Clips from assorted television programs, B-movies, commercials, music performances, newsreels, bloopers, satirical short films and promotional and government films of the 1950s and 1960s are intercut together to tell a single story of various creatures and societal ills attacking American cities.
Goodman Ace Jane Ace Ann-Margret Ngo Dinh Diem Dwight D. Eisenhower John Lennon Paul McCartney George Harrison Ringo Starr Walter Brennan Walter Cronkite Bing Crosby Phyllis Diller Dave Garroway Arthur Godfrey Stewart Granger Bela Lugosi Dean Martin Edward R. Murrow Jack Nicholson Richard Nixon Ralph Richardson Gordon Scott Howard K. Smith Robert Vaughn Allison Hayes Yvette Vickers George Fenneman Groucho Marx Show All…
Wait did Joe Dante invent supercuts AND binge watching simultaneously 45 years ago? This was like the 50 best times I've ever had at the movies all in a single sitting. After 5 hours I didn't want it to end.
The failed revolution is televised in Joe Dante’s dementedly ambitious student film “The [Great] Movie Orgy.”
A clip compilation running somewhere between four and eight hours, Dante originally edited the super montage as an undergraduate in Philadelphia. Shown first at campus events, and later, art museums across America, “Orgy” is like riding the aftershocks of a mental explosion endured by Baby Boomers as all their idealism turned to dust… and static.
“Orgy” is comprised of intermingled cuts from TV shows, films, game shows, and commercials of the 50s and 60s. Its initial segments unfold with a stilted sort of affectation. Everything is scripted. Planted. Molded. Fake. Facades exist to serve the entertainment of the whole. Jingles rhyme, products sell, and…
Most of the reviews that I’ve seen of this seem to focus on the contents of the avalanche of clips, but what really makes this for me is the way that they’re maniacally assembled, as if a gremlin got loose in the projection booth and started furiously cutting and scotch-taping trims and any other piece of celluloid detritus at hand together at will. There’s a handmade quality to this that makes watching it so much fun, as a 16mm VD scare film abruptly cuts to squashed scope footage of the Beatles and then to a scene from Speed Crazy. The entire thing feels like it could come apart at any minute, but then continues on for another full five hours.…
Cinema dementia - a condition elicited by a sustained saturation of imagery, in which the subject understands its life experience primarily through moving images, takes its tutelage and values from media, filmed morality plays and pop-cultural constructs, and essentially has "amused itself to death".
Wyatt Earp, The Lone Ranger, Robin Hood, Superman, Groucho Marx, WC Fields, Elvis, The Animals, Lassie, Rin Tin Tin and Betty Boop join forces against the 50ft Woman, Godzilla, King Kong, UFOs, giant spiders, locusts and turkey buzzards, Judeo-Christian propaganda, sexual repression, and of course, the twisted mastermind behind it all, Andy Devine.
This batshit splice-party really stretches the outer limits of just how much you can be entertained. It's the movie equivalent of the pioneering…
My new life mission is to track down and attend a screening of this from Joe Dante. The Movie Orgy is madness and it’s perfect. The version I watched was just shy of 5 hours, and had scenes from Attack of the 50 ft Women, College Confidential, Speed Crazy (I think?), alongside a million other films, commercials, test footage, stock footage, and everything else under the sun.
My only complaint is that it’s a Joe Dante film without Dick Miller. Not that Dante could’ve done anything about that since they hadn’t linked up yet, but still. Feels wrong.
"Stop crowding me!" A literal must-see for any film buff, this witty collage of 1950s/1960s ephemera is the grandfather of every supercut that has ever been uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo. A madcap mishmash of music, hot rods, giant monsters, Superman, Mamie Van Doren, atomic scare movies, swashbuckling Stewart Granger, laxative commercials, and every other 16mm print laying about, MOVIE ORGY was created in the 1960s by avid movie and television fans Joe Dante and Jon Davison, who would later move to Hollywood to direct and produce, respectively, fan-favorite exploitation films such as PIRANHA and THE HOWLING.
At one time or another, MOVIE ORGY ran approximately seven hours, but Dante and Davison hacked away at it over time, taking some…
"Don't crowd me, man!"
A dizzying compendium of editor-jokes made with a backbone of a few core B-Movies (ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN, THE GIANT GILA MONSTER and SPEED CRAZY) and a SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT-esque approach to narrative storytelling, with sidespins into Elvis Presley, menstruation, Bufferin ads, Mighty Mouse and much much much more. An ur-text that presages Dante's work (from the obvious MATINEE to the thematics of SMALL SOLDIERS). I like to go to the 24 Hour Movie Marathon in Auckland, and at the end it's blended into one incomprehensible phantasmagoric experience. This transmits you to roughly the same mental place in 5 hours. I thought this holy grail would be never experienced by me, but it is, at…
Well there's no point in having a perfect body if you don't show it to anybody. Would you mind giving us a peak of your framework?
And I learned that a rattlesnake is right. You gotta be first. Everybody's always crowding you, trying to push you with the pack and you gotta crowd back and break through. A guy that breaks away from the pack is a winner every time, baby. . . . I already proved it. Save my dough and fix up that car of mine. When I get behind that wheel, I'm the boss. All those horses under the hood running for yours truly. Ah, it's like music, baby, psyching music, better than rock 'n roll. You're…
4 and a 1/2 hour long everythingisterrible youtube playlist but its from before we landed on the moon so that's pretty neat
Juxtaposition through editing in separating the 1950’s from the fifties. Traditionalist values and consumer culture eclipsed by racism and postwar anxiety. The foundations of America were built on a bed of lies and hatred.
Essential viewing
