Night of the Ghouls (1959)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Night of the Ghouls (or the more appropriately titled Revenge of the Dead) is yet another silly low-budget effort from Edward D. Wood, Jr. The plot deals with the police investigating strange goings on at a secluded house where a phony swami is bilking money out of elderly people hoping to connect with their departed loved ones. The film has many of the elements typical of Wood films, including stock footage, incompetent policemen, poor special effects, and a serious lack of talent and budget. Too bad Lugosi isn't on hand. He could have at least brought some bravado to the Dr. Acula role.Apparently this is supposed to be some kind of a sequel to Bride of the Monster. It even has Tor Johnson reprising his Lobo role from that film. His burn makeup is actually one of the more impressive elements of this film. But instead of Lugosi as a mad scientist, we get this phony Dr. Acula guy. Kenne Duncan, one of Wood's drinking buddies, is just basically a guy in a suit with a cheap turban on his head. He isn't scary or mystical, he's just kind of an a-hole to everyone around him. True he is theoretically supposed to be a phony, but this setup only allows Wood the freedom to cut even more corners than usual with the production. You say the séance seen looks cheap? Of course it does. The guy performing it is a fake! You get the picture...A good chunk of this film is actually taken from a previous short film with the police detective walking around a theater in a tuxedo. That explains the ludicrous reason they have him wearing one in this picture! "I was just on my way to the opera when I got your message...." Ha! Some of the biggest chuckles are from: Wood's stock footage not matching up with the movie theme. Criswell, who narrates and also plays a small role, is talking about juvenile delinquency and the footage we see is just of some kids dancing at some kind of 50s malt shop. The bumbling Paul Marco is also back as Officer Kelton. His lines are so terrible, you will fall over laughing! The film's centerpiece is the previously mentioned séance scene. Dr. Acula has some old buzzards on one side of a long table, and some plastic skeletons on the other. We hear an off-screen gong bang several times. A trumpet is lazily hung by a string and it keeps blurting out some off-key notes, randomly. There are a couple of random shots of a guy in black-face mumbling incoherently. Some guy with a sheet over his head randomly dances around as someone plays an old fashioned slide whistle. None of it makes sense. The old buzzards just stare ahead, not reacting to any of it in any way. In other words, this scene is everything we've come to endear about Wood films. There is a nice little plot twist at the end that makes it all worth it. Kind of. Like many wood films, this can only be viewed for novelty effect. Definitely worth a look, but Lugosi would have improved it. He may not have even been alive by the time it was filmed, however. 4 of 10 stars.The Hound.

Ghouls! The movie itself is a ghoul. It dwelled in a filmic graveyard for 23 years before some misguided soul unearthed the remains and paid to process the film. Now the creature wanders the dark halls of cable and sadistic late shows inflicting groans, snickers, and stomach-aches on masochists like me. No, it doesn't reach the inspired level of Plan 9, but it tries. Filmed in somebody's seedy garage (Wood never uses sets when a curtain will do), the goofy Wood trademarks are all present—bad acting, clueless dialog, a $1.50 budget, and his beloved lightning bolts which I take are from angry movie gods with bad aim. Then there's a pair of Wood's all- stars— the poor man's Nostradamus, Criswell, and everyone's favorite man mountain, Tor Johnson. Still, Woods' goulash does have one distinction— the worst comedy relief on record. Where Paul Marco came from I don't know, but his Patrolman Kelton makes Barney Fife look like Einstein, and about a fraction as funny. I'm just sorry our old six-gun pal Kenne Duncan needed a payday or at least bus fare to the beach. You can tell he misses those old Saturday matinees by the way he sleepwalks through his lines. Okay, on the subject of Wood, I'm beating a dead horse. So let me put down the word processor and find out when his next fun-fest is on. Oh my gosh, the biggest horror of all— I'm looking forward to it.

An old couple, taking a shortcut at night, run into "a nightmare of horror" - an attractive blonde woman with long fingernails! The old woman can't quite stop smiling long enough to look horrified, but the police are sent to investigate anyway. Lt. Bradford, a man with a passion for internal monologue, and Kelton, an incompetent buffoon, discover Dr. Acula, a man in a turban.Acula has been swindling money from the incredibly dense with the old raising-the-dead scam using a floating trumpet and bed sheet. But what Dr. Acula doesn't know is that he accidentally has real powers to raise the dead, and the dead just might knock off his turban! Fortunately for them, he decides to evade them by running directly at them."Night of the Ghouls," the long-awaited sequel to "Bride of the Monster," was left unreleased for over twenty years because writer/director Ed Wood couldn't pay the film lab fees. Though not quite as "good" as "Plan 9 From Outer Space" or "Glen or Glenda?" it's definitely worth watching just to see the look on the old couple's faces when they see the "monster." It doesn't get much better than that. God bless you, Ed Wood.

This is the "lost" Ed Wood film. It wasn't released until 1983 because Wood couldn't pay for the development fees at the film lab. I highly doubt that this would have been the one to break him into the mainstream.The plot is that Dr. Acula (hee-hee get it?) is running a spook house in the same house that was supposedly burned down in "Bride of the Monster." Tor Johnson also plays the same character, Lobo, who was supposedly burned in the accident. And yet again, Kelton the cop mucks things up with his stupidity. Overall, I really don't think it was intended as a sequel, but in the weird world of Ed Wood just about anything could be recycled. I didn't enjoy this one as much as Wood's other films. I think that he did a better job on this than Plan 9, but it lacked something.Look for Dr. Tom Watson (this time he actually shows his face unlike when he played Bela Lugosi's stunt double), and Tony Cardoza (MST3K fans should recognize him as everyone's favorite monotone, Coleman Francis collaborator).