Brainscan watches an Ed Wood film!

Brainscan’s comments:

This is an Ed Wood masterpiece he called Nympho Cycler. Long ago, someone decided Plan 9 from Outer Space was the worst movie ever made, but lots of folks pointed out it wasn’t even the worst movie Ed Wood ever made. Nympho Cycler is … if for no other reason than you have to endure the sight of Ed dressed in drag. My sense of things is he started out the movie (sic) with the intention of making things drive-in appropriate but convinced himself along the way the bigger market was in grind houses, on the edge of porno. Nympho Cycler crosses the edge in two places.

Casey Lorraine (aka Casey Larrain) is in every scene. She is married to Ed Wood’s character, and lolls around in a hot tub for a while with him,

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but when he arranges for her to do an explicit photo session, complete with male model whose member is, shall we say, very attentive to the proceedings (details of that attention not pictured)

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and berates her for being a poor photo model,

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she hops on her motorcycle and heads off in search of better companions.

Casey quickly finds a couple of gals (played by Donna Stanley and Lynn Harris). The scene with Donna and Lynn could have been worthy of considerable time and effort, but it is so chaotically shot – not just frenetic but frantic – that I found very little to capture …

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… in a scene with three very attractive women who would have been happy to show us what they got. Such a shame.

Then Casey gets back on her bike and finds a new guy (scene 4) for an outdoor nooner.

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The two of them get together with a bunch of other biker guys and gals in an orgy lighted only by a bonfire.

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And again, the scene is shot with all the cinematic skill of a hyperactive 4-year-old with his mother’s new iPhone. The orgy starts off with naked dancing by Casey and four women credited with names such as Sherry Duz and Mary Wood, and evolves, or rather mutates, into a hardcore scene between unnamed parties, which no one wants to see, so I left it on the cutting room floor.

Okay, fine – so far a real shit-stain of a movie, but what happens in the last 20 minutes makes it the very worst (THE. VERY. WORST.) movie ever made. Casey and her new boy go into town, he gets beaten to a pulp by three guys (you see only one, but Casey’s voice-over assures us it was three and tells us they were hired by her husband to teach the guy a lesson). One of the three then has his way with her.

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At the end of that crap, Casey is back with her savagely beaten boyfriend, in a jump-cut that offers no explanation of his health and recovery from the assault because he looks none the worse for the wear. They walk and walk and walk – what is this, Lord of the Rings? – before he gets on a train to leave her behind (why in the world?) as the camera stays on the wheels of the departing train for a good three minutes. I kid you not. The End.

I blame the screenwriter – that would be Ed Wood. I blame the director – Ed Wood again. I blame the male lead – yup, that’s Ed. This movie stinks and Ed is the stinkee. You could take all the movies made in the last decade, single out the moments of gross incompetence, stitch all those together and have a much better movie than Nympho Cycler. Any colonoscopy would be better. It’s only saving grace is the reason I captured it in the first place, and that is Casey Lorraine, but how bad does a movie have to be that some 15 minutes of her nekkid as a jaybird fails to make it interesting? I ask you.

Heading into the weekend, here is hoping you enjoy the most American of all national holidays (Super Bowl Sunday).


Scoop’s notes: Brainscan’s film clips from this forgotten treasure, truly alongside Michelangelo’s David as one of the great artistic achievements in mankind’s stay on this big blue marble, will be in the Sunday Fun House (member’s version).

3 thoughts on “Brainscan watches an Ed Wood film!

  1. I thought Hmmm, I bet this has some interesting trivia. I looked it up on IMDb. No trivia at all but they rate it a 5.1. Another Ed Wood called Take It Out In Trade only got a 3.9, if you really want to scrape the sub-basement of the bottom of the barrel…

  2. In defense of Ed Wood this film passes the Showgirls/Basic Instinct filmmaking standard. If you can’t blind them with brilliance; mesmerize them with biguns and a gratuitous beaver shot.

    1. And he also follows one of the basic Scoopy principles – one that I call the Deathstalker 2 principle – if you have no choice but to make a bad movie, make it so bad that it will be both memorable and entertaining.

      Of course the difference between Ed’s movies and some hilariously bad classics like Deathstalker 2, Hell Comes to Frogtown and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, is that those other directors knew they were making schlock and owned it. Ed Wood, on the other hand, thought he was the reincarnation of Shakespeare.

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