Ed Wood didn’t direct The Bride and the Beast; he “only” wrote it. One really can’t tell the difference, as the film is stamped with the Plan 9 auteur’s brand of incompetence all around.

The bride of the title is Laura (Charlotte Austin, Gorilla at Large), newly married to Dan (Lance Fuller, This Island Earth). However, her hubby is not the beast … but he does keep it caged in his basement! And by “it,” we mean his gorilla. (Yes, gorilla.) It is named Spanky. (Yes, Spanky.)

Captured as a baby, the now fully grown Spanky is due to be shipped to the zoo in a week’s time. Wasting no precious moments, the big ape goes so agog at the sight of lovely Laura, he bends the bars of his cage! The fascination is mutual, as Laura — sleeping in her twin bed, separate from Dan — dreams of having her nightgown ripped off by Spanky. Even awake, she can’t quite contain her obsession, which stems — as hypnosis reveals — from the suppressed fact that she used to be gorilla herself in a previous life.

Ah, but of course! The way it’s written, it makes perfect sense … if your name were Ed Wood. The way it plays out onscreen, guided by The Amazing Exploits of the Clutching Hand serial producer Adrian Weiss in his only feature gig as director, it makes zero sense, which is the only reason The Bride and the Beast didn’t disappear into mere memories. The pic is Woodsian through and through, as exemplified by:
• obvious day-for-night shots, made all the more jarring by a storm that’s supposed to be taking place;
• a variety of mismatched stock footage for the second half’s jungle scenes, some of which are negatively exposed;
• the man-vs.-tiger wrestling match, in which the cat clearly is a stuffed animal; and
• suspect science, including Dan’s outright untruth that the tarantula is “as deadly as the lion’s fang and the elephant’s foot.”

We also can’t discount the howler of an ending, which finds newlywed Dan suddenly back to bachelorhood as Laura rejoins the apes as their rightful queen. To think of the activities that await her and Spanky in private is … is … well, it’s an image I don’t want seared in my brain. Moviegoers who paid good money in 1958 to catch The Bride and the Beast in theaters must have found it a safari on the regret level of Cecil the Lion. —Rod Lott

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