Glen or Glenda

"Edward D. Wood Jr.'s Glen or Glenda has had a strange distribution history. Wood's debut directorial effort was produced by exploitation film specialist George Weiss and was seen on cheap second-run circuits in the mid-'50s before it disappeared. For decades, it lurked on filmographies of Bela Lugosi, its nominal star, and even stills of it were seldom seen. Then Warren Beatty saw the movie and thought it had the potential to be another Reefer Madness; he persuaded Paramount Pictures to distribute a reissue of the movie in the early '80s, and it was well received as an unintentionally campy vehicle, although it never became the kind of ubiquitous campus entertainment fixture that Reefer Madness was. And then it disappeared again, until Wade Williams arranged for its reissue on video. The DVD has its clever elements -- the menu, which opens automatically on start-up, is designed in an entertaining manner that exploits the visual elements of the trailer and is fun to watch by itself. The movie is mastered from what is credited, at the end, as a 25th anniversary edition, which would place it in 1978, just about the time that Edward D. Wood Jr. passed away. There are frames missing and there's some damage to the audio track at some awkward and key moments in the narrative. The transfer itself, however, is very nicely done within the limitations of the source; the contrast and clarity are generally uniform, although the extended dream/fantasy sequence obviously took some work to get it to look like the rest of the movie. The 68-minute movie is broken into 16 chapters, which is more than adequate. The only bonus material is a trailer that is in somewhat rough shape but otherwise a bit surprising for its two-minute length (rather ambitious for a film of this type). In contrast to several other titles in the Wade Williams Collection, of which this release is a part, the annotation is limited, which is a shame; Glen or Glenda has serious flaws (mostly of a uniquely ""Woodian"" nature, i.e. bizarre word usages in the script, strange syntax in the dialogue, and wooden -- no pun -- direction), but it is a fascinating artifact of its time as well as its maker's career, and it deserved better treatment."