollywood is always going to need big, tough-looking dudes to act as thugs, guards, and assorted bad guys. Some might attribute Lee Kolima's career to the James Bond spy craze that captured all of popular culture in the 1960s. Too bad Tor Johnson's career was already over by the time the fad started; he could have made some serious meatball money in the 1960s. As it was, the younger Lee Kolima scooped up roles on such action shows as Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, I Spy, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Garrison's Gorillas, and The Wild Wild West, plus the movies 7 Women (1965), Dimension 5 (1966), and The King's Pirate (1967).

For such a colorful and unusual actor, Lee Kolima's career is shockingly under-documented. In fact, I could find no articles about the man whatsoever—no interviews, no career retrospectives, nothing. His wrestling career is even more obscure than his movie career. I found only a few fleeting references to his matches in newspaper articles from the early 1950s, nearly all from California. An online archive says he had 145 bouts, stood 6'3", and weighed 280 pounds. That makes him the same height as Tor Johnson but 120 pounds lighter. Indeed, he looks more svelte than Tor and moves more easily onscreen. But directors didn't trust either man with much dialogue.

If Lee's famous for anything in particular, it's for his association with that loveable prefabricated pop group, The Monkees. For a while there, Lee was practically the fifth Monkee. He guested twice on their self-titled TV show, appearing as Yakimoto in "The Spy Who Came in from the Cool" in Season 1 and as Attila the Hun (!) in "The Devil and Peter Tork" in Season 2. Lee even turned up as a guard in The Monkees' trippy feature film Head (1968). I've seen rumors on the internet suggesting this is Tor Johnson, but the evidence indicates it was Lee.

The Monkees wasn't Lee's only foray into comedy, by the way. In the late '60s and early '70s, he also appeared on The Red Skelton Show and The Jonathan Winters Show, plus the sitcom That's My Mama. Miraculously, his application to join AFTRA has survived from this era in his career. Notice that this document includes both his stage name and his real name. We can also see that he was living at 16246 Virginia Ave. in Paramount, CA. There's still a charming two-bedroom home with Spanish tiles on the roof at this location.

Lee gets into the union.

The wrestler's career naturally slowed down in the 1970s and '80s as he began to age. As an actor, Lee last turned up onscreen in the notorious Burt Reynolds vehicle Cannonball Run II (1984). But his most lasting contribution to pop culture during the Reagan years was modeling for the cover of Tom Waits' classic album Swordfishtrombones (1983), where he appeared alongside Waits himself and dwarf actor Angelo Rossitto, whom we have discussed previously. All three men look like circus performers here, reminding me of the cover of Strange Days by The Doors (1967). Notice how both albums include a strongman and a dwarf, while Waits' own heavy makeup resembles that of the mime on the Strange Days cover. Just a theory.

Lee Kolima (left) with Angelo Rossitto and Tom Waits on the cover of Swordfishtrombones.

Lee Kolima died at the age of 75 in November 1995, just a year after George "The Animal" Steele portrayed Tor Johnson in Ed Wood (1994).  Lee's death generated no publicity. I cannot even find an obituary for the man, nor any record of how or where he was buried. But the TV shows and movies in which Lee appeared will likely be in circulation for decades to come, and I probably won't be the last to spot him somewhere and think, "Hey, isn't that Tor Johnson?"

Podcast Tuesday: "2057: A Fonz Odyssey"

Fonzie (Henry Winkler) is torn between a robot and a future chick on Fonz and the Happy Days Gang.

In 1977, Happy Days producer Garry Marshall asked his young son, Scotty, why he no longer watched his father's own, highly-rated sitcom. The boy, then obsessed with Star Wars (1977), answered that the show didn't have space in it. The result was the classic February 1978 episode "My Favorite Orkan," in which Fonzie (Henry Winkler), Richie (Ron Howard), and the gang encounter manic, fast-talking alien Mork from Ork (Robin Wiliams). The character of Mork proved so popular, he got a successful spinoff of his own.

Fun as it is, "My Favorite Orkan" isn't much like Star Wars. It takes place entirely on Earth, and the action is limited to the usual, workaday Happy Days locations: the Cunninghams' tidy suburban home and Arnold's drive-in restaurant. Mork himself, wild though his personality may be, just looks like a human being in a red jumpsuit. There are no robots, space ships, or laser guns in it. And, depending on which version of the episode you watch, the whole thing could just be a dream. History does not record Scotty Marshall's reaction to "My Favorite Orkan." I wonder if he found it satisfying.

I think the "space" version of Happy Days that Scotty was envisioning was a lot more like "May the Farce be with You," an episode of The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang that aired in November 1980. From its title onward, this is much, much closer to Star Wars. It's teeming with robots and star jets, and the entire thing takes place in outer space in the year 2057, which must have sounded a lot further off back then. The plot has Fonzie and his pals foiling the plans of some evil androids to blow up the Earth. Doesn't that sound like fun?

Find out if it is by listening to the latest episode of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast.