framptonhollis Ed Wood's "classic" surrealist docudrama romance horror semi-autobio "Glen or Glenda" joins the ranks of films like "Eraserhead" and "The Holy Mountain" in terms of pure, unadulterated weirdness. It probably wasn't intended to be so bizarre and mindbending, and that's a large part of what makes it so great. It feels like an awkward and occasionally incoherent collaboration between David Lynch and Tommy Wiseau (one of the most unlikely pairs in cinematic history!!!), and, naturally, it is an entertaining stain on the carpet of filmmaking.

Red-Barracuda Glen or Glenda is the debut film of the legendary director Ed Wood. It was certainly his most personal film, seeing as it was about a subject he knew plenty about. Wood was a practising cross-dresser and this movie is partly a heartfelt plea for understanding for transvestite behaviour. He even plays the main cross-dressing character in the first segment of the film under the alias of Daniel Davis. The film is roughly made up of two stories about different transvestites but, really, that only scratches the surface of this one, as this is overall a pretty delirious and bewildering movie.Inspired by the sensational nationwide coverage of the first widely reported sex-change operation in 1953, an enterprising exploitation producer quickly jumped on the bandwagon and gave the go-ahead for a cheap quickie to be made to cash in on the story. From this situation Wood was given his first crack of the whip at directing and a very, very strange movie emerged. In many ways the story mainly boils down to a tale of a man who wants to tell his girlfriend he likes to cross-dress and would dearly love to put on her angora sweater. But in the hands of Wood this is expanded into an often incomprehensible mish-mash of disparate elements. There is copious amounts of melodrama, much earnest social commentary, lots of often irrelevant stock footage (a herd of buffaloes?!), a surreal dream sequence, some early 50's sexploitation, very silly monologues and a healthy dose of pseudoscience. The dialogue is often quite hilarious, with typically terrible Wood script-writing very abundant throughout with talk of things like people not being born with wings or wheels. The acting is often of a heroically terrible standard, with Wood's real-life girlfriend Dolores Fuller once again displaying her highly entertainingly poor acting chops. Bela Lugosi is of course the main name actor but he has clearly been roped in with little overall plan other than to have him appear in the movie. He appears as a character known as 'the scientist' whose dialogue really doesn't connect with anything that is actually going on elsewhere, yet his performance is compellingly weird just the same. Which is essentially a term that could be applied to Glen or Glenda in general. Woods films are often held up as examples of the worst movies ever but really this is a nonsense statement. Unlike most films out there, his output has genuine originality and all are unique and interesting. Okay, there's a lot of technical and artistic deficiencies but those only add fun to the overall whole. For those who like to see something unpredictable and unusual then Glen or Glenda is clearly a must.

mevmijaumau How can you describe Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda? Well, it was supposed to be a biopic on Christine Jorgensen, the subject of the first, well-known, sex change, but Wood transformed the story into a semi- autobiography about his cross-dressing habit and how the society looks down on those like him.Essentially, this is a sociological docudrama about transvestites and pseudo-hermaphrodites, depicting tribal rituals and connecting them with contemporary social issues, laced with a slight comedic touch and filled with loads of idiosyncratic stock footage and featuring a narrator speaking cryptic, pseudo-philosophical, non-sequitur lines in a shlocky B-horror film spook-lab, but then it turns into an auto- biographic plea for compassion to viewers and follows two stories of two characters, intercut with strange nursery rhymes and interrupted by an impressionist/psychological horror-themed surrealist dream sequence featuring vignettes of sadomasochism, rape, religious imagery and an autoerotic session, only to shift back and forth between fourth wall-breaking reactions of both the narrator and the protagonist, in a 68-minute film with three separate narrators and NUMEROUS confusing flashbacks-within-flashbacks containing said narrations.We also learn that hats make you bald.Ed Wood certainly outdid himself on this one. It was shot in four days and starred his idol Bela Lugosi, in one of his last roles, as the narrator who sits in a chair the entire time and sometimes does chemical experiments. Wood played Glen under the pseudonym Daniel Davis, and his girlfriend Dolores Fuller was cast as Barbara.Glen or Glenda is a hysterical and entertaining movie, that is until the storyline unexpectedly starts following Alan instead of Glen, about 55 minutes in. Alan's storyline is also over-the-top, but considerably more boring than Glen's, which is an absolute riot. The scenes with Bela Lugosi are pure gold.

gamethrones00 I feel really bad for Ed Wood. Not only was this movie a way for him to express his feelings, but it was also an attempt to get people to open their minds and accept people for who they are, which is a fantastic concept for a movie that was made in 1953. However, instead of getting an emotional narrative on the life of the transvestites and how they struggle to get people to accept and understand them (as well as their internal conflicts), we got a horribly narrated documentary type movie with abysmal acting and lazy writing. I don't even blame the concept of the film, because this (like I said before) could have been incredibly powerful and have more of the characters interacting with each other and trying to cope with society's hatred toward them, which in turn would get intolerant people attached to the characters, therefore causing them to question their beliefs. In fact, I think that this could have been one of the greatest movies of all time if the writing was not so dull and lifeless, if the acting was not laugh out loud ridiculous, and if it was not a god damn documentary type movie. Think about it, if more effort and editing was done to the script, if the actors had even a shred of talent (except for Bela Lugosi), and if it was more of a narrative than a documentary, it could have been a masterpiece.