On The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson: The Amazing Criswell

Yes, not all that fresh from Criswell's star turn in Plan 9 From Outer Space, A.K.A. The Magnificent Ambersons of B-movie auteur Edward D. Wood, Junior: a film that manages to be entertaining, incoherent and a textbook case of critic Andrew Sarris' auteur theory.



The amazing one appeared on one of this blogger's all-time favorite television programs, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (note Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog thanks, grovels and genuflects before whoever posted this clip, since television history - thanks to the fact that stations, always looking at that business bottom line, taped over damn near everything to save money - was neither preserved for posterity or posterior).



Alas, it could be argued that Criswell's fortunes did not exactly skyrocket after a stint hobnobbing with Johnny on The Tonight Show. Here is the amazing one's next gig: the introduction to the mind-numbingly inept entry in the "nudie horror" genre Orgy Of The Dead (1965 - screenplay by Ed Wood).

We can only hope that some conscientious film archivist will find, buried inside the same deep, dark cool cave that contains complete, pristine 35mm nitrate prints of Tod Browning's London After Midnight, F.W. Murnau's 4 Devils and Emile Cohl's "The Newlyweds" cartoons, a stack of ultra-rare kinescopes featuring Sid Caesar, Steve Allen and, of course, Ernie Kovacs.

Trailers From Ed Wood Movies

As your correspondent is dealing with jet lag and a full week of fighting a losing battle with "gravel pit" throat - persistent cough - fatigue - general bleccchness (as well as the happier problem of prolonged astonishment over the 2010 Giants' World Series victory), he is yet again way, way too damn lazy to write much of anything.

That said, here are theatrical trailers plugging the entertainingly execrable "cinema on a shoestring"- invariably sans the possession of an actual shoestring - of Edward D. Wood, Jr.







Can you "top" those trailers? Er. . .uh. . . in a strong effort to at least equal them in sheer WTF value, here's Bela Lugosi, waxing poetic in Wood's Citizen Kane, the 1953 opus Glen Or Glenda, A.K.A. I Changed My Sex.



The barrage of bizarreness continues with the worst starring performance by a guy in drag - including The Milton Berle Show - from Glen Or Glenda, sometimes known as Look Back In Angora.