Review: Two New Movie Thrillers Bring Blood-and-Guts to Gay Cinema

The trailer for Let Me Die Quietly

You know how in diving, a particular dive has a "degree of difficulty" — the more difficult the dive is, there is a multiplier that drives the final judges' score higher compared to less difficult dives?

Sometimes I think there should be "degrees of difficulty" in filmmaking: if a film is ambitious or somehow sophisticated, it should get "bonus points" in reviews and the like. Unfortunately, that's not quite how it works: a film either "works" as an entertainment project or it doesn't, and good intentions don't count for much.

Still, Let Me Die Quietly, a new gay-ish film noir just out on DVD, is an example of a film with a very high degree of difficulty. As you might be able to tell by the title, this is a classic film noir — a movie genre from the 1940s and 50s that's mostly out of fashion these days, but that focuses on evocative, often "dark" imagery, and themes of cynicism and sexual compulsion. Let Me Die Quietly was also obviously made on a shoestring — and I mean shoestring — budget.

Talk about a filmmaking challenge!

Mario (played by the film's screenwriter, novelist Charles Casillo) is a very neurotic gay man riddled with guilt over his gay sexual compulsions and tortured by visions of violent murders — so much so that he must confess his nightmares to both a psychiatrist and a priest (this turns out to be important). He meets a seductive psychic woman who seems to be having visions of the same murders he is. But who's to be murdered next — and why? More importantly, can the two of them do anything to stop it?

Of course, nothing here is exactly what it appears to be, and to the film's great credit, it includes a couple of solid twists (the second even better than the first). Meanwhile, the acting is good for a film of this type, and the movie is clever and creative in its imagery, despite the low, low budget.

Alas, if this movie was a diver, it got tripped up a bit in the execution. It's simply too talky. Every thought, every feeling is spoken out loud in either narration or dialogue, and too often a piece of dialogue will literally be repeated twice. But this is a genre that screams out for economy of language.

Because film noir was dealing with sophisticated, unsavory themes in a time of repression and censorship, the genre pioneered the idea that film actors' facial expressions can reveal much more than what is actually being spoken, and the imagery surrounding the actors can tell us everything else we need to know about their inner emotional states.

But here the writer and co-directors Mitchell Reichler and Brian Michael Finn go in exactly the opposite direction, making it too verbal — the classic mistake of a novelist writing for the visual medium of the screen. That turns this review from a rave into a mild recommendation.

And be forewarned: the main character is gay, but he becomes involved with the woman. I confess it annoyed me that the movie focused on his sexually compulsive "gay" behavior, but then when it comes to romance(ish), he gets involved with a female. If you're doing a gay film noir, why not do a gay film noir?

But remember what I said about a high degree of difficulty? Like Pi, the micro-budget 1998 Darren Aronofsky film that first got that director noticed, this is a very small film with very large aspirations, and maybe that does count for something after all. I wish the filmmakers had trusted their audience more, but even so, I suspect, like Aronofsky, we'll see some very interesting work from the key players here in the years ahead.

The trailer for Fright Flick

I try really hard to try to find something nice to say about all the movies I review here, especially the very low budget ones (and as regular readers know, I generally only review films I recommend).

But I honestly can't think of anything positive to say about the new movie Fright Flick, just out on DVD. It stars out gay actor Chad Allen (in a very small part — he was clearly doing someone a favor, and boy, does that person now owe Chad back), and it will probably be identified on Netflix as a "gay" film due to its director and gay distribution company. But the gay content is actually very modest.

The film, written and directed by Israel Luna (Ticked Off Trannies With Knives), is an inept disaster from start to finish. It tells the story of the filming of a B-grade horror movie that becomes the setting for a series of vicious real-life murders. Almost everyone has a motive, but who's really doing the killing and why?

The script is disjointed and over-written, trying to be both a parody of and an homage to the traditional slasher pic (and how many zillion times has that been done at this point?). The jokes fall uniformly flat, the production values are horrible, and when the acting isn't outright bad, it veers wildly in tone — it's almost as if all the actors are appearing in different movies.

Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

Well, if you're doing an indie film with gay actors, and submitting it to the gay press for review, wouldn't it be a good idea for the gay characters not to be the most annoying, unappealing characters in the whole movie — stereotypical and sexually predatory?

If you really are interested in a gay slasher pic, try the underrated 2004 movie Hellbent.