A Monster to Be Despised!

By RICHARD CORLISS

Come on, now! Edward D. Wood Jr. is not nearly the world's worst director. Lots of people made movies that were even more desperately inept and ludicrous. It's true that Wood's cheap '50s exploitation films -- the heartfelt expose Glen or Glenda, the octopus-wrangling horror movie Bride of the Monster and the sci-fi anticlassic Plan 9 from Outer Space -- boasted floridly awful dialogue and actors who seemed terrified to be on camera. But Wood had passion, ambition and, as a heterosexual who enjoyed wearing women's clothes, a very chic identity crisis. His films were about something: man's need to create a monument to himself, even if it ends up as a smirk on the face of posterity.

After his death in 1978, Ed Wood got the last laugh: his films were rediscovered, first as camp and now as fodder for a light industry in cultural revisionism. The shaggy hagiography includes a breezily lurid documentary, Ed Wood: Look Back in Angora; a second documentary on the making of Plan 9; and even a porno homage -- Plan 69 from Outer Space. And now there's Tim Burton's surprisingly listless biopic, known simply as Ed Wood. Once a never-was, Wood is now a brand name.

The Ed Wood script, by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (based on Rudolph Grey's excellent 1992 biography, Nightmare of Terror), posits Wood as a classic American optimist, a Capraesque hero with little to be optimistic about, since he was also a classic American loser. That's a fine start, but the film then marches in staid chronological order: Ed made this bad film, then this one, then a third. It focuses on the director's curious cast of hangers-on (played here by Bill Murray, Jeffrey Jones, Lisa Marie and others). They were all, as Wood's psychic sidekick Criswell intones in the 1965 Orgy of the Dead, "monsters to be pitied, monsters to be despised, from the innermost depths of the world!" But Burton treats them with stone-faced sympathy.

Primary among these was the aging, decrepit but still majestic Bela Lugosi. Martin Landau does a handsome turn as Lugosi -- so strong that when he disappears, Ed Wood loses its momentum and continues its death march on the shoulders of Johnny Depp, in the title role, an exemplary actor who can't do much more than smile heroically in the face of every humiliation. Sometimes this is funny. "Really?" Depp says, sounding like Jon Lovitz's Master Thespian on Saturday Night Live. "Worst film you ever saw? Well, my next one'll be better!"

Most of Burton's films have been better than better. One wonders why this one is so dishwatery -- why it lacks the cartoon zest and outsider ache of Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands or Batman Returns. Could it be he gave the material too much respect? The real Ed Wood would have known how to do it: with oddball twists and goofy stock footage, with no brains and a lot of heart. It would have been dreadful, and it would have been better -- more desperate, more daring. But this Ed Wood is dead wood.