I can't sit here and say something obvious like Ed Wood was an incompetent filmmaker. It's like common knowledge. But it's all here: Continuity errors galore, zero motivation or plot, lapses (swan dives) in logic, botched lines, bad lighting, you name it. All this "fun" stuff, frankly, takes a back seat to exactly how incredibly dull this pure exploitation picture is.
Plot goes: Rich parents' daughter Shirley goes missing. They hire Mac McGregor, about as low rent of a "gumshoe" as you're going to find. They trust this guy so implicitly, that he travels the globe, via groan-inducing quantities of stock footage planes taking off and landing, on their dime. Mac works on, well, Ed chose to not make that clear. He has no clues, his interviews are futile, and there's no explanation as to how he gets a lead. At the midway point, he (somehow) figures out where the missing girl is. Says the name of the location, specifically. Instead of going to find her, he subsequently visits a cross-dressing couple, and has a, um, rather unpleasant (for the actress) encounter with a blonde hooker. Add a few dozen more dollops of nudity at the brothel, to, you know, establish SHIRLEY WORKS HERE. Which is something that could've been laid out in a sequence or two. Add to that, it's made abundantly clear from the beginning where she is, so it's no mystery.
Take It Out in Trade (a giveaway of the ending) is, front to back, gratuitous nudity. Definitively gratuitous. So gratuitous, it's BORING. And I'm the last guy to complain about naked ladies. How many shots are there of women walking up and down the shag-carpeted stairs, nude? Oh, it's a lot. Every male in this movie is repulsive, cross-dressed or not. Any young woman in the movie who had to put their lips or tongue on that toad of a detective, deserves a freaking trophy. Detective trots the country and globe, to spy on naked ladies... from entirely unrelated locations (between him and the woman). In one sequence, he spies on a naked woman doing yoga (or something), cut to footage of a plane taking off... then he spies on the same woman having sex! For all I know, the brothel was in the same town as the parents. No sense of place, even when Woods has the nads to film a myriad of posters with countries' names on them (cue the stock footage). This film is mind-bogglingly inept and boring. Sure, there are unintentional laughs to be had (hence the extra star), but the allure of Wood's brand of filmmaking eludes me. Even as a lark.
