Orgy of the Dead is your typical Ed Wood movie. The storyline is, well let’s just say it was most likely put together during filming. The acting is sub par at best, but that just reflects the extremely low budget that was afforded to this movie.

The film begins with a graveyard scene that is a direct recreation of the opening sequence of Night of the Ghouls, a previous Ed Wood film. A young writer, Bob (William Bates), searches out a cemetery to help inspire is next project with his girlfriend, Shirley (Pat Barrington, but billed as Pat Barringer), in tow. After a car crash, they find themselves in a graveyard witnessing some sort of ritual of the dead under the light of a full moon. Soon after they are spotted and captured. The couple then find themselves bound to posts and forced to watch zombie spirits dance for the Emperor of the night (Criswell) and his sexy consort the Black Ghoul (Fawn Silver). The bulk of the movie from that point on is a parade of ten striptease performances by resurrected zombie chics each having a different costume theme. At one point of the movie, Barrington dons on a blonde wig and dances as a gold zombie, a character inspired by the movie Goldfinger, while her Shirley character watches from her post. Throughout movie The Wolf Man and The Mummy lurk behind graves lusting after the dancers.

That is the entire movie for the most part. If any, or all, of the elements of this movie were viewed individually, they could not be taken seriously. For whatever reason though, when they are all thrown together, it somehow works in a ‘it’s so bad I have to watch it’ way. It is for that quality alone that believe is the reason it has gain a cult following.

The amazing thing about this film is how much it was cleaned up when it was remastered for dvd. The quality of the old vhs copies I first watched were about as good as the film. Years later when I watched it on dvd, and was amazed at how much more detail everything had. What used to be cloudy mist, was now the work of cheap fog machines, there are even a few shots that you can see the hoses that the fog is coming out of now.