Devil Girls (1999) Starring John Badalamenti, Arlene Cooney, Sandra Delgado & Katie Dugan Written by Andre Perkowski & Ed Wood Jr. Directed by Andre Perkowski

Ed Wood's "Devil Girls": My personal favorite of the trio, this is the first of Perkowski's love letters to the late, great Ed Wood, Director of some of the best worst films ever set to celluloid.

This particular gem is based on the Devil Girls novel by Wood, never turned into one of his legendary films. Fate would put that task squarely on Perkowski's shoulders. The story is about 'The Chicks', a wicked street gang of street-toughened ladies, the titular girls, while they cavort about town, beating up unsuspecting and foolish men, and occasionally smoking doobies. There are power struggles between the Chicks, but their main struggles come from their leader's infatuation with local drug-dealer and pimp, and the youngest member's feelings of regret about joining the gang. Yes, its true, her dear, old, heavily accented mom is getting curious about her daughter's doings, and the truth will likely break her heart. The Chicks are also relentlessly pursued by the cops and Reverend Steele, a beefy crime-fighting clergy man, played in the stylings of Tor Johnson.

The film, shot in only 5 days around the Chicago area, strives to recreate the stylings of Ed Wood's oddball films. Shots are grainy, blurred, over/under-exposed, and full of bizarre continuity errors. The narrator figure of Criswell comes straight out of Plan 9 from Outer Space, popping up at odd moments to admonish the Chicks with a slew of run-on sentences. Particularly fun are cat-fights held for the pimp's favor, and some weird psychedelic freak-outs in his drug den. The film climaxes its end-chase on a boat in a way most fitting and... unexpected.

The style of the film was only aided by the technical errors that come from being a small, penniless film crew working at breakneck pace. Some actors were missing for pivotal scenes, or from the entire shoot, and later cut into the film, or dubbed into scenes, making for some strange interactions. A lack of budget to clean/replace any damages to a class-room set forced the gang that trashed the set in the movie to very gently ransack the area, and pretend to throw items around. Priceless.

This one is hilarious, and while it Lampoons Wood's notorious style, it's done so as an obvious labor of love, a creation that could easily fit in Wood's film library. For a five day shoot, it's a marvel.

While the startlingly large cast deal with the mystery of Acula, who stalks around at night through a series of re-used, appropriately degraded stock shots, a ridiculous number of murder sub-plots fire off around the castle, investigated by doctors and detectives perverse, incompetent, or both.

While still very fun, this one didn't work quite as well for me compared to Devil Girls, which I had to compare, watching them back to back. While many of the same conventions are used, the aging of the film stock, the narration of Criswell, the Wood imitation didn't feel as natural as it did in the original piece. This film, too, was shot in five days, with many of the same interesting problems, and on whatever various film-stocks the crew could find laying around. But somehow the frantic energy is just a little bit less, the dialog a bit more forced. It goes through the motions of imitating Ed Wood, but it is obviously an imitation, where Devil Girls could have been a Wood film.

Either way, it's worth a watch for any Wood fan.

"I Was a Teenage Beatnik": Finally, an original for Andre Perkowski and Terminal Pictures and it... wow, just wow.

The best way I can describe this picture is to have you imagine that Ed Wood and Ray Dennis Steckler gang-banged 'Tetsuo the Iron Man'; this is the film that would be formed from that unholy union.

The story is about a group of beatniks who form a garage band and, through battles within and without, learn to deal with and avoid big major-label fat cats while they seek fortune and glory. There's music, or 'noise' as the kids call it and... some explosions of weird and what appears to be a mad-scientist trapped in a puppets body.

I'll admit, I kind of got lost in there. This film is an experimental, visual typhoon that'll blow your brains back into your balls. Puppets? Check. Big fat guy with no shirt and a twisty mustache? Check. Surreal cover of Ice, Ice, Baby with some Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! tossed in? Check and Check.

If you want to see something that's funny and musical and also... just plenty damn odd. Like, scary weird, then this is one to hunt down. Honestly, go look up some clips first, though. It's one that's just going to be too experimental for most folks.

But, for fans of cult film, worth hunting down for some little cameos by the recently deceased Ray Dennis Steckler (Director of The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, mentioned, above), in his Cash Flagg persona.