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Last week's Movie Quiz winners

Although last week's quiz movie in question was really the 1994 semi-quasi-pseudo-biopic Ed Wood, several quiz players are forgiven for thinking it was really Ed's masterpiece, Plan 9 From Outer Space. Declared the worst movie ever made in the excrementitious Golden Turkeys book, cartoonist/illustrator Drew Friedman set the record straight: "Plan 9 is far from the worst movie ever made. The worst movie ever made is whatever movie Meryl Streep was just in."

Director Tim Burton and star Johnny Depp took their admittedly pathetic titular subject and did his life story as a transvestite screwball comedy. The cast is wonderful, especially the actors playing the members of Wood's weird repertoire company. Lots of winners cited Max Casella and Vincent D'Onofrio in last week's picture clues as being favorites (with a few also commenting on the latter's voice dubber, Orson Welles soundalike Maurice LaMarche from Pinky and the Brain), and almost everyone praised Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi and-- my own favorite-- Bill Murray as Myra's real-life brother, Bunny Breckinridge. ("Let's hear you call Boris Karloff a cocksucker!") Even Danny Elfman's great score is a favorite of a few. And several winners made a similar concluding pronouncement: "Great film."

(Landau, who looks less ghoulish as Bela than he did as a young man in North by Northwest, had a great cameo at the Mission: Impossible premiere, or at least on whatever crap TV show that covered it at the time. The squeaky little dummy interviewing the stars on the red carpet asked him, "What are you doing here?" Landau proceeded to gnaw her a few new orifices, informing her of his role in the original show. Then he stalked off, only to spin around and return to blast her some more!)

But wait! Not everyone agreed with the hosannahs, like the winner who admitted, "I wanted to like it, but it literally put me to sleep. Another one for the Sarah Jessica Parker highlight roll." A few disliked the liberties taken with the biographical facts, especially the movie's almost Capra-esque conclusion: "Just as the same screenwriters foisted a fake happy ending on their Andy Kaufman movie by shifting his Carnegie Hall concert from the beginning of his career to the very end, Plan 9 From Outer Space gets a royal premiere instead of being dumped to theaters years after completion." I don't disagree with the latter view, or the observation that the writers' pay for this script would have not only funded Ed's ouevre but also financed another one or twenty new films.

My personal hope: someday the real Ed Wood story will be filmed. Preferably with an all-octopus cast.

(Besides being one of the worst film-makers of all time, is this man also America's most prolific transvestite novelist?)

So congratulations and a motor-free octopus to the following quiz winners: Vince Tuss, Mike Knox, Corey Anderson, Sarah Sicheneder, Jim Moomey, Joe Rosenberg, Michael Mattson, Nancy Louise Rutherford, Nick Rupar, Bob Redwing, Gus Mastrapa, Stacy Sarette, Bill Hearne, Bill Kelly, Mike Kelly, Donald Greene, E. Yarber, Thomas Miller, and Kevin Musolino. And morphine-laced kudos to none other than quiz champeen Wayne Palmer, who wins this week's Grand Prize: a DVD of the impossible-to-find '50s Red Menace film, Leo McCarey's great mistake, My Son John!

Posted by Steve Monaco at August 27, 2007 12:21 AM

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