“Glen or Glenda”, this is the first film by Ed Wood (“Plan 9 from Outer Space”), who is supposedly the worst director of all-time. It was to a film about sex changes but instead it’s a sort-of bio-pic about Ed Wood’s cross-dressing. ‘Beware the big green dragon’ this film warns us and it’s that style of bizarreness that makes this film both awful yet hilarious to sit through.

In “Glen Or Glenda”, we meet cross-dresser Glen (Wood) as he struggles with his lifestyle now that he’s engaged to a woman. Parts of it are like a public information film then we cut to endless stock footage (animals, wars, milk men… you name it) as well as several weird clips of Béla Lugosi (“Dracula”) yelling strange things at us including the sentence I quoted earlier.

Ed Wood is a terrible actor and he seems completely unnatural playing something that should be natural to him. Ed Wood is laughable here. Béla Lugosi is of course terrific, the scenes with him talking gibberish make the movie worth a watch for anybody that likes “Dracula” or “Son of Frankenstein”. Lugosi was also in some of Ed Wood’s other pictures and despite the fact the films are terrible, he’s always great.

“Glen Or Glenda” is obviously a bad film but like “Robot Monster” and “The Giant Claw”, it’s pretty funny. I think “Plan 9 from Outer Space” is better (and by that, I mean it’s even worse but that’s what makes it better). Béla Lugosi gives a great performance as he makes the lines that if uttered by anybody else would be merely stupid, grand… that’s about all I can say when defending this film. Everything else about it is horrendous but that’s why it’s been remembered. Ed Wood was a passionate moviemaker and he made his films incredibly poorly yet saw them as masterpieces. If you’re going to be bad, do it with love like he did and maybe you’ll be talked about in the years to come.