{"id":1031,"date":"2014-07-13T11:01:22","date_gmt":"2014-07-13T15:01:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bmoviemaniacs.com\/?p=1031"},"modified":"2014-07-13T11:01:22","modified_gmt":"2014-07-13T15:01:22","slug":"accidentally-hilarious-the-sinister-urge-1960","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bmoviemaniacs.com\/blog\/accidentally-hilarious-the-sinister-urge-1960\/","title":{"rendered":"Accidentally Hilarious – The Sinister Urge (1960)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I love B-Movies. Given that I\u2019m writing a couple of articles for a B-Movie blogathon, that can hardly be surprising. In my decades of watching them, I\u2019ve always been more attracted to the crime genre than to those of the fantasy and sci-fi genres. Perhaps it\u2019s due to the crime dramas being set in the real world (or a world more real than can be found in those other genres.) My attitudes toward Ed Wood\u2019s work runs in the same way. He\u2019s mostly remembered for his majestically bad sci-fi movies (Plan 9 From Outer Space, Bride of the Monster), but for me, it\u2019s his crime dramas which I remember him for. Making a sci-fi movie look low-budget is relatively easy; it takes a special kind of talent to make a movie set in the modern world look absolutely unreal in every way. Ed Wood had that talent, and he used it to great effect in films like Glen or Glenda (1953) and The Violent Years (1954). For me, though, the absolute best (and by best I mean worst) film Ed Wood ever did was The Sinister Urge (1960).<\/p>\n

The Sinister Urge is the story of the effect of pornography on society as a whole. At least, that appears to have been Ed Wood\u2019s goal with the film. In the film, the police are seeking a sex crazed maniac who is killing women in the smut racket. The killer, Dirk Williams, works for the woman who runs the smut ring, Gloria Henderson, and her smut director boyfriend, Johnny Ryde. Dirk likes smut. A lot. When he isn\u2019t out seeking more smut to look at, he\u2019s killing another woman. The police, despite an advanced knowledge of the inner workings of Gloria\u2019s setup, are completely unable to either break up the ring or catch the killer. Eventually Dirk, Johnny and Gloria get their comeuppance, and the city is free from smut.<\/p>\n

Ed Wood\u2019s vision of pornography (aka smut) is that everyone in town appears to be either a producer, or a consumer, of it (except the cops, of course.) Moreover, the teenagers in town seem inexplicably linked to it. According to Ed Wood\u2019s vision, high schools and ice cream parlours are hotbeds of vice. Which, let\u2019s face it, is pretty much the same argument in most other teenage films of the period. Further, Gloria\u2019s crew seems to be composed entirely of teenagers, mostly girls who distribute the smut and, when needed, break a few legs to get payment. Gloria seems to depend on them a lot, which makes it all the more stranger when she says that she doesn\u2019t like it when the girls know too much about the setup. There doesn\u2019t seem to be much for them to discover, but if they do, she has Dirk shut them up permanently.<\/p>\n

Dirk\u2019s motivation as a killer in Sinister Urge seems to depend entirely on what part of the script they\u2019re reading from. Early on, Gloria admits to Johnny that she\u2019s used Dirk to shut up potential blackmailers. Johnny expresses his concern about it, reminding her that smut does strange things to Dirk, and bad things happen. Gloria says she can handle him. By the second half of the film, their roles are reversed. Johnny uses Dirk in some of his pictures. Gloria echoes Johnny\u2019s earlier feelings, but Johnny says he can handle Dirk. Of course, both use the caveat that they can control Dirk \u201cwhen they can find him.\u201d As you can no doubt guess, Dirk spends the vast majority of the film looking after himself, causing trouble and seeking smut.<\/p>\n

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And speaking of smut, the movie is downright laughable when it comes to the depiction of said smut. This gigantic operation that Gloria runs seems to consist entirely of Johnny and an odd elderly man who lapses into a Germanic accent whenever he\u2019s \u201cdirecting.\u201d What we see him \u201cdirecting\u201d consists entirely of middle aged women wearing bikinis and, occasionally, even more clothes. In the real world, such pictures can indeed be made sexy; in Ed Wood\u2019s world, they\u2019re not. It\u2019s pure Ed Wood fantasy. And just to add to that fantasy, when Ed shows us Johnny\u2019s office, it\u2019s clearly not meant to be real. How do we know this? The walls are all decorated with posters from Ed\u2019s own films. And yet, it\u2019s obviously not Ed\u2019s own office, but a set. Why would he build a set when he could have saved even more money by using his office? Because the office would look real, and the movie was about fantasy and the mind.<\/p>\n

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Ed\u2019s examination of the effects of smut uses the police investigation as a sounding board for dialogue that\u2019s meant to sound deep and significant. What it does instead is show the police as ridiculously inept. They appear to know all about Gloria and her operations, yet all that information does them no good at all. Do they know who makes the stuff? Yep. Do they know where they make and sell the stuff? Yep. Does all this information help? Nope. Instead, they come up with half-assed plans to maybe come up with the goods, to no avail. When they finally discover Dirk is the killer (thanks to Dirk conveniently leaving his fingerprints on some smut at a crime scene) they come up with the idea of having a male cop dressing up as a woman as a decoy. This plan fizzles out, and it\u2019s only because Gloria herself goofs (in a wonderfully inept final scene) that they\u2019re finally able to close the case. Incompetence rules the day, which sounds like something that might be said about Ed Wood\u2019s films as a whole.<\/p>\n

To be honest, I don\u2019t know much about Ed Wood, or the thought processes he had when he made his films. What I do know though is that, whether intentional or not, the amateurishness of his films makes them clearly fantasy. You can\u2019t watch an Ed Wood film and misinterpret it as reality. The acting, the dialogue, the fakeness of the sets all make it clear that this is all fake. It can be hard to reconcile a movie about women being murdered with being fun, but The Sinister Urge makes it impossible to take anything in it seriously. And therein lies the fun.<\/p>\n

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