Monkey Uncaged: The Ten Worst Gay Movies of All Time!

Have a question about gay male entertainment? Send it to aftereltonflyingmonkey@yahoo.com! (Please include your city and state and/or country.)

A Note from the Flying Monkey: Of the many emails I receive every week for my column, some are so good that they simply can’t be answered in just a few words. So from time to time, the editors have decided to let me out of the “cage” of that regular column, in a feature we’re calling Monkey Uncaged! 

Q: What, in your opinion, is the worst gay film ever made? Why? – A.R.

A: A couple of months ago, I wrote a list of what I considered to be the ten most “important” gay male films – not what I felt were the “best,” mind you, but the ones that I felt had had the most impact either on the GLBT community or society at large.

This list is completely different. It has nothing to do with any greater social ramifications. It’s entirely my lil’ ol’ opinion.

Before we get to my list, a caveat: like all of you, I’ve seen plenty of downright terrible gay indie films. No doubt some of these were horrible because the actors and filmmakers were untalented and/or incompetent, but surely at least some of the awfulness was the result of the fact that the projects were done on shoestring budgets with nonprofessional talent. These folks were at least trying to keep the spark of gay cinema lit, often at enormous personal cost and at times when no one else gave a damn.

As a result, I don’t think these gay movies deserve nearly the same scorn as actors and filmmakers who command actual resources and claim to be professionals and yet still make bad movies. So I’m excluding micro-budget indie movies from my list.

And now another caveat. As with my list of the most “important” films, this is entirely subjective. These are only my opinions, and my opinions are just that: opinions. We’ve long resisted doing “worst” lists here at AfterElton.com, mostly because we feel there’s already too much negativity in the world. One person’s “worst” movie is someone else’s favorite, and with so little joy and goodness in the world, who wants to spoil that?

Still, film criticism is film criticism, so we thought readers might enjoy this little foray to the “dark” side of gay cinema:

(10) Kiss the Bride (2007): I was a big fan of director C. Jay Cox’s 2003 film Latter Days, and I’m on record as saying that I think Tori Spelling deserved an Oscar nomination for her brilliant (and fearless!) performance as a character who is a horrible actress in 1999’s Trick. So imagine my disappointment when the two of them teamed up for this dud.

The two male leads are so bland and interchangeable I actually had a hard time telling them apart. The movie even co-stars the delightful Amber Benson – “Tara” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer – but she’s completely wasted, natch.

Philipp Karner, Tori Spelling and James O'Shea in Kiss the Bride