Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

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.

mmallon4 I might sound insane, but I'm giving an Ed Wood movie a positive score from an artistic point of view. Glen or Glenda marked Wood's first film, which he not only written and directed, but also starred in. The film was originally slated to be an biopic on Christine Jorgensen, the propriety of the first publicly known sex change operation (in this case from male to female) Wood however took over production and instead turned it into a film about his own transvestism.Weather you're conservative or liberal on issue of cross-dressing and trans-sexuality, Glen Or Glenda manages to do something which I've seen many sacred cows fail to do, create emotional interest in its main characters, and succeeds to raise question on what it means to be normal, with an issue which is just as relevant today as it was in 1953. The movie's production values are surprisingly good for a film of this caliber. The surreal dream like sequence in the 2nd half of the movie features some impressive film making techniques and manages to engage you in the character's descent into insanity. Even the film's acting is decent, certainly better than in the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space.Lugosi's character is widely regarded to be a scientist representing God. At first I didn't understand the character's role in the movie (plus the use of stock of footage is completely random). However I was impressed with how his catch phrase which he utters throughout the course of the movie actually finds its way to having relevance with the plot. I'm not the type of person who over analyzes movies looking for their deeper meaning, but in Glen or Glenda it really came through quite obviously, and did leave an impression on me, as well as changing my opinions on Wood as a director. I can defiantly sense Ed Wood put a lot legitimate feeling into this movie, and certainly comes through in the finished product.

rooster_davis I am a fan of movies that are so bad they're good. I've seen plenty, and Ed Wood is the king of cranking out such stuff. But until I saw his "Glen Or Glenda" I never new how genuinely horrific a movie could be! First let me say that I find some of the other reviews almost as ridiculous as this movie. Calling it some sort of 'ahead of its time GLBT' classic or any sort of 'serious look' at anything is simply finding pearls among the dog doo. The storyline is very thin; some parts of the movie are not even related to the storyline and are inexplicable, such as the silent (with background music) scenes of one woman tying up another lying on a couch, or a guy whipping a woman lying on the same couch, or Ed Wood (as Glen/da) making a face that looks like he's being electrocuted while a little girl's voice echoes in the background "Puppy dog tails! Puppy dog tails! Puppy dog tails!" Now really, is this a GLBT treasure? There are obviously some men dressed as women in some scenes of the movie, none of whom are any more of a feminine nightmare than Wood himself dressed as Glenda. He looks like Fred Flintstone in drag with makeup.Many of the cast of actors are seen in other of Wood's films. Actually they must be incredibly, fantastically talented actors to be able to utter this insane dialog without bursting into hysterical laughter:"I guess I've seen just about everything there is for a policeman to see. Yet I wonder if we ever stop learning... learning about which we see... trying to learn more about... an ounce of prevention." "I'm a man that thrives on learning. We only have one life to live. If we throw that one away, what is there left?" "Okay. Here's a story from fact!" Now, most of the handful of men dressing as women in this movie are NOT good basic material. Frankly they all look more like your Uncle Ralph or someone equally non-feminine.This movie is a riot, a howl, a scream. In some places it's a baffling mystery. "What does THAT mean? What is going on HERE?" It alternates between insanely funny and just insane. It is not some deep work as some here have tried to make it out. It cannot be described how truly and riotously AWFUL Glen or Glenda is... watch it, and try not to have your mouth full of Pepsi during the dialog lest it come shooting out your nose.