Blackmail Boy, the quasi-erotic queer thriller from the Greek filmmaking duo Michalis Reppas and Thanassis Papathanasiou, has been touted as having a Desperate Housewives mentality. There's even a kooky cartoon montage on the official web site. But don't be fooled. That's a facile allusion cooked up for catchy marketing blurbs, and it's thoroughly misleading. Despite excursions in melodrama, the tone is so dark, the deeds so disturbing, chances are most of mainstream America who've made the ABC-TV hit dramedy a Sunday night ritual would be truly mortified watching this film.

For Blackmail Boy is a gritty, scintillating tale of lust, money, power, treachery, and death-a contemporary Greek tragedy. Desperation is only the beginning.

The film opens with a family's horrible car wreck that kills one daughter and causes the father to lapse into a vegetative state, barely kept alive sitting in the family's living room with closely regulated tanks of oxygen. (Fun fact: the original title was the poetic "Oxygono," or oxygen, a recurring theme in the film, but the distributors sexed it up to appeal to American GLBT film fest audiences.)

Sure, like Housewives, Blackmail Boy is populated with a host of quirky characters, but here they're damaged beyond repair. Some years after the accident, the materfamilias Magda (Nena Mendi), is now a bitter shrew, struggling to keep her crackpot family under control. Her listless, brooding 20-year old son, Christos (Yannis Tsimitselis), has taken to screwing anybody he chooses for personal gain, including a model-gorgeous girlfriend, an older waitress with a drug habit, and a married, middle-aged bureaucrat named Giorgos (Akyllas Karazisis).

Then there's Magda's wretched daughter, Yiota (Jeannie Papadopoulou), who is deeply scarred-both physically and emotionally-and is jealous of her favored brother. Yiota's swarthy husband, Stelios (Alexis Georgoulis), has fallen out of love with her and connives behind her back.

The criss-crossing story lines, even more convoluted than the shenanigans going down on Wisteria Lane, revolve around a fierce battle over a choice chunk of family real estate. Stelios tries to blackmail Giorgos, who happens to control the parcel's development, by exposing the secret homosexual affair with his brother-in-law, Christos. He videotapes Christos, who may actually be in on the scheme, on his knees before Giorgos at a secluded junkyard outside of town. That's when things really get ugly.

Surely the violence and vitriol surpass anything you'll see on Desperate Housewives. More than one character is viciously beaten. Another is raped. Blood gushes in several scenes. The close-up of somebody blowing chunks into a toilet is hardly fit for prime time.

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