Volume 41, Number 19 · November 17, 1994
A Kinder, Gentler Perversity
By Geoffrey O'Brien
ED WOOD'S MOVIES AVAILABLE ON VIDEO
Ed Wood
directed by Tim Burton. Touchstone Pictures
The Violent Years
Rhino Home Video, $9.95
Jail Bait
Rhino Home Video, $9.95
Plan 9 from Outer Space
Rhino Home Video, $9.95
Night of the Ghouls
Rhino Home Video, $9.95
Bride of the Monster
Something Weird Video, $20.00
Glen or Glenda (I Changed My Sex)
Something Weird Video, (available for rental, not for sale)
Ed Wood: Look Back in Angora
directed by Ted Newsom
Rhino Home Video,, $19.95
Few biographical movies can afford to take as their title the bare name of their subject, without further adornment or explication. Napoleon, Cleopatra, Abraham Lincoln, Al Capone, Gandhi—and now, Tim Burton's Ed Wood. The inevitable response—Who was Ed Wood, and why did they make a movie about him?—is part of the strategy. Nor does Burton stand alone in his enshrinement of the mysterious Mr. Wood. In addition to his film (now in general release after being shown at the New York Film Festival), Wood's career has been the subject of two recent documentaries (Ted Newsom's Look Back in Angora and Brett Thompson's The Haunted World of Ed Wood), a biography (Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy), critical essays, and a succession of retrospectives: all this for a man who lived in obscurity and died only sixteen years ago under the most squalid circumstances.
Review, 3268 words
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