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mst3kproject · 6 years

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423: Bride of the Monster

My favourite part of this episode is the ‘Favourites from Hired!’ skit Joel and the bots do in between the short and the movie. It’s so perfect in its parody of musicals, and the songs are better than almost any of the music featured in MST3K’s movies. When I got my current job, back in 2012, I actually extemporized a career-appropriate version of I Just Got Hired to sing on the way home.

I enjoy the movie, too, though. The ‘Old Willows Place’ is a house by a lake in the middle of some very spooky woods, with a reputation for being a home to monsters – which include the hulking Lobo and the gargantuan octopus that lives in the lake. The monsters, however, are just the appetizer: mad Dr. Vornoff has built an evil laboratory in the basement and is trying to create a race of giants by experimenting on random passers-by. So far all his attempts have been failures, but enough rumor about this has leaked out to get the attention of zealous reporter Janet Lawton. She heads out to the Old Willows Place to see for herself, only to be captured by Vornoff and Lobo. Is Janet doomed to become Vornoff’s first successful giant?

This movie is famously cheap, to the point where it becomes kind of charming. The walls of Vornoff’s laboratory are plywood painted with big dark squares to try to look like stone. When the monster octopus isn’t footage shot through the side of an aquarium, it’s a few immobile rubber tentacles off a prop from the 1948 movie Wake of the Red Witch (it is not true that Wood stole the octopus, by the way – Tim Burton appears to have made that up). Vornoff growing to gigantic size is represented by him raising his arms into the air, and later by the stuntman wearing platform heels. A scene with ‘quicksand’ is just actor Tony McCoy standing in a hole in the ground.

Also rather entertaining is the fact that while nobody in the movie is very good, they all look like they’re having a great time. Loretta King relishes every word of her dialogue and Harvey B. Dunn as the police chief seems to enjoy the banter scenes and the interactions with his little parrot – I wonder if it were Dunn’s real-life pet. Bela Lugosi as Vornoff chews the scenery with evident enjoyment and a surprising amount of dignity for such a silly film.

The plot mostly resembles a coherent story, and the cast’s actual dedication is enough to move Bride of the Monster past ‘bad’ and into ‘so bad it’s good’. What really interests me about it, though, is the question of whose movie it actually is. There’s only one character who can properly be said to have an arc, to start off as one thing and evolve into another. It’s not Janet or Dick, our apparent heroes, nor is it Dr. Vornoff – it’s actually Lobo!

Lobo begins the movie as Vornoff’s unquestioning servant, doing his master’s dirty work and being beaten into submission when he refuses – which isn’t often. We’re meant to believe he’s mentally handicapped, but he’s smarter than he lets on, and something about Janet (or perhaps her furry hat) awakens some rebellion in him. At the climax he takes charge of his own destiny, saving Janet from Vornoff’s clutches and strapping Vornoff into his own machine. He has become somebody capable of standing up for himself against his abuser, only for the very instrument of his revenge – the giant-making machine – to turn against him!

Think about it: who else is gonna be the hero of this movie? Not Janet – once she reaches the Old Willows Place, Vornoff places her in his hypnotic thrall and she’s incapable of doing anything useful until Lobo unties her. Not Dick – he’s chained up while Vornoff prepares to experiment on Janet and can’t get out until she’s free to undo his shackles! Then he tries to fight Lobo, gets his ass kicked and his shirt mostly torn off, and just lies on the floor during the climax. Certainly not the chief of police – his bird shows more initiative than he does! It’s Lobo all the way! He oughtta team up with Eulabelle from The Horror of Party Beach. There’s a pair of unappreciated heroes who could totally save the world!

On the other hand, Lobo also gets a death suitable for the villain of this movie! Like any halfway-respectable mad scientist, Lobo is killed by his own creation, the giant Dr. Vornoff! It’s a bit of an open question what Lobo thought the embiggening machine would do to Vornoff… he clearly fears it’ll kill Janet, since he takes the trouble to rescue her from it, and it’s likely he puts Vornoff into it hoping to see him fried. Why he didn’t just break the man’s neck or feed him to the octopus, as he did with Dr. Strowski, I don’t know. Perhaps he’s merely falling back on his training, although there are clearly some higher thought processes at work, since he must have learned to operate Dr. Vornoff’s machine by watching, and since this is evidently something he hasn’t done before he must have made a conscious decision to do it.

Vornoff is in turn killed by his creation, the monster octopus. Such is the fate of all who Tamper in God’s Domain.

Another argument that this is actually Lobo’s movie is that he might be the monster referenced in the title. Janet is clearly the bride, since she’s wearing a wedding dress at the climax – though the movie never tells us why, and the last guy Vornoff experimented on appeared to just have a sheet over him. It’s true that Vornoff tells the two hunters Lobo is not the legendary Lake Marsh Monster, and implies that it is actually the giant octopus – but nobody comes near marrying the octopus. Instead, it’s Lobo who appears to consider Janet a potential bride, and rescues her in the hope of winning her heart. Then again, perhaps Vornoff is the monster. He carries Janet off, probably intending to rebuild his laboratory and make her his giant bride, and his acts throughout the movie certainly qualify as monstrous.

I know, I know. It’s an Ed Wood movie. I’m thinking too hard.

Unique in Ed Wood's filmography, Bride of the Monster is rather mysterious about its message. I’ve observed before that Wood wanted to make important movies, movies that would teach people to be better human beings, and usually this ‘moral’ is pretty obvious. The Sinister Urge is about the horrors of pornography, Jail Bait and The Violent Years are about being involved with your children’s lives, and Plan Nine from Outer Space is about the arms race, as the aliens are determined to destroy us before we can discover the ultimate weapon. What the heck is Bride of the Monster about?

Perhaps it, too, is about humanity’s warlike tendencies: Dr. Vornoff’s home country wants to use his work to rule the world, while Vornoff, like Dr. Zorka of The Phantom Creeps, would rather rule the world himself. The final line, the infamous he tampered in God’s domain, suggest that the theme is scientific over-reach, which is also echoed in Plan Nine – Vornoff discovered something man wasn’t mean to know and it destroyed him, just as the Solarmanite is likely to do to all humanity in the other movie. But there’s also yet a third theme from Wood’s other works that creeps in here, and that’s the uselessness of the police.

I’m not sure if this is something Wood actually thought about, like he did his other themes, but it is a motif that runs through multiple films: the police don’t try very hard and are, ultimately, irrelevant. It was true in Plan Nine, as well as in Jail Bait and The Sinister Urge – policemen are fairly major characters without doing anything much to further the plot. This seems to be at the forefront of Bride of the Monster even more than the other films, as we get to know at least three of the cops fairly well and one of them, Dick, has an intimate connection with the actual plot in that he’s engaged to Janet.

As well as Dick, who tries to be a hero and fails, spectacularly, over and over, we get to know two other policemen: Kelton is eager to please but incompetent and cowardly, and Captain Robbins is far more interested in playing with his pet bird than with solving crimes. They’re all spectators for the climax, while Lobo does interesting things and giant Vornoff fights his octopus. Did Wood have some kind of grudge against the constabulary? Or was all this just a side effect of bad writing and attempts to add character?

Finally, Bride of the Monster is particular fun for MSTies because it’s so full of opportunities to play The Movies Are All Coming Together. If you feel like it, for example, you can wonder if Tor Johnson is playing the same Lobo as in The Unearthly – perhaps he came to, escaped the fire, and went to go work for Dr. Conway! Heck, maybe he’s also the same character as in The Beast of Yucca Flats… maybe he got his scars from that nuclear test, and is able to work Vornoff’s machinery because somewhere in there is some vestige of Joseph Javorski, Noted Scientist!

You can also ponder whether this might be a sequel to The Corpse Vanishes. In both movies, Bela Lugosi plays an evil scientist who keeps deformed henchmen and works alone in an isolated house… in The Corpse Vanishes he was interested in young brides and hormone secretions. Maybe in Bride of the Monster he dresses Janet up in a wedding gown because he’s used to working on young brides, and any attempt to turn people into giants would probably involve human growth hormone.

Wood did make a sequel of sorts to Bride of the Monster, called Night of the Ghouls – I’ll have to find that and watch it as an Episode that Never Was. I will not, however, be reviewing Plan Nine. So many other internet reviewers have done so that I doubt I have anything new to say about it, and besides, I honestly don’t think MST3K would ever have featured it. As supposedly ‘the worst movie ever made’ (though we MSTies have seen way worse), it was simply too obvious.

#mst3k #reviews #bride of the monster #ed wood #50s

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