Film

Glen or Glenda

Ed Wood's 1953 oddity poses as a clinical warning about transvestism and delivers something stranger: stock footage of buffalo stampedes, Bela Lugosi ranting about bats and rats from an armchair, and genuine, fumbling tenderness toward its subject. It's inept, sincere, and unlike anything else — a curio for lovers of outsider art and camp history rather than conventional drama.

TMDb rating4.7

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Ed Wood1994

Tim Burton's black-and-white biopic turns the making of movies like this one into a tender love letter to hopeless dreamers, with Johnny Depp radiating pure, unkillable optimism in the lead.

But It's affectionate rather than mocking; if you wanted a film that laughs at Wood, this one insists on loving him instead.

Ed Wood poster

The Room2003

Tommy Wiseau's disasterpiece is the modern heir to Wood's earnest incompetence, a film so committed to its own logic that it becomes accidentally hypnotic and endlessly quotable.

But Its cult reputation is built on rowdy group viewings with spoons flying; watched alone and quiet, it can feel merely strange.

The Room poster

Pink Flamingos1972no page yet

The granddaddy of gross-out cult cinema, starring Divine as the filthiest person alive, made with the same shoestring defiance and total disregard for good taste that powers Wood's work.

But It's genuinely shocking rather than campy-innocent; some scenes are designed purely to test what you can stomach.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Paris Is Burning1991

Both films try to explain gender nonconformity to an outside audience — one clumsily, through a lecturing narrator and stock footage, the other from inside the community itself, with joy and specificity Wood could never access.

A documentary about New York's Black and Latino ballroom scene, full of wit, grief, and dazzling self-invention — everything Wood's film gropes toward but can only fumble at from the outside.

But It's a real documentary about real lives and real stakes, not camp; some of its subjects' stories end in tragedy.

Paris Is Burning poster
More like this (5)

Mommie Dearest1981

Faye Dunaway's ferocious, wire-hanger performance turned this into an accidental camp monument, the kind of film that's quoted more than it's watched but rewards both.

But It was made in earnest as a serious drama, so its campiness is a happy accident rather than Wood's knowing sincerity.

Mommie Dearest poster

Showgirls1995

A big-budget Hollywood film that somehow achieves Wood-level camp by accident, all glitter, thrusting, and dialogue delivered with total, misplaced conviction.

But Its tone lurches between satire and sincerity so wildly that some viewers find it more exhausting than fun.

Showgirls poster

Troll 21990

Widely (and lovingly) called one of the worst films ever made, with vegetarian goblins and dialogue so strange it's become a beloved communal joke.

But There's no Wood-style personal sincerity underneath it — just chaos, which some viewers find funnier than others.

Troll 2 poster

A Fantastic Woman2017

Where Glen or Glenda pleads for tolerance through baffled melodrama and pseudo-science, this film simply insists on its protagonist's humanity — the same plea, six decades later, made with total craft instead of none.

A Chilean drama about a trans woman fighting for dignity after her partner's sudden death, anchored by a performance of tremendous quiet force — the seriousness Wood's film reaches for but can't sustain.

But It's a slow, sober arthouse drama with real grief at its center — nothing campy or funny about it at all.

A Fantastic Woman poster

Mom and Dad1945no page yet

This is the exploitation-lecture formula Wood inherited wholesale — a traveling showman's PSA disguised as sober education, proving Glenda wasn't an aberration but part of a whole disreputable American tradition.

A cheap, roadshow-circuit exploitation film about sex education, complete with a lecturing narrator and shock footage — the exact genre engine Wood was running, from a few years earlier.

But It's genuinely obscure and creaky even by exploitation standards; expect grainy prints and a very dated moral panic.

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Ed Wood, Disclosure