In “Glorious,” J.K. Simmons plays the voice of an ominous Lovecraftian deity lurking behind a glory pit in a random roadside restroom. That’s practically all the horror audience needs to sample these not-so-sick-so-weird-looking superhero-type things by Rebecca McKendry, whose expertise in all things horror is far beyond her knowledge of the basics of men’s restrooms – including how they look and how men act when they They realize that someone/something is breathing hard in the stall next door. And again, creativity in such logistics hasn’t affected Porky’s place in film culture, so why should it be a deal breaker here?
It’s just that, even at 80 minutes, “Glorious” feels four times as good as it is. While the film’s prequel (designed by Todd Rigney, then embodied by Joshua Hall and Fangoria veteran David Ian McKendry) may seem juvenile, director McKendry navigates through a sense of the inexplicable parallel dimension of “good taste”: it made him Point to be avoided is the transgressive shocks one might expect from the concept—like what would happen if Wes put his eye (or any other hole) in the hole—instead, treat this external encounter as a kind of cosmic doomsday.
Despite Simmons’ oral contributions to the film, “Glorious” is almost a one-man show of co-star Kwanten, who plays Wes, a weary commuter who drives who knows where with all of his belongings crammed into the back of his SUV. Freshly single and unhappy about it, Wes moves to a highway rest area and proceeds to feel pity for himself, smashing his (convenient) phone and burning a shoebox full of souvenirs (including photos of his ex-girlfriend Brenda, pictured in a flashback by Sylvia Grace Karim) before he passed out drunk in the parking lot.
The next morning, Wes drags himself barefoot into the bathroom. Once the door closes behind him, he’s stuck in what appears to be the movie “Saw,” or the public toilets of a 90-year-old Soviet subway station. It’s clearly a sound theatre, albeit a finely orchestrated state of desperation/neglect, which is justifiable, given that “Glorious” was made during the pandemic and never made any claims to realism. The elaborate fresco adorning the booth wall is hard to swallow—a curious design choice, as this primitive graffiti becomes a greater focus point than the glory hole itself (the movie barely deals with the strange annoyance of its premise).
Anyway, once the supernatural companion who shares this pigeon starts chatting, Wes doesn’t seem so bothered by the stranger’s presence as he is by his own predicament. Referring to Brenda from time to time, Wes wastes a lot of time trying to escape from the bathroom when what we really want him to do is start taking that disembodied voice, who calls himself “Ghattanothua,” seriously. Only then will this plot begin to go anywhere. There’s a reason the universe has brought these two souls together, but “Glorious” unwisely obscures the interpretation as a perversion of it, rather than creating what they have in common from the start and making the monster’s demands exponentially more interesting.
Gatanothua is in fact a malicious entity in the extended mythology of classic horror writer H.P. Lovecraft—”a being of pure destruction,” Simmons puts it—though Wes doesn’t seem to deserve such a visit. Some people love Lovecraft, with its tertiary colors (the same shades of blue and fuchsia seen in films like “From Beyond” and “Color Out of Space”), deep-sea visuals (represented here via tentacles and an ominous watery sound design) and a general fear of the unknown. . However, this is the most absurd place to cram those items. It ultimately feels like a gimmick, especially since the movie never really answers its primary creative question: Why the glory gap? Of all the awful things one could imagine behind a portal of illicit pleasure, Gatanothua’s first son Cthulhu is strangely not the worst.
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