certainly no one would rent ed wood's glen or glenda ? expecting to see a good movie , but this screwy discourse about transvestitism betrays a level of incompetence that i didn't know was possible . in fact , wood's infamous plan 9 from outer space actually seems pretty tame by comparison . watching glen or glenda ? i found myself occasionally wondering if wood had originally made two or three separate movies and accidentally edited them together ; as a result , it is actually quite entertaining in that it is unintentionally hilarious . the movie starts out as what mostly seems like a bad documentary , with endless , repetitive narration about transvestites , how difficult it is for a transvestite to look at his girlfriend's clothes without being able to wear them , how transvestites are not necessarily homosexuals , and how the main character , glen/glenda is ( as it reminds us probably half a dozen times ) " not half man and half woman , but man and woman at the same time . " the camera work is terrible - occasionally the camera lingers on , say , a closed door while the characters talk off-screen , or inexplicably zooms in on someone's ear or nose . wood also makes copious use of mostly irrelevant stock footage , which leads to voiced-over non-sequiturs like , " yes , our world is a busy and frightening place , with so many people driving their automobiles . " finally , there is occasional commentary from bela lugosi as a sort of omniscient being who seems to inhabit a frankenstein-style laboratory , delivering pointless lines such as , " people . . . all with their own thoughts . . . their own ideas . . . . " while lightning crackles quasi-ominously overhead . had wood continued in this vein , glen or glenda ? probably would have been remembered as nothing more than a poorly done documentary with the occasional inappropriate horror-movie touch . unfortunately , he then wanders so far off into left field that you have to wonder if he had been eating some funny mushrooms when he wrote the script . " pull the string ! pull the string ! " announces an alarmed lugosi as stock footage of buffalo appears . there is another crash of lightning before lugosi returns , this time warning us , " beware . . . beware the big green dragon that lurks outside your door ! . . . it eats little boys . . . and puppy dogs' tails . . . and big fat snails ! " a bizarre nightmare sequence , which is probably meant to be symbolic but instead is just incredibly stupid , ensues , during which glen/glenda finds his fiance trapped under a fallen tree-in the living room . someone who is apparently intended to be the sinister " green dragon " ( but looks more like a klingon from the original star trek series ) appears to be orchestrating all this , though the film is far from clear on this point ( to put it kindly ) . near the end of this scene-and here i must confess that wood lost me completely-is a violent sexual encounter on a couch that features two characters who do not even appear in the rest of the movie and is scored by goofily upbeat folk music . after this scene ends ( not a moment too soon ) , glen or glenda ? returns to its documentary style , but at that point any lingering sense that wood had the slightest idea what he was doing is pretty much gone . the film wanders to a dumb happy ending that also seems to abandon much of what it was trying to say about transvestitism , but at that point it didn't matter much what happened . as soon as the aforementioned sex scene was over , glen or glenda ? had pretty much cemented its place in my mind as the most incoherent film i had ever seen . i honestly think that if i picked up my camcorder and deliberately tried to make the worst movie i possibly could , it still might not match glen or glenda ? for sheer cinematic disaster . i am giving this movie an f , but i'm not sure that quite does it justice .
