The nudity in Glam (1997)

Diondra Redondo, Kristy Mist and Joy Marquart played three strippers. I have no idea who is who or what is going on, which makes the scene completely consistent with the rest of the film. Forget about Plan 9. This is my nominee for the worst film ever made.

In the unlikely event that you want to see the entire scene, Johnny Moronic has it.

I don’t know how many movies I have seen in my life, but I have to be pretty close to the all-time record. I never got into silents, but it’s almost impossible to find a talkie I haven’t seen. 70s Eurotrash, 50s monster films, drive-in films, exploitation, art films, Disney films, Tarzan films, Bowery Boys classics, chop-shop Westerns with singing cowboys and Lash Larue, musicals, underground films from the beatnik days, gangster and noir films from the 30s and 40s, great movies, bad movies, foreign movies, American movies. You name it. Probably close to 50,000 films.

So when I read an internet comment about how some film or another is the worst film ever made, I instantly know a lot of films the commenter has never seen. He has never seen Island of the Dead with Malcolm McDowell, for example, or Going Overboard with Adam Sandler. And he has never seen Glam. Glam is my all-time choice as the worst movie I have seen among the tens of thousands. Whenever new people would come around the house, I would tell them that I had to watch several movies per day in order to keep up with my sites, and so I would be popping one in from time to time. I would then pop in Glam as a gag to see how long it would be before they’d ask if we could do something else or watch something else. Nobody ever made it to the five minute mark. Nobody – irrespective of which kinds of movies they like. I don’t even know if it is possible to find someone who would make it any farther than that. It would have to be someone very, very timid, who would hate it, but be too shy to say anything. It is absolutely incomprehensible gibberish. Makes “Battlefield Earth” seem like “Battleship Potemkin.”

Here’s what the movie is supposed to be about:

A hayseed wanders to L.A. to write. He finds it a cesspool of drugs and sex and violence. He writes about it. He is discovered. He must leave the spotlight before he gets corrupted. He searches for a woman to share his life with. After he sees his dream girl sunning herself, he has to figure out how to win her love without being killed by her mobster boyfriend.

I copied that from the box.

Personally, I have no idea what it is about. Most of the dialogue went something like this:

“Green, he’s so green. He’s green, know what I mean? Green. Green, I tell you. So damned green. He’s green. Mua-ha-ha-ha! Green!”

Except they repeated stuff more than that. I just got tired of typing.

It really called out for Bill Murray to look them square in the eye and say, “Yes, I understand that much, but do you happen to recall what color he is?”

As I see it, here’s what happened in the film. A guy who wears green arrived in LA to meet with his cousin who repeats everything thousands of times. The green guy writes some stuff in a book, and all the other characters think his writing could spur people to revolution. Tony Danza takes off his shirt and pounds somebody. Danza is a wiseguy who loves Natasha Wagner. But Greenguy loves her more purely, possibly because Danza is not green.

You ever wonder what Ali McGraw was doing after fame deserted her? How about Valerie Kaprisky? Here’s your chance to catch up on both of them, doing something which must somehow relate to the rest of the film, although I’m not sure how. All of the characters appear to be the hallucinations of a madman, so I assume the point is that the “writer” is insane, and we share his POV. Or maybe the characters are meant to be broadly satirical. There are flashbacks and flashforwards and dreams and drug-induced hallucinations and I don’t know what else, but I don’t have any clue what it was about, other than what I already said.

But I do know this – that guy was one green-ass motherfucker.