Moonshine Mountain (1964)

I had this theory based on viewing the movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis. It was that, if you have no talent at all, you can do pretty well if you make a movie that's just an excuse for a series of nude, sex or gore scenes.

I doubt it would work now. Porn is everywhere and Hollywood is awash with big budget gore.

I wondered if it would work with something more innocuous. Like, say, hillbilly music---if you did a movie that was just an excuse for a series of scenes with hillbillies playing their music. No. It wouldn't work.

Just forget my Herschell Gordon Lewis theory.

I just watched Lewis's Moonshine Mountain. A singer goes to the mountains of North Carolina. Hangs around with horrible, obnoxious, overbearingly friendly but simultaneously menacing and violent Southerners. They keep playing guitars and singing. Absolutely awful.

Ed Wood wasn't that bad. Plan 9 was entertaining. It had five storylines that all came together in the end. It was well photographed and nicely edited, and back then horror movies were all intended for children. Look at Roger Ebert's outraged review of Night of the Living Dead. He watched it in a theater full of traumatized children. You think children of the 1950's would notice any flaws in Plan 9?

Wood's next movie, The Sinister Urge, was fine. The exterior scenes were filmed outdoors, it had a crowd scene and a car wreck. I liked the girls in it. They leave church Sunday morning and beat up a guy because he hadn't paid for the pornographic pictures the criminals had supplied him.