Crew
Director/Producer – Ed De Priest, Screenplay – Akdon Telmig [Edward D. Wood Jr]. Production Company – Canyon Films.
Cast
Susan Berkely, Billy Wolf, Sharon Wells, Natasha, Nancy McGavin, Tod Badker, Tony Brooks, Pam English, Shari Stevens, John Lee, Bonnie Walker, Harry Stone, Mary Doyle, Gail Lavon, Greg Mathis, Larry Vincente, April O’Connor
Plot
The sex lives of a group of cave people as they engage in various virgin sacrifices and orgies. At the same, they try to survive against a rampaging dinosaur outside the cave. Meanwhile, one of the girls is abducted by an ape and dragged away as its sex slave.
Edward D. Wood Jr (1924-78) became a cult figure on the basis of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), which was labelled the worst film ever made by the Medved Brothers in The Golden Turkey Awards (1980) and Wood the worst director of all time. This contrarily created a great fascination with Wood and his films. Throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s, there was a great deal of excavation of Wood’s life and associates by magazines like Filmfax, assorted Wood documentaries and then the Tim Burton film Ed Wood (1994).
During this time, all of Wood’s films were unearthed, including several that had been completely forgotten or never released such as Night of the Ghouls (made 1960, released 1983), Orgy of the Dead (1965) and Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love (1971). In the increasingly wider search, other unknown oddities turned up, including One Million AC/DC, a sex film that Wood wrote under the pseudonym of Akdon Telmig. (Wood published quite a bit of pornographic fiction when his career as a director dried up, including directing one such film with Necromania).
During the video era of the 1990s, there was a fad for coming up with titles for adult films that were spoofs of popular hits – the likes of Edward Penishands (1991), The Flintbones (1992) and Shaving Ryan’s Privates (2002), among numerous others. One Million AC/DC may well have been the first of these and is clearly construed as an adult take on the popular then-recent Racquel Welch-starring prehistoric drama One Million Years B.C. (1966) and is set around the mating rituals of a group of cavepeople.
The cavepeople dramas are none too exciting. The film opens on a ‘virgin sacrifice,’ a rather distasteful scene that involves a woman being violated with a large horn, which she soon comes to enjoy. The rest of One Million AC/DC is assorted couplings between cave men and women and a climactic orgy of sorts. It is all very tame by today’s standards – no more than bare boobs and some bush shots, along with simulated humping. (Although the dvd version I saw is sixteen minutes shorter than the IMDB-listed runtime of 80 minutes, suggesting that some other possibly more hardcore footage might be missing or edited out). There is also a subplot about one cavewoman who gets abducted by an ape and made a prisoner in a cave from which she keeps making an escape only to be recaptured. The cave incidentally is the famous Bronson Canyon location used as the lair of Ro-Man in Robot Monster (1953) and assorted episodes of Star Trek (1966-9).
As might be expected of an Edward D. Wood Jr film, even one he has only scripted, One Million AC/DC is fairly pitifully made. The dinosaur looks exactly like a plastic toy dinosaur that someone is shaking about from behind a rock. The rest of the time the film trots out rehashed footage from One Million B.C. (1940), possibly the most recycled film in history. The cavepeople do speak in English, although Edward D. Wood Jr’s infamous purple prose rarely gets much of a look-in. There is one bizarre scene where the cave artist asks one of the other guys “Do you have any filthy pictures of your sister? Do you want to see some?”
Edward D. Wood Jr’s other genre films are:– the transvestitism pseudo-documentary Glen or Glenda? (1952); the mad scientist film Bride of the Monster (1955); the script for the ape-human love saga The Bride and the Beast (1958); the fake medium film Night of the Ghouls (1960, released 1983); the script for the nudie horror Orgy of the Dead (1965); the script for the prehistoric sex comedy One Million AC/DC (1969); and the pornographic film Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love (1971).
Trailer here