Since this footage was never even developed until long after Wood's death (he couldn't afford to pay the lab for the footage he was so poor apparently) according to the trivia then I'm wondering if this film might actually be better than if Wood himself had pieced it together.
It is still pretty bad continuity-wise but then all his films relied heavily on misjointed stock footage shoved between new material (like showing a scene of a police squad car, sirens blaring and one officer driving...cut to another scene where the car...now simply a dark sedan with NO sirens or lights on top and 3 men riding in the car but the sound of sirens still heard on the soundtrack to try and insinuate that this is the same car arriving at their destination...like I say, very bad continuity but maybe he just hoped nobody would be paying that much attention, he obviously didn't).
Anyway, my point is I wonder who actually edited this thing together. The credits in the movie were obviously made back in the '50s and credit it to Wood but he never got the chance to actually do it and nobody bothered to remake the credit sequences to reflect the change (perhaps they didn't want to accept the responsibility or the blame?).
One thing you have to love about this film though is how kooky it is. It doesn't try to make sense of itself. It just revels in its own misdirection.
You can't hate a film too much where the villain of the thing (when he has to pack up and slip out of town) just shrugs and tells his accomplice they can move to the next town and set up shop in another abandoned house and continue pulling the same fake seance scam never once considering how unlikely it would be to locate another run down old farm house with a MASSIVE underground facility built by a mad scientist.
Maybe in Ed Wood's world though every small town has a mad scientist building ridiculously large underground facilities?
I won't mention that the house in this picture is supposed to be the same house from "Bride of the Monster" yet looks nothing like that model used there (do I really even need to point that out? Would Ed have bothered with something like using the same building when he can just say it is the same building and leave it at that? Probably nobody in the audience of this thing ever even saw "Bride of the Monster").
Anyway, you have this tiny old run down farm house above ground and then underground there is this huge warehouse-type building (probably "warehouse-like" because it actually was filmed in a warehouse) with skylights no less...opening out into a field?...
Wood likely edited the film himself. He probably had the money to have workprints developed and edited those, but then couldn't afford the answer print to make any release copies.
Yes, that's the correct story. The trivia section of the imdb is inaccurate. Ed Wood had managed to get for himself one finished copy that was shown at several occasions - there are reports that the movie was broadcast on TV prior to its rediscovery - but he wasn't able to put together enough money to have the negative back or to get enough copies to allow a real release. If you watch closely the credits on the DVD copy, you'll notice that "Wade A. Williams Presents" at the very beginning was graphically added at the time to cover a previous credit. So, the movie had been completed and edited to the point there were original credits.
I've often wondered who "finished" this film. Night of the Ghouls is always credited as "Night of the Ghouls (aka Revenge of the Dead)." Where did "Revenge of the Dead" come from? Was this Ed Wood's original title? Was the title changed to "Night of the Ghouls" when Wade Williams got his hands on it? I have a vague memory of reading, I think in "Nightmare of Ecstasy" that the lab that was holding the film actually pitched the film to drive-in theater distributors. I can't find my copy of the book but I think it suggests that the lab changed the title to spark more interest in the film.
"The film Ed Wood eventually sent to the Film Service Laboratory Inc. of Hollywood for processing, ends with Criswell neatly and methodically swaddling the unconscious form of Kenne Duncan in the white satin tucks and ruffs of a coffin before sending him off "to the crypt" to be interred alive."
"And that's how things stayed for over two decades."
"The film was previewed for AIP and other drive-in distributors, but none of them wanted to pick up the tab for the developing, post-production and final prints. 'Night of the Ghouls' would be forced to undergo its own premature burial on the lab shelves, accumulating storage charges which Ed Wood hadn't a hope of covering."
"In 1982, Criswell made one last, unexpected public appearance when Ed Wood's 'Night of the Ghouls' was finally released after producer Wade Williams had paid off all of its outstanding processing and storage charges."
"Night of the Ghouls is a Wade Williams release that actually is a Wade Williams production. Enduring as a bunch of uncollated stills for a couple of decades, this is a film that Ed Wood was never able to get out of the lab, and it was only completed when Williams finished it (the copyright date is 1983)."
"The editing is credited to the 'CFI Editing Department', and it looks as though the material went through more professional hands than those of Ed Wood. For instance, there are dissolves here and there, a no-no in classic Wood, and the cutting is fairly nicely timed, instead of the sloppy stage waits and mismatched continuity of the previous four films. But Criswell's looney voiceover is poorly cut in places, giving evidence that the movie was indeed assembled from an authentic Wood-cut workprint, as opposed to being edited from scratch in 1983."
If this is all true then there are two versions of the film. The print shown to AIP and the drive-in distributors and the print CFI edited for Wade Williams. The AIP version may very well be the copy Ed Wood talked about and may have been the version shown on TV back in the 60s.
If the AIP version still exists, who would own it? Wade Williams filed for copyright when he acquired the film stock from Film Service Laboratory Inc, but the AIP version was most likely not part of this acquisition. Would the AIP version be public domain? This is very interesting.
I would think that, if Wade Williams owns the copyright to the film, then he would also retain the rights to any derivative works. Unless somebody were to challenge his copyright (mainly by proving that, although Ed's original cut wasn't registered in 1959, it was affixed in a finished format), then any other versions would probably be considered derivative works, since they use the same material(s) found in the copyrighted version.
*bump* Just looking at this and "The Sinister Urge" on YouTube and was surprised to discover that the same "pizza joint brawl" footage was used in both films. I read somewhere that Ed Wood himself is one of the brawlers?
Yes, just like Hitchcock, Wood liked to make cameos in his movies and he is one of the principals in the fight scene. He also makes another appearance in "Ghouls" as the face on the "Wanted" sign on the wall across from the front desk of police headquarters.