I first learned about Ed Wood from Michael Medved's 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards, which infamously labeled Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space as the worst movie ever made and "honored" Wood as the worst director of all time for his incredibly inept body of work. Of course, this only elevated Wood's status as a cult favorite and inspired Tim Burton to craft the fine sympathetic biopic Ed Wood that has brought additional recognition to the legendary director of hilarious kitsch. Whether you regard his tacky films as truly avant-garde or hopelessly inept depends on your point of view. Undisputed is the fact that Wood was a bonafide indie filmmaker, perpetually scrounging for resources on miniscule budgets.

Having failed three times to sit through Wood's most noteworthy film (Plan 9 from Outer Space) in its entirety, I braved a Netflix rental of Glen or Glenda (aka I Changed My Sex) and can now finally declare that I’ve seen a complete Wood opus. Running only 67 minutes, this most autobiographical of Wood's films may be his most accessible—or at least one that you can watch without nodding off. Glen or Glenda contains all of Wood's signature trademarks: technical glitches, bizarre off the wall dialogue, irrelevant stock footage, and Bela Legosi blubbering incoherent nursery rhymes as the host "puppet master" for Wood's pedantic preaching on transvestitism.

Cutting down on costs, Wood portrays the title character Glen, who mirrors the director's real life sexual preferences and fetishes—a married heterosexual who enjoys wearing angora sweaters and a variety of women's clothes. Patterned after post-WWII educational films that had American school children ducking and covering, Wood employs an onscreen psychiatrist (Timothy Farrell) and heavy-handed off-screen narration to educate us about the normalcy of transvestites and the nature of hermaphrodites. In repetitive voice-overs, the high pitched tones of an old lady mockingly screech, "If God had wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings" and a male voice follows with ludicrous parallel logic involving cars and wheels. These examples are supposed to convince us that transvestites and sex change operations will one day be as commonplace as U.S. Airways and Chevrolet.

To further his crusade, Wood offers examples from nature where the male dresses in more flamboyant plumage while inserting an incongruous section of stock footage of masked African natives dancing under an American elm. Other stock footage insertions totaling nearly 14 minutes are little more than cheap filler tossed in to expand the film's running time to over an hour—lightning flashes, a buffalo stampede, steel factory footage, and WWII action are puzzling out of context insertions.

These miscues only scratch the surface of Wood's rambling incoherences. Glen or Glenda stands as a textbook example of schlock, where a desperate filmmaker whores himself and throws any kind of crap he can get hold of. To satisfy producer George Weiss (who also backed such "classics" as White Slaves of Chinatown and Chained Girls), Wood includes an absurd sequence of soft porn bondage and simulated sex. But the heights of bizarre wackiness occur during Bela Legosi’s scattered appearances. So thrilled was Wood to get a real star actor for his film that he just plops him helter-skelter throughout, as if he is some god ruling over a existential universe of puppets.

"Pull the strings! Pull the strings!" Bela blusters before blathering about a green dragon that eats little boys. Multiple times he busts out with a nursery rhyme doggerel about "puppy dog tails and big fat snails." Surrounded by skulls and sitting in a large leather chair, Lugosi delivers a surreal narrative that evokes his pitiful final drug addled years when cocaine addiction took over. He has no reasonable place in the narrative, so all his soliloquys, warnings, and silent double takes are basically duct taped over the plot. As outrageously bad as this is, it's difficult to laugh too loudly, considering that it comes at the expense of cinema's definitive Dracula.

Glen or Glenda is the only Ed Wood feature film that he didn't produce himself, but his absurdly inept "artistic" hand dominates as the screenwriter, director, and lead actor. But as insanely bad as this movie is, it retains perverse pleasures that serve it well as a cult icon. Running just a tad over an hour, this can serve well for an evening of laughs--and you don't even have to get drunk or stoned beforehand. It may even spark future filmmakers to pursue their dreams; after all, if a director can make something this bad and eventually become famous . . . anyone could do it!