- DVD cover art - image courtesy of Zombie Movie Guide
A loose sequel to the 1955 feature Bride of the Monster and the second part of what director Ed Wood dubbed his “Kelton trilogy” (as each film included actor Paul Marco in the role of Officer Kelton, Plan 9 from Outer Space being the third), the making of Night of the Ghouls is one of the more bizarre and sad stories to ever come out of the industry. Completed in 1959, Wood was too strapped for cash to afford the final development costs of the film negatives. As a result, the film was held hostage by the post-production lab until the bills could be paid. During Wood’s lifetime, it never saw the light of day.
It wasn’t until 23 years later, when a conversation took place between Wood’s widow, Kathy, and the millionaire, Wade Williams, subsequently leading to the long-overdue payment for the film, that Night of the Ghouls was finally freed for public exhibition. That recovery must have been a cause for celebration amongst fans of the director, who had just recently begun developing notoriety as the Golden Turkey-anointed “Worst Director of All Time,” an award that saw him quickly becoming more successful in death than in life. Considering the uniquely savory qualities of his filmmaking output, these circumstances are not without an appropriately poetic resonance.
That Wood wanted more and more for tools as his career progressed is obvious from the get-go, as Night of the Ghouls feels thrown-together enough to make the aforementioned Bride and Plan 9 look reasonably well-resourced by comparison.
Conversely, it seems that the unfairly maligned director had learned how to better adapt to these circumstances, as Night compensates for its wanting production values with some of the better cinematography and special effects trickery to be found in the filmmaker’s body of work. Within the Kelton trilogy, its moments of tangible atmosphere are among the most potent. Unfortunately, the material is often so inherently silly (such as a bedsheet ghost accompanied by a slide whistle) as to neutralize many of these silver linings.
When one imagines Wood scrambling to complete production with anything available to him, no matter how unpolished, one can’t help but think of another famous director continually outcast to low budget productions as his career progressed: Orson Welles. In an overlooked landmark moment of 90s cinema, the two shared a fictitious meeting in the Tim Burton biopic Ed Wood, and the equation of these two creative forces spoke volumes to the forces of the medium at both ends of the artistic spectrum.
The plot is only tangentially related to its predecessor, and in fact begins to strain all credibility the more one thinks about it. Kenne Duncan stars as one Dr. Acula (a pun so bad it hurts to type), a con man who purports the ability to communicate with the dead, charging the living exorbitantly to do so while employing actors to embody the departed and “haunt” the remote building he works out of (the same building Bela Lugosi's mad scientist worked out of in Bride of the Monster, despite the fact that we saw it destroyed at the end of that movie). An elderly couple taking a shortcut happens upon the place, and one of its supposed ghostly residents, at the outset of the film, leading to bumbling police involvement amidst the doctor’s latest dramatization of the supernatural.
In keeping with Wood’s awkward directorial trademarks—overwritten dialogue, fake-looking sets, cheesy performances, a general disregard for continuity, ill-fitting stock footage, even faker-looking special effects, and the like—the joys of Night of the Ghouls rest on the laurels of an extremely acquired taste in “bad” movies. From a purely technical perspective, it's just barely watchable, but if one is privy to the creative choices visible between the lines, there’s an oddly personal nature to the film. Without that, it would plummet to the lower rungs of the cinematic compost heap. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Night of the Ghouls is available in its entirety on YouTube ( click here for part one).
Night of the Ghouls. Dir. Edward D. Wood, Jr. Perf. Kenne Duncan, Duke Moore, Tor Johnson, Valda Hansen, Johnny Carpenter, Paul Marco. Wade Williams Productions, 1959. Running Time: 69 min.
