Watch Glen and Randa For Free

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Don't Believe the Hype

A Masterpiece!

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Bizarrely, GLEN & RANDA was shown on late night TV here in the UK, so I decided to give it a watch having never heard of it before. I'm not exactly sure what I watched; ostensibly this is a post-apocalyptic movie dealing with mankind's struggle to adapt in a ruined world, but it's also an incredibly slow moving film in which very little incident actually happens.The film begins with a couple of naked hippies strolling around and moves on from there. The female character falls pregnant and this sub-plot takes up a lot of screen time. The performances, shall we say, naturalistic to say the least, and there's a lot of waffle and philosophical debate as the characters interact with others in their landscape. I did like the way the central twosome are searching for a mystical comic book city and the cinematography is quite good on a zero budget, but there's too little meat here to sustain a proper movie.

A downbeat post-WWIII film that has practically no soundtrack; there is an old pop hit being played on a record player, and some of the characters briefly sing a bit, but basically there is no music. A very silent, calm film which takes a little while (10-20 min.) to get interesting. The gloom isn't realized with dark scenes and depressed faces; it's realized with the lack of music, the miserable living conditions of the characters, and by the events.Whether it's realistic or not depends on how you look at it; it's realistic enough within the framework of the world that is envisioned here. However, at least 20 years have passed since the Armageddon, and people still live like rats which is an underestimation of humankind's ability to re-organize. I mean, all that the group of people (the ones Glen & Randa belong to) in the movie do is collect cans of food. Also, there is a ridiculous scene where Randa holds a piece of raw fish and lights it briefly with a match, then eats it! Surely, even cave people would have more culture than that. Surely, Glen and Randa - as super-naive as they are shown to be - at least ought to know that fire is used to prepare meat.But otherwise the realism achieved is far greater than in most post-apocalyptic films, and there are no other exaggerations that I can think of.After seeing the fish-hunting scene (literally "hunting fish") it's safe to say that the movie can make no claims that "no fish were killed during the making of this film".

An intriguingly spartan and offbeat avant-garde early 70's excursion into post-nuke sci-fi survivalist cinema centering on the obsessive Glen (muscular, curly-haired Steven Curry) and his more passive female companion Randa (a sweetly disarming performance by the lovely, willowy Shelley Plimpton), a pair of guileless youths trying to eke out a meager existence amid the desolate ruins following an atomic war. After a wily, lecherous old magician (a wonderfully rascally turn by Garry Goodrow) visits Glen and Randa's camp and fills Glen's head full of tales about a great lost city, Glen and a now-pregnant Randa (the magician impregnated her) embark on a dangerous trek across the harsh, ravaged terrain to discover this great city that Glen first read all about in an old "Wonder Women" comic book. During their perilous quest Glen and Randa meet a friendly, doddering elderly man (an endearingly crotchety Woodrow Chambliss; Uncle Willie in the funky '72 made-for-TV creature feature favorite "Gargoyles") and Randa gives birth to a baby.Director Jim McBride (who later helmed such better known big budget films as "The Big Easy" and "Great BAlls of Fire") skillfully uses an extremely plain, basic and unpolished no-frills cinematic style to plausibly create a vivid depiction of the banality and hopelessness of day-to-day post-holocaust existence, thus giving this bleak, albeit strangely haunting and affecting apocalyptic vision an unshakable sense of gritty, lived-in conviction. The bare-bones, but eloquent and sometimes wittily droll script by McBride, Lorenzo Manns, and Rudolph Wurlitzer (who went on to write "Two-Lane Blacktop" and "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid") relates with deceptive simplicity and straightforwardness a lyrically powerful parable with provocative religious allusions (Glen and Randa's odyssey could be interpreted as Adam and Eve's fall from grace after leaving the garden of Eden) about lost innocence and a futile search for an irrevocably vanished past paradise. Kudos as well to Alan Raymond's flat, spare, minimalist cinematography, which uses long, lingering, unedited takes, stately tracking shots, and elegant fade-outs to convey a wealth of striking visuals: the rusty hulk of a car with tree branches growing out of it, a horde of grimy survivors glumly rummaging through the rubble for cans of food, Randa ravenously devouring grass and worms, Glen savagely beating several fish with a stick, and the oddly poignant final shot of Glen and the old man drifting out to sea on a rickety boat are all indelible moments that stick in your memory after seeing the movie. A pleasingly quirky and truly novel one-of-a-kind experimental oddity.

I thought this was a really interesting antidote to all of the mow-hawked and black leather-wearing silliness that seems to occur after the apocalypse in every other movie of this type. There are no marauding gangs of motorbike riders here. The innocence and ignorance of the titular characters is alarming enough; seeing them foolishly expend all of their wooden matches because its amusing to them before they attempt to cross what looks like the Cascade Mountain range is painful to watch! I happen to think that if anyone ever did survive an Extinction Level Event,they might behave something like Glen and Randa; what has destroyed the world is never explained; no mention of nuclear war is made and when the characters stand at what is obviously the west coast of either Oregon or California and explain that ..."about ten miles that way there used to be a city called Boise!" you realize that whatever happened, it was massive;nuclear warheads don't re-shape the coastline! The found sets--wrecked cars sunk in sand, mobile homes that look as if Godzilla stomped on them, a rusty derailed train half submerged in a river--lend a sense of surrealistic realism to the film, if that makes any sense. This movie moves at a slow pace but i was captivated by it, wondering what would happen next. I think one of the most powerful aspects of this film is the fact that there are NO characters who provide a sense of sanity and strength; all of the older characters seem to have been driven into a sort of semi-schizophrenic absent-mindedness by whatever it was that slammed the crap out of the old civilization and the 2 youngsters seem so ignorant and unaware of the inherent dangers of their travels that you seriously worry about their safety as they tramp barefooted thru the mountains, across deserts, etc etc. I would recommend this film as an example of what can still be done with the post-apocalyptic genre. This one was a breath of fresh air.