A few books into Crispin Glover’s eight-book, hour-long presentation “The Big Slide Show,” you begin to wonder if you should be laughing.

“Laughter,” says Glover at the end of the evening “is one of the most rudimentary forms of reaction… I’ve learned that it is a good thing. After doing this for years, I know how to encourage it in certain parts of the reading…Yes, there’s definitely supposed to be humor in the books.”

Despite Glover’s response, recalling his serious figure on-stage, bathed in red light, emphatically motioning at the projected images above as he lurches towards the audience to yell the lines, “QUIET! QUIET,” you kind of have to wonder how much of that is bullshit. Glover’s awkwardly passionate demeanor is still hard to discern as sincerity or jest despite it being a well-known trademark of his persona (take his notorious karate shenanigans on Letterman, for example). But it’s that strangely unique energy that Glover hums with which makes watching him so captivating. You’re kind of waiting for that karate-kick-to-the-face moment to seep out from behind his apparently demure character.

Laughter aside, Glover’s books reflect his own esoteric and off-beat personality in an intriguing way. The tales are dark, strange and ambiguous stories that stylistically and artistically resemble zines more than books. The pages are rarely, if ever, traditionally typed. Words are often scrawled over type-print, pasted sentences and images float amidst India-inked lines. Some pages only contain single words or sentences while others, blocks of blacked-out print which mysteriously spot paragraphs.

The bulk of the evening is focused on the screening of Glover’s 72-minute film, “What Is It?” and the following Q&A session. The film is the first installment of Glover’s trilogy-in-the-making entitled “It” released through his company, Volcanic Eruptions. The subtle balance of irony, horror and mystery Glover achieves in his books is totally abandoned in “What Is It?”, and the audience’s reaction is telling. The laughter during the reading is replaced with a polarizing, shocked silence. “What I think is truly funny,” Glover explains, “is when the audience sees something in the film that causes their laughter to halt immediately. Silence. That’s when I laugh.”

The plot’s description is best summarized through the movie’s tagline from IMDb.com: “What Is It?” follows the adventure of “a young man whose principle interests are snails, salt, a pipe, and how to get home. As tormented by an hubristic, racist inner psyche.” Imagine it being said backwards on a Playschool tape-recorder held to a demonic sounding voice-manipulator with one of those little cylindrical moo-cow toys being flipped continuously (except the adult version, producing sexual moans instead of mooing…and replace the label’s pastoral scene with a swastika) and there’s “What Is It?” As what Glover calls a “reaction to cinema in the past 25 to 30 years,” “What Is It?” can easily be mistaken for a mish-mashed shock-collage of obscenity. The assumption, however, isn’t far off point.

“The idea is to break down the walls of taboo wherein a whole universe of thought resides,” Glover explains. The film, however, is more intent on grinding those walls to a pulp than it is on moving past them.

Some of Glover’s methods of taboo-breaking prove thought-provoking (i.e. directing a cast mostly composed of actors with Down’s syndrome). More often than not, however, they seem like irrelevant cheap-shots: using a civil-war era rebel song which spouts the N-word, violently and graphically killing several snails, and depicting a scene in which an elderly man with cerebral palsy gets a hand-job, for example.

Considering the material’s sensitivity, Glover is understandably protective of the film. Much of the Q&A session he spends stressing the point that precautions were taken and that the actors’ needs were dealt with thoughtfully. Certain images that he fails to address, however, rail against his claim: a scene in which a crippled man falls to the ground from a modest height with nothing to break his fall (one that looks disturbingly unscripted and painful), and not to mention the small army of innocent snails wasted in the film. Art, however, should be able to stand on its own, and the requisite Q&A is an indication of the film’s short-comings.

Frankly, the movie fails to provide anything substantial enough to compel the viewer beyond the discomforting material and the amateurishness of the film itself. Round two of the “It” trilogy, “It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine!”, Glover claims, although even more graphic, is his best contribution to film yet. And hey, it very well could be. You get the sense that although definitely off, he isn’t that far off. As bold as a failure as it was, it was at least still bold. Let’s hope next time around, Glover succeeds in relaying poignancy in his film more than pornography.