Johnny Showtime: THE MOVIE ORGY

 by JB

Boy Howdy, I never thought I would ever get to see this legendary show, much less OWN the damn thing on little shiny disc...

Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy is legendary. According to the Make Mine Criterion website, [The epic film montage started] “as a lark assembled and performed by Dante, then a student at the Philadelphia College of Art [...] and Jon Davison, a 16mm film collector still in high school (and a long way from becoming the producer of Airplane! and RoboCop.) The Movie Orgy toured a year before Schlitz Beer arrived with a sponsorship deal. Schlitz promoted the hell out of The Movie Orgy for a number of years but the appeal of the project was waning by 1975. The Movie Orgy played college campuses as a special engagement for less than a decade and then vanished. In the years after, the five-to-seven-hour screening became a cinematic legend that only a select few could rightfully claim to have witnessed. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Our very own Patrick Bromley attended one of these screenings in Chicago fourteen years ago. Damn him.)

“Yet, like all great movie monsters, The Movie Orgy eventually rose from its tomb. In the late-2000s, Dante toured a nearly 5-hour long, digitally preserved 'Ultimate Version' at repertory houses and film festivals to rapturous audiences ready to embrace the 'lost opus' of a favorite filmmaker.”

Dante’s latest iteration uses footage from eight feature films: Speed Crazy (William J. Hole, Jr. 1959), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (Nathan H. Juran, 1958), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (Fred F. Sears, 1956), The Giant Gila Monster (Ray Kellogg, 1959), The Giant Claw (Sears, 1957), Tarantula! (Jack Arnold, 1955), College Confidential (Albert Zugsmith, 1960), and The Beginning of the End (Bert I. Gordon, 1957). Dante cuts in and out of them, willy-nilly, suggesting that all of them are somehow happening at the exact same time. They are all in black and white, they are all from the same era (era), and most of them involve massive, monster-y monsters.

The overall impression is that 1950s America was a nightmarish hellscape where out-of-control juvenile delinquents, giant women, giant lizards, giant claws, giant spiders, giant grasshoppers, and space aliens who were all giant assholes ran rampant every single day. Just as one earth-shaking disaster was averted, the American People would turn a corner... and face another. Frequently, the mayhem is interrupted mid-tragedy for a commercial break. We are told that the solution to all of these problems involves Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Bayer Aspirin, and Johnson’s Baby Powder. After a few hours of this, it begins to play with your mind.

During my time bathed in the ethereal glow of The Movie Orgy, I let my mind wander and saw the entire enterprise as a massive proof of the Kuleshov Effect. The Kuleshov Effect, for those of you who kept falling asleep during your Introduction to Cinema class, was “discovered and explained” by Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation. (Fellow Russian filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin later claimed to have been the “co-creator” of this concept.)

Here, Dante creates the Kuleshov Effect Gone WILD: 276 minutes of associative editing that suggests: 1) the whole giant monster thing; 2) the crucifixion of Jesus occurred during the reign of Tarzan; 3) Richard Nixon was NEVER been popular, though he was elected President of the United States twice; 4) Andy Devine was the Anti-Christ; 5) Bayer Aspirin not only gently cures headaches with no stomach upset, but also cures campus unrest, civil rights inequalities, and national criminal justice quandaries; and 6) all manner of strange and curious phenomenon might distract us, but the most important thing in life is for women to find an in-home hair dryer that actually dries their hair to salon quality.

The Movie Orgy is like mind-altering drugs, only better. It leaves no lasting deleterious effects—although who knows, maybe it does and I just haven’t experienced them yet. Its side effects are like those of The Music Box Theater’s famous Music Box of Horrors (formerly “The Massacre”), a 24-hour in-theater horror marathon held every October. If you like that feeling, but you don't feel like driving into the city and spending 24 hours in an increasingly stinky theatre, you can achieve similar results at home in 5 hours or less. It's almost as good as having that quality in-home hair dryer!

The Movie Orgy, like The Music Box of Horrors, teaches us that you cannot feed your brain a steady diet of horrifying nonsense hour after hour without creating a narcotic effect. Our brains are small and cute, but they are suggestible creatures.

If you crave that effect, good news! The Movie Orgy is being released on Blu-ray disc today by Vinegar Syndrome and AGFA. This is the first “Must Buy” disc of 2026.