Glory Daze is a 1995 American independent comedy film written and directed by Rich Wilkes and starring Ben Affleck, Sam Rockwell, Megan Ward, and French Stewart.

The plot concerns five college housemates in Santa Cruz, California who are facing graduation and make an attempt to prolong their carefree lifestyle before going their separate ways.

To preserve their memories of the house and prevent any future residents from despoiling it, they proceed to smash their furniture and belongings, culminating in the destruction of the bar counter that they had built together.

The next day, the five friends go their separate ways: Rob leaves for Los Angeles with Joanie, Dennis heads off to school in Michigan, and Mickey and Chelsea begin dating.

The soundtrack also features several other contemporary punk rock bands, mostly from California, including NOFX, Bad Religion, Tilt, The Mr. T Experience, Assorted Jelly Beans, The Bouncing Souls, and the New Bomb Turks.

The song "Sports Pack" is sung by Vinnie DeRamus, who played Mickey, with writer and director Rich Wilkes on drums along with bassist Scott Marcano and a guitarist credited as "Gold"; for the soundtrack album they used the group name Epoxy.

If the loose, anecdotal pic sometimes rambles and loses its main line, eventually it rights itself, with enough inventiveness and fresh, nasty humor to compensate for the dull moments.

"[1] Upon its theatrical release, Stephen Holden of The New York Times gave Glory Daze a positive review, saying "This tiny nostalgic comedy, with its smart collegiate chatter, is a much better movie than slick fatuities like The Jerky Boys (1995), Airheads (1994), and Billy Madison (1995), for which Mr. Wilkes wrote the screenplays.

But Glory Daze deftly sketches each member of its underachieving fivesome while sustaining a mood of humorously frazzled end-of-semester anxiety [...] Mr. Affleck's affably mopey performance finds just the right balance between obnoxious and sad sack.

Wilkes has a gift for nasty put-down lines, but his directing debut lacks heart and his leading man isn't a tad sympathetic – or even slightly redeemed by Affleck's sour performance.

"[4] Joey O'Bryan of The Austin Chronicle also criticized Glory Daze, calling it "insipid [...] a loving, if not particularly funny, tribute to the slob-comedies of the Eighties, or, in other words, it's an Animal House (1978) wannabe with a condescending Gen-X slant [...] the film's sense of social satire is hopelessly pedestrian, the dialogue stale ('He changed his major more often than his underwear'), and the editing is amateurish, with many scenes beginning too late and ending too early.

Club compared it unfavorably to 1995's Kicking and Screaming, calling it "a considerably weaker variation on the same themes [...] Glory Daze is not a good movie, but it does illustrate some of the frustrating clichés that the Gen Angst genre has accumulated in the nearly four years since Reality Bites (1994) appeared.