Still a legendary name in the annals of bizarre cinema, Edward D. Wood, Jr. found himself toiling in the deep end of exploitation after his 1956 cracked masterpiece, Plan 9 from Outer Space. Various disappointments involving The Sinister Urge and the long-unreleased Night of the Ghouls veered him to sexploitation, including penning the wild Orgy of the Dead, writing a large number of books geared for the adult store market, and acting in no-budget quickies like The Love Feast. By the early '70s, he was moving into harder territory with the once-lost Take It Out in Trade and hedged his bets after that by shooting softcore and hardcore variants of his last directorial efforts (along with several XXX loops). Most of these films were also considered extinct for decades, but eventually they were discovered within the past two decades and have appeared on home video in sometimes compromised form. Some like The Undergraduate and Nympho Cycler remain on DVD only as of this writing, but the most brain-busting ones from this era have been collected in a 2024 Severin Films triple-disc Blu-ray set, the impressively-titled Hard Wood: The Adult Features of Ed Wood.

First up is the most notorious of Wood's sex films, 1971's Necromania (or to go by its full on-screen title, Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love!), an adaptation of one of Wood's own naughty novels and a tantalizing question mark in his career for years thanks to its write-up in Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (complete with a wild still of actor Ric Lutze being serviced in a coffin). The softcore version of the film was eventually discovered and released on VHS by Something Weird in 1994, while both the soft and explicit cuts (which feature different footage of the sex scenes) were issued on DVD in 2004 from adult site Fleshbot as part of its short-lived foray into home video distribution. Later the soft cut (with the XXX scenes as extras) was put out by Alpha Blue Archives on DVD as a standalone and as part of a lost Wood sex film set, with bonuses including more films with star Maria Arnold, Pleasure Between Heaven and Hell, Oakie Maid, and For Love of Money. The Severin offers the best of all possible worlds with both versions in HD scans from the sole surviving prints, which have good color and are in nice shape overall. The meager plot involves young couple Shirley and Danny (played by early sex film power couple Rene Bond and Lutze), who have a very unsatisfying love life due to his performance issues. They go to stay at the home of mystic Madame Heles (Arnold) for some sex magick therapy, which involves their host doing naked rituals with a skull and spying on her guests (including another couple) through peepholes. Everyone swaps sexual partners until the most Woodian moment of the film comes with an occult finale involving Criswell's coffin.

Made in the pre-Deep Throat era when hardcore features were just starting to get a real theatrical foothold, Necromania is cheap, dumb, and weird, exactly how you want it. The sex scenes are about as mechanical as you can get, especially the softcore version in which everyone just rubs their faces and tongues around their fellow actors' crotches enough to avoid going all the way. Credited as "Don Miller," Wood was supposedly slated to appear in one scene as a necromancer, just one of the many mysteries here including the cast "who wish to remain anonymous." Arnold, Lutze, and Bond are all very familiar faces though and were busy crossing back and forth in the early '70s between softcore and XXX, and while this isn't exactly the greatest acting showcase for any of them, they acquit themselves well enough here. In addition to the best a/v presentation of the film so far (as usual in DTS-HD MA 2.0 English mono with optional English SDH subtitles, the same as the other films in the set), the soft cut comes with an audio commentary by Ed Wood Summit host Greg Javer and Author Paul Apel would get a lot into the brief running time pointing out the filming location, Wood's unorthodox directorial fashion choices, the identities of the known actors among the tiny cast, and recurring production design items that pop up in other Wood-connected films from the '70s.

Also on the same disc is another one thought lost to the ages for a long time, 1971's The Only House in Town, which opens with sex film staple Lynn Harris being chased through a house by members of what appears to be a crazy sex cult including Uschi Digard and Harry Novak regular Malta. The pursuit, apparently triggered by someone ratting on them to the cops, soon turns into an orgy, after which Digard serves as our narrator, guide, and star for three more tales about what happened inside the same house. Once a bordello, it serves as the backdrop for our top-heavy Uschi as the main character (exactly how is left vague) having sex separately with two of the guys from the cult, now playing other people(?), as well as another one before things wrap up with another group session. Don't even bother trying to make sense out of this one as it's basically an excuse for long simulated sex scenes and some goofy bits of comedy.

Reportedly this film was never technically finished (with some obvious gaffes in the audio giving the game away), with Wood maybe abandoning the project near the end depending on which source you go to. Rumors indicate there may have been a longer hardcore version prepared as well, but if so, it couldn't have been anything terribly significant since neither Uschi nor Malta ever did the deed for real on camera. Uschi fans in particular will have a field day here as she's in every scene, enthusiastic as always and bouncing all over her costars with wild abandon. This one also looks very good and comes from the sole surviving film element, this time with a commentary by Javer and Capri Show World's Spicy Goldman who basically run with a similar approach covering the location, the strange history of the film and its ties (or lack thereof) to Wood's book The Only House, more about the curiosities in the decor, and covering as much as they can about the performers. A theatrical trailer (once the only remnant of this film) is also included.

Things get a lot more graphic on disc two with what is likely Wood's final film, The Young Marrieds, which once existed only as a soft VHS copy of its softcore version (included here for posterity) but was eventually salvaged in its full-strength hardcore iteration. This one goes for it a lot more than Wood's other adult titles, here using some sincere but utterly goofy narration to tie together the turbulent story of recently married Ben (Please Don't Eat My Mother's Burns) and Ginny (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie's Friedland), who are having issues due to his resentment and her reluctance to loosening up in bed. In between snippets of a burlesque routine, we see how Ben's quest for advice at a strip club sets him on a course to awaken his wife's libido by any means available including filming themselves and ultimately trying out the swinging scene. However, things don't go exactly how he expected.

After its rediscovery, The Young Marrieds has floated around in a couple of DVD editions from After Hours Cinema (as part of Ed Wood's Dirty Movies along with Nympho Cycler and, for some reason, Shot on Location) and a pointless, heavily edited version from Alpha Blue (with bonus Friedland films Kiss My Analyst, Analyze Your Sex, and The Adventures of Flash Beaver) which deletes the insane twist ending completely. The main version on the Severin disc is complete and looks the best of all options by far, even if this cheap 16mm production will never be much of a visual dazzler. For the third and last commentary in the set, Javer teams up with "porn archaeologist/collector" Dimitri Otis to sift through the film's attitude about gender relations and marriage (including comparisons to Necromania), multiple John Cassavetes connections, and various tales from related personnel they've gleaned over the years. Also on the disc is a batch of silent sex loops "with subtitles by Ed Wood" (and maybe directed by him among the batch he did around that time) including "15" Commercial" (8m11s), "Devil Cult" (8m16s), "Doc's House Call" (8m22s), "Girl on a Bike" (8m18s), "Notorious Landlady" (8m11s), "The Two Faces of Kim" (8m24s), "Virgin Next Door" Parts One (8m16s) and Two (7m27s), and "Western Lust" (8m19s). There isn't much to say about these, which feature a mixture of unknown faces with vets like John Holmes and Linda McDowell.

Finally on disc three we dispense with the adult film angle entirely as this is more of a Wood-related gathering of odds and ends. The biggest one here is a pristine and very impressive scan of the obscure Shotgun Wedding, co-written by Wood for Anatomy of a Psycho director Boris Petroff. A typical hillbilly melodrama of the period, this was shot in the backwoods of... uh, Arizona, here subbing for the Southern town of Mudcat Landing. Moonshine-running Buford (O'Malley) has a very dysfunctional relationship with his pregnant girlfriend, Melanie (Allen); she's trying to figure out where he keeps his hefty savings and having a fling with his son, and he's dead set on marrying her. Meanwhile Buford's daughter Lucianne (Peterson) is mixed up in more scheming and blackmailing locals, including the town preacher (The Patty Duke Show's Schallert) who's actually a con artist with too much info about Melanie as well. In between you get some silly cornpone comedy and a great barn dance scene before everything gets tidied up, at least for the time being. The plot here is minimal, and title's implication (and the poster's promise) of shotgun weddings involving underage daughters has absolutely nothing to do with anything here. It's all quite upbeat and mostly clean fun, shot with that vibrant '60s color palette that even the most impoverished quickies could pull off in the right hands. Tough to see outside of an Aussie VHS and a bad bootleg DVD, this one sparkles here with a gorgeous presentation that makes it a prime slice of eye candy.

If that isn't enough Wood for ya, the third disc also has four video extras kicking off with the classic episode about the filmmaker from the pioneering The Incredibly Strange Film Show (39m54s) with Jonathan Ross serving as your guide for a collection of interviews (including Grey, Dolores Fuller, Vampire, and Harry Medved) and film clips laying out the whole story that could only happen in Hollywood. Then you get Dana Gould and Bobcat Goldthwait (28m17s) enthusing about Wood's later career, their memories of discovering these films during the VHS era, similar affection from collaborator Tom Kenney, the "gateway drug" of Plan 9, the appeal of his cinema, and thoughts on Tim Burton's biopic. In "The Mad Genius of Ed Wood" (13m27s), author Carl Abrahamsson offers his own appraisal of the director's output, tackling the whole misleading "worst filmmaker ever" label and pointing how the inventive and passionate use of genre tropes and personal expression that defines his most significant films. Finally in "A Brief Encounter with Ed" (10m39s), filmmaker Fred Olen Ray looks back on his proposed collaboration with Wood, Beach Blanket Bloodbath, which he embarked on at a young age with on-and-off attempts at staying in contact with the filmmaker, plus his own thoughts on the ownership of Wood's films and personal decline he suffered in his final years.

Reviewed on December 1, 2024.