“Eating Out 3” Makes for a Mostly Unsatisfying Meal

A movie franchise is like a shark. For it to stay alive, it has to move forward. It’s a lesson that the Eating Out franchise would do well to learn.

I liked 2004’s Eating Out a lot. The campy gay sex farce was downright revolutionary coming after decades of earnest, angsty coming out dramas (and two years before Another Gay Movie).

2006’s Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds wasn’t as successful, but it wasn’t a disaster.

But Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat, now playing in limited release, is the weakest entry in the series so far. It’s not that parts of it aren’t funny. It’s just that the movie takes absolutely no chances, choosing instead to change a few details and repeat what came before in the first two movies.

Q. Allan Brocka, the creator of Logo’s Rick & Steve the Happiest Gay Couple in all the World and writer and director of Eating Out and the producer of Eating Out 2, doesn’t appear to have been involved at all this time around, and it shows.

The movie quickly kills off the main character from the first two movies, Kyle (American Idol’s Jim Verraros), replacing him with Casey (Daniel Skelton), a wide-eyed gay innocent who takes one look at the slutty things going on during the opening credits and says, “I’m gonna love this town!”

Rebekah Kochan is back as the foul-mouthed Tiffani – “the slut with the mouth of shit.”

Casey and Rebekah team up and soon meet the sizzling hot Zack (Chris Salvatore), smarting over having just been dumped by his boyfriend, Lionel (The Janice Dickinson’s Modeling Agency’s John Stallings).

John Stallings (center)
 

Casey thinks Zack is out of his league, but Rebekah talks him into inventing a fake online profile, using photos of her hot ex, Ryan, under the (accurate) assumption that people are often more honest with strangers than they are with people they know.

Naturally, Zack falls in love with the non-existent guy who has Casey’s personality but who looks like Ryan. Then the real Ryan turns up back in town and, well, complications ensue.