[Intellivision]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067479/

The filmmaker Ed Wood, Jr., who died in 1978, didn’t make many movies during the last decade of his life, owing to problems with money and booze, not to mention the problem of never having made movies that were any good in the previous decades. He got by, toward the end, by writing pulp—some hundred and thirty-five sex novels, such as "Bye Bye Broadie" and "Killer in Drag." Seven years before he died, though, he did shoot one last picture, a pornographic film called "Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love!" Wood wrote, produced, and directed it (in three days, dressed in a pink baby-doll outfit) under the name Don Miller. The budget was five thousand dollars. It was one of the first skin flicks to have what, technically, could be called a plot, and for Ed Wood fanatics—among whom are many Woodites, as adherents of the Church of the Heavenly Wood call themselves (no joke)—it was for years the ultimate buried treasure, the Woodite equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Wood made two versions, one soft-core (the sex is simulated) and the other hard-core (the sex is real), both of which went missing after an extremely brief run at the Hudson Theatre, on West Forty-fourth Street, in 1971. The soft-core version turned up at a yard sale in California in 1992 and eventually achieved limited distribution, thanks to the exertions of some West Coast cult-video collectors. But the longer, dirtier cut was the grail.
In 2001, after a seventeen-year quest, Rudolph Grey, the author of the Ed Wood biography "Nightmare of Ecstasy" (which became the basis for the Tim Burton film "Ed Wood"), found the triple-X "Necromania" in a warehouse in Los Angeles. He and a B-movie distributor named Alexander Kogan bought the negatives for "two and a half nickels," as Kogan put it. Their next task was to figure out what to do with them. A year ago, Kogan came across a profile in the Times of the blog impresario Nick Denton, who had just launched a pornography Web site called Fleshbot. Kogan e-mailed Denton and said that if Denton ever wanted to sell porn films on his site he should consider buying "Necromania." "I bought it as a joke," Kogan said last week, in an effort to make it clear that he was not, repeat not, a pornographer.
Denton, however, was interested in it as a business proposition, in his quest to become a pornographer, if a somewhat ironic one, and next week he is releasing it as Fleshbot Films’ first title. And so, at long last, Woodites, if not the world, have an opportunity to see the story of Danny and Shirley, a young couple who, to spruce up their flagging sex life, visit a strange house that seems to be both a sex clinic and a funeral parlor. They seek out a therapist named Madame Heles, who ministers to her patients inside a coffin. There are numerous erotic pairings (including one between a woman and a bronze skull), some delightfully incongruous music (surf songs and cha-cha-cha), and, of course, choice dialogue (Danny, gesturing to a pair of red pajama bottoms: "For such a fancy setting, you think these are conventional enough?" Tanya: "The word ‘conventional’ has many connotations, never more so than in this establishment"). Compared with the pneumatic tattoo-and-tan-line porn that the Valley turns out these days, or even with the steamier passages in the sexual-harassment suit filed against Bill O’Reilly last week (one wishes that Wood had lived long enough to make a movie called "Loofah!"), the squalor of the contortions onscreen seems almost quaint.
Rudy Grey, who is in his forties and lives in Hell’s Kitchen, stopped by the other day to deliver a copy of an article that he wrote two years ago for the magazine Cult Movies, under the headline "Lost Ed Wood Movies . . . Found!" (The other lost one was an unfinished porno flick called "The Only House in Town," which Fleshbot is releasing as well.) Grey has spiky dark hair and patchy stubble; imagine Pedro Almodóvar without a job. "Ed Wood was a great filmmaker," Grey said. "Maybe he’s not Hitchcock or Kubrick, but . . . " Grey is not an ironic enthusiast.
In his view, even "Necromania" contains moments of brilliance. Grey writes in Cult Movies, "Take particular note also of the sequence which begins 28 minutes & 7 seconds into the movie, where Ric Lutze struggles to get his red pajama bottoms unraveled to put them on. But, he can’t. His fumbling lasts about 15 seconds, easily edited out. But Wood deliberately leaves it in. Why? I think it’s his perverse sense of humor . . . I think he got a kick out of Lutze fumbling on camera with the pants." At the end of the piece, Grey remarks upon a moment when Danny looks behind a curtain and glimpses what some might call a blurry, kaleidoscopic orgy but which Grey calls "the sex dimension of lost souls who can never be satisfied." His last sentence: "Taking into account the context and the tone of the rest of the movie, it may be the most remarkable sequence in the history of film."

— Nick Paumgarten
http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:Ig31-chsImQJ:garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~lflynn/vault.html+necromania+found&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd =10

[Iain]

Awesome news!

Thanks for the info.

[Intellivision]

Help to petition for Ed Wood, Jr.'s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

[atsonicpark]

This film is terrible! I like it!!

[noisereductions]

so is it available on DVD or...?

[Trasher02]

His porns are hilarious.

[DanielCarlson]

Haha, I gotta see this.

[noisereductions]

I have Orgy Of The Dead.

[atsonicpark]

Yeah, Orgy of the Dead is one of my all time favorite films.