Bride of The Monster/Review

I have been a fan of Edward D. Wood Jr since before I actually saw any of his films. Tim Burton's biopic Ed Wood is an excellent introduction to the unfairly labelled ‘worst director ever’. Bride of the Monster stars Bela Lugosi as a mad scientist along with a whole host of Wood regulars such as Tor Johnson and Delores Fuller.

The film follows the tale of an unfortunate mad scientist, Dr Eric Vornoff (Lugosi) who was driven out of his home country for trying to create a race of atomic supermen. He relocates to a swamp in small town America and continues his experiments. As well as trying to create atomic supermen the professor also keeps a giant octopus in the swamp outside his house. This allows for one of the most obvious uses of stock footage in film history as Dr Vornoff looks out of a tiny window in his secret lab and sees a gigantic sea octopus frolicking in the ocean water.

The story starts with two locals hunting near the swamps. One of them is attacked and killed by the giant octopus and the other is captured by Lobo (Johnson) and taken to be experimented on by Dr Vornoff. Unfortunately, the doctor's experiments don’t seem to be going to plan as he has killed all of his test subjects so far and this one is no different.

The local police and townspeople are obviously getting a bit annoyed that so many people are going missing but the ongoing investigation seems to be coming up with nothing. Will the police and a local female reporter be able to get to the bottom of the case before Dr Vornhoff and his hulking servant Lobo kill again?

I really enjoyed this film its has every thing you want from a 50’s B movie bad acing, hackneyed dialogue, cardboard sets and extremely terrible special effects. I absolutely love the rubber octopus that is brought in when anyone has to be dispatched by the ‘monster’ it is so obvious that it does not move at all and the actors have to use all their ‘skill’ to move the tentacles and make it look like they’re being attacked.

If all that was not enough to make you want to go running from your computer and track down a copy of Ed Wood's masterpiece Bride of the Monster the film also has one more drawing point, a fantastic speech written by Mr Wood himself and hammed up with the best of them by Bela Lugosi (it was excellently reproduced by Martin Landau in the film Ed Wood) when he is asked to go back to his home country to finish his work. This speech is so great that I feel the need to reproduce it now (for best effect read with a Hungarian accent). So without further ado I will leave the closing remarks of this review to Dr Vornoff himself, enjoy:

"Home? I have no home. Hunted, despised, Living like an animal! The jungle is my home. But I will show the world that I can be its master! I will perfect my own race of people. A race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

Reviewed by Neil Evans