It would be easy to turn Ed Wood's strange life into a condescending freak show. He pronounces every take he shoots 'perfect,' no matter if the acting is hopelessly rank, the special effects straight from the five and dime. But this would-be Or-son Welles's vision is, unfortunately, unredeemed by talent. It's a valentine to the tenacious spirit of an artist who will do anything to see his vision realized on screen. Tim Burton's sweet, sad and very funny Ed Wood takes its cue from that passion.

The passion of the film is as undeniable as its ineptitude that potent combination gives it its distinctively unhinged Woodsy flavor. The singular nuttiness of that 1953 film-far ahead of its time in con-tent-comes from its mind-bogglingly random shifts between pseudodocumentary earnestness and gothic delirium. Soon after, he was rediscovered by connoisseurs of kitsch and semiofficially dubbed 'the worst director of all time' for such grade-Z '50s epics as 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' and 'Glen or Glenda.' The latter, a bizarre cri de coeur, was a plea for compassion for transvestism in which the director-a heterosexual cross-dresser with a serious angora fetish - appeared in drag as the doubly eponymous hero. Wood Jr., a writer-director who inhabited the outermost margins of Hollywood, died in alcoholic obscurity in 1978.

Nightmare of Ecstasy by Rudolph Grey