Glam

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 come around the house, I tell them that I have to watch several movies per day in order to keep up with my sites, and so I'll be popping one in from time to time. I then pop in Glam as a gag to see how long it will be before they ask if we can do something else or watch something else. Nobody has 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:

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 is doing these days? 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.

DVD info from Amazon

NUDITY REPORT

some anonymous strippers do some good stripping, but it's pretty tame for an nc-17.

no nudity from the famous people

The Critics Vote ...

No major reviews on line.

The People Vote ...

IMDB summary. IMDb voters score it 2.1/10, 23rd worst of all time. It is dramatically overrated.

The meaning of the IMDb score: 7.5 usually indicates a level of excellence equivalent to about three and a half stars from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm watchability, comparable to approximately two and a half stars from the critics. The fives are generally not worthwhile unless they are really your kind of material, equivalent to about a two star rating from the critics, or a C- from our system. Films rated below five are generally awful even if you like that kind of film - this score is roughly equivalent to one and a half stars from the critics or a D on our scale. (Possibly even less, depending on just how far below five the rating is.

Our own guideline:

A means the movie is so good it will appeal to you even if you hate the genre.
B means the movie is not good enough to win you over if you hate the genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an open mind about this type of film. Any film rated B- or better is recommended for just about anyone. In order to rate at least a B-, a film should be both a critical and commercial success. Exceptions: (1) We will occasionally rate a film B- with good popular acceptance and bad reviews, if we believe the critics have severely underrated a film. (2) We may also assign a B- or better to a well-reviewed film which did not do well at the box office if we feel that the fault lay in the marketing of the film, and that the film might have been a hit if people had known about it. (Like, for example, The Waterdance.)
C+ means it has no crossover appeal, but will be considered excellent by people who enjoy this kind of movie. If this is your kind of movie, a C+ and an A are indistinguishable to you.
C means it is competent, but uninspired genre fare. People who like this kind of movie will think it satisfactory. Others probably will not.
C- indicates that it we found it to be a poor movie, but genre addicts find it watchable. Any film rated C- or better is recommended for fans of that type of film, but films with this rating should be approached with caution by mainstream audiences, who may find them incompetent or repulsive or both. If this is NOT your kind of movie, a C- and an E are indistinguishable to you.
D means you'll hate it even if you like the genre. We don't score films below C- that often, because we like movies and we think that most of them have at least a solid niche audience. Now that you know that, you should have serious reservations about any movie below C-. Films rated below C- generally have both bad reviews and poor popular acceptance.
E means that you'll hate it even if you love the genre.
F means that the film is not only unappealing across-the-board, but technically inept as well.

Based on this description, this film is an F. Arguably the worst thing ever recorded on film, and the worst thing I can recall.