GLORIOUS (2022) ★ ★

Ever wonder what kind of people find pleasure in rest-stop sexual hijinks? I would be wondering too, if I weren't so busy wondering why it took three people to write Rebekah McKendry's "Glorious." 

This is a low-budget movie, yet the screenplay money was divvied three ways. Bad economics, and even worse when you consider the outcome. The film stars five people, only four of which appear on screen, and what it lacks in casting it fails to make up for in story. I was five minutes into "Glorious" when I figured out who Wes, the main character, really is. Spoiler, he isn't just another innocent guy who gets lost trying to reconnect with his ex-girlfriend. 

I had him pegged down to the last detail before he even set foot in his little roadside hell, and figuring the character out that early, and that thoroughly, made the rest of the movie a total slog. If you graduated from middle school and know how many dimes are in a dollar, you'll figure it out too. Then again, the movie practically reaches out of the TV screen, grabs you by the hair, and pulls you face-first into Wes' true character. The guy behaves like a guilt-ridden lunatic before the into music has even faded out. 

This poses a problem for "Glorious." We're meant to root for Wes. We meet him when he's dangerously close to nodding off while driving alone on a long, winding road in the middle of nowhere. His hair is messy, he hasn't shaved in a month, he's pale, and his eyes are bloodshot. He already looks like he's been through hell, so how much of a transformative character arc can we expect to see here? He pulls over at a remote rest-stop comprised of a building with bathrooms and a near-empty vending machine, which teases him with its last chocolate bar. He inserts a coin, is given nothing, and throws a hissy fit. A disheveled woman, who for reasons unknown is loitering near the bathrooms, tells him he's given up too easily. She inserts the winning quarter into the machine and hands him the prize. Wes is clearly not very bright.  

This is followed by him obsessively calling the person we're meant to think is his ex. Then his phone runs out of battery, so Wes does the sensible thing and plugs it into his car charger. Just kidding! He throws the phone across the parking lot and destroys it. This prompts him to tell himself that he needs to pull it together, and his way of doing that involves chugging a bottle of Jack Daniels and setting all of his worldly possessions, including his pants, on fire. Wes is even more clearly a total jerk. 

Todd Rigney, Joshua Hull, and David Ian McKendry try to fob this off as comedy, and then amplify the tragi-comedic element by trapping Wes in a restroom with a malevolent pagan god who speaks through an artistically-embellished glory hole in one of the toilet stalls. The toilet god idea is truly original, and I have to give the writing team full marks for coming up with it. But the execution is sloppy, and the whole thing disappoints when it fails to follow through on the obvious built-in gag. J.K. Simmons is the voice of Ghatanothoa, and he plays the deity tongue-in-cheek. But Wes, played by Ryan Kwanten, isn't in on the joke. He's far too serious, another case of poor direction from another low-rent director. Wes comes across as the kind of humorless dummy nobody can stand in real life. He's the guy who opens a can of peanuts and storms out of the office when the snake hits him in the nose. 

With "Glorious," there isn't much beyond the trope of a man trapped by a supernatural and all-powerful entity. We have the obligatory rescue attempt when Andre' Lamar stops in, but it's just an excuse to murder a black man on screen. Really people, you have one white guy and one black guy, and your artistic instinct is to kill the black guy? By the time Lamar's character arrived, I was begging for the toilet god to kill Wes, and give someone else a shot. No dice: I was in for another forty-five minutes of Mr. No-Humor. 

"Glorious" is a failure as a horror movie, which is a shame because it had the makings of something interesting and truly scary. The playful intonations of Simmons rumbling over Kwanten's insipid yelping was grating after five minutes, and in the absence of true scares, even this refreshingly original concept wore out its welcome. We live in an age of writers who don't read, and filmmakers who don't watch. One gets the sense that the brains behind this thing are true film buffs who lacked the wherewithal to construct greatness out of the scattered pieces of a good idea. 

                                                                                                                                --- Bill Fontaine