NECROMANIA
As Nick Paumgarten reports in the Talk of the Town section of this week’s New Yorker magazine, “In 2001, after a seventeen-year quest, Rudloph Grey, the author of the Ed Wood biography Nighmare of Ecstasy (which became the basis for the Tim Burton film Ed Wood), found [Wood's final film,] the triple-X Necromania in a warehouse in Los Angeles.”
Wood wrote, produced and directed a soft-core and hard-core version of the film in three days under the name Don Miller; the soft-core version was discovered in 1992 and has since been available in limited release.
Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love (1971) — “one of the first skin flicks to have what, technically, could be called a plot,” according to the New Yorker — is now available on DVD. It’s the first title released under the newly launched Fleshbot Films imprint.
As described on the Fleshbot site: “The plot involves a coven of witches, led by the mysterious Madame Heles, who concoct a series of ‘lessons’ for a couple whose sex life is less than satisfying. Their teaching methods involve topless chanting, simulated intercourse with painted skulls, and a lot of oral sex. Madame Heles was to have been played by longtime Wood collaborator Maila ‘Vampira’ Nurmi, who took one look at the script and withdrew herself from the production citing concerns of ‘professional suicide’.”
