In the dawn-tinted Parthenon of awful gay movies, Cruising stands alone. It doesn’t merely backfire; it backfires brilliantly.

So it is with mixed emotions (two parts joy, three parts delirium) that we turn our gaze on September 18 when this anti-classic will be released finally on DVD in its shameless uncut glory (with restored scenes never released) — and even better in hi-def, so you can catch all the undulating male bodies in the background of its bar scenes where, according to the movie’s fantastical conceit, everyone is always in some state of fuck or suck.

Cruising was certainly a shocker in its day. The 1980 thriller is set in the night-world of New York’s orgiastic backrooms, peepshows and open-air fuck-fests that ran 24/7 in the bushes of Central Park. A then hot and nasty Al Pacino goes undercover to attract a serial killer, decoying himself as a hungry bottom in wife-beaters and low-slung jeans. The killer, meanwhile, a lanky, long-torsoed lad whose face is always concealed, is shown tricking and then killing his bound-up S&M partners — a sort of buyer’s remorse we usually associate with the black widow spider — ever whispering in his victim’s ear the moronic catchphrase “You made me do that.” (more…)

“Your body is a labyrinth that only I can penetrate.”

It’s pretty arch and baroque as far as come-ons go, but if you’re indie film maker Joe Zaso, it’s likely to make you stiffen with anticipation below the belt.

New York-born Zaso is a devote of the sexy, violent horror movies produced in Italy during the 60s and 70s and a whispered, vaguely threatening line like that is just the type of florid dialogue you’d expect in movies with erotically macabre titles like Your Hands On My Body, The Corpse Bears Traces of Carnal Violence, and Strip Nude For Your Killer.

This is the twilight world Zaso dreams of — a place where beautiful people in mod fashions die operatically, everyone lives in an opulent Italian villa, sex is kinky and scored to lush Ennio Morricone-style music, and there’s always a trench-coated, fedora-wearing maniac with a razor lurking about.

Joe Zaso was born too late to have the movie career he craves or deserves. Had he arrived decades earlier, he’d be playing an assortment of shirtless Frankenstein Monster sex toys, Eurospy heavies, drop-dead gorgeous Spaghetti Western anti-heroes, and macho explorers in Italian cannibal epics.

With all his telegenic brawn, it’s not hard to picture him assaying Hercules or Maciste in toga pictures, getting roles as sand-kicking bullies in sugary beach party movies, or being plucked right off the streets of New York to star in Andy Warhol Factory films.

Alas, the world has changed. The Hollywood studio system collapsed and has left many a beautiful hopeful to fend for themselves. Broadway and Soap Opera inner circles are just as closed off. The European Horror and Sexploitation market dwindled by the close of the 80s. Gone are the drive-ins and grind house scenes of yesteryear.

So what’s a handsome, ambitious young actor to do? (more…)

There’s always a modicum of truth in humor.

Remember when the showbiz satire site Dateline: Hollywood “reported” that 2006’s homo-hot gladiator movie 300 was the “first gay porn movie to gross over 70 million dollars”?

We do. We laughed really hard. Almost as hard as when that same site’s front page screamed out: BRITNEY SPEARS ANNOUNCES PLANS TO EXPOSE ANUS!!

But back to the 300 lampoonery. Dateline: Hollywood’s pseudo feature on the film featured an “interview” with Don Fanaras, one of the film’s “producers.” Mr. Fanaras revealed how 300’s core audience was “mostly men who are in denial that they are attracted to other men.” (more…)

Gaysploitation.

Unlike the Blaxploitation and Kung Fu crazes of the early and mid 70s, the Gay Exploitation genre never really arrived. Outside of underground films and odd shorts and loops, gay characters just didn’t bust out on drive-in screens and urban adult-only theaters. Where was our vigilante Pam Grier, our abtacular Bruce Lee?

Only the peerless Tura Satana (top right) as Varla in Russ Meyer’s 1965 classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has the balls to assume the mantle of all-time Super Queer.

The joy of Faster, Pussycat! is that Ms. Satana is in many ways playing herself. She was trained in karate, did a stint in reform school, married at thirteen, joined an all-girl gang, was a popular burlesque dancer, dated Elvis and garnered bit parts in a Hollywood studio system that couldn’t accommodate her exoticism.

We know her Varla is bad because she’s got a face like a kabuki mask of disdain, a repetoire of judo death blows, and cleavage that runs deeper than a California fault line. Add her two sociopathic go-go dancer cohorts Rosie, the enigmatic Haji (supine below) and Billie, the bodacious Lori Williams (below right), into the mix and the movie spills deliriously over the top.

The triad is such an stunning camp spectacle that they’re almost impossible to define as fully man or woman. Are they buxom, cat-fighting male fantasies? Brawling bull daggers behind the wheel? She-male outlaws or tranny terrors on a desert death trip into oblivion? (more…)

Yes, yes, we’re squeezing yet another piece out of the movie 300!

That total popcorn experience that is so homoerotic it goes out of its way to be homophobic — is that classic gay panic or what!

Classic Hollywood, that is; not classic Greek.

The Spartans, as we have all learned by now, when not slashing, gashing and slaughtering, did not tremble or shake when confronted with the willing mouth or open anus of a fellow hardbody warrior.

Part of what made the warrior caste in Sparta so elite was the homosexual sex, which was — do you love it — mandatory. Pairing up with a lover was thought — with perfect Euclidean logic — to strengthen unit cohesion, not weaken it.

In fact, experience had taught them so. There were famous fighting teams, famously devoted to each other. You would think that our own military brass — with all the mutual fucking and sucking that soldiers, marines and airmen have enjoyed over the years — might have learned the same lesson. Alas, no — a modern bias that plays out, anachronistically, in the film.

But if 300 gets their history wrong, they nail it with the hardbodies. Particularly, the mighty, mighty bod of Gerard Butler, whose wall-to-wall chest span and six-cylinder six-pack are featured front and center in every 300 poster, as well as on the box of the Playstation spin-off.

We haven’t seen a male body sold this hard since the glory days of Steve Reeves. (more…)

In Ancient Sparta, the only way they could separate the men from the boys was with a crowbar — and crowbars wouldn’t be invented for hundreds of years to come. So it was all fuck, fight, and fuck some more.

Above we see a recreation from the film 300 of the Ancient Spartan Come-Hither Look. Come hither and I’ll kill you — but first, Hector, we fuck! Ah Sparta. Such romantics.

And yet, ASTONISHINGLY, in 300, there was plenty of man ass running around but not a sign of men assing around in that … how shall we put it, classically Greek way. (more…)

Forget Citizen Kane. Banish Vertigo. Give us a break from Brokeback.

There can be ONLY ONE.

You know what it is. We don’t even have to name it. It was one magical moment after another.

Moments …. like … (more…)

The New York Times is scratching its head this morning over the spectacular 70-million dollar haul that the computer-enhanced musclefest 300 took in this weekend. Surreally beautiful but widely panned, 300 has surpassed all expectations, and no one knows why. Could it be the hunks upon hunks of manflesh on display?

All we know is this is definitely a movie we’re getting in hi-def DVD: It has high jerkoffability.

We think it would be suitable as the midnight show in those dirty movie theaters that suddenly turn gay at the witching hour, when the boy features replace the girl features, and people get downright frisky in their seats … and along the walls …and behind the screen.

Based on the Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name and married to Miller’s muscular graphic style, thanks to the breathtaking CGI work (similar to the overwhelming artistry seen in Sin City, Miller’s first comic to hit the big screen), 300 tells of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, a battle still revered and taught at West Point, when 300 Spartans fought to the death against 4000 Persians — and won (in the long run* — see comments). (more…)