Glen or Glenda Reviews

Is Ed Wood the worst director who ever lived? His films are campy, clumsy, and hysterically inept, but their enthusiasm and good humor overcome incoherent scripts and wooden performances with heart, soul, and an infectious sense of fun. The jaw-dropping "documentary" Glen or Glenda? is a bizarre confessional starring Wood himself as a misunderstood transvestite and Bela Lugosi as a smirking godlike narrator. "Pull ze string!" shouts Lugosi as Wood reveals his angora fetish and love of women's underwear to the world. Lugosi returns as a mad scientist revenging himself on the world ("Home? I have no home!") in Bride of the Monster , a howler of a horror picture. Tor Johnson, the hulking Swedish wrestler turned B-movie icon, made his first Wood appearance as the lumbering beast Lobo (he almost knocks over the set in one scene!) tamed by the touch of angora. Finally there's Wood's "masterpiece," the clumsy, nearly incoherent, and ridiculously cheap Plan 9 from Outer Space . A tall, skinny, blond chiropractor subs for short, raven-haired Bela Lugosi (who died after a few days of shooting), cardboard gravestones wobble as the actors walk by, and night and day randomly come and go within the same scene. --Sean Axmaker