“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? (read the full article)

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.” (read the full article)

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? (read the full article)

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. (read the full article)

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. (read the full article)

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 … (read the full article)

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). (read the full article)

Once again the tension is mounting. Oscar Eve is upon us.

The Smart Money, we are told, is on Helen Mirren. She is one of maybe three Sure Things set to look up from the stage of the Kodak Theater this Sunday into the full glow of Academy acclaim. The Smart Money is also on Dreamgirl Jennifer Hudson and — until just recently — Eddie Murphy.

Now readers, we know you’re just like us: longtime Academy-Award watchers, the kind of people who started rehearsing their Oscar speeches in the mirror at age six. We Nightcharmers know that Smart Money predictions and Shoo-Ins are a tradition of Oscar Night.

So is The Major Upset. (read the full article)

As this giddy NY Times review by Manohla Dargis reminds us, “There are, in the movies, few places creepier to spend time than in David Lynch’s head.”

But ask yourself: When it comes to David Lynch, isn’t that exactly where you want to be?

Remember Mulholland Drive? I do. After my sixth viewing I realized I was watching the movie, repeatedly, not because I enjoyed it as cinema but because as a process the movie taught me to appreciate symbols with the same deference I apply to modern art.

“What does it mean?” was replaced with — well, rewatching the film. (read the full article)

Dreamgirls is weirdly like The Wizard of Oz.

Neither one has a single shred of overtly gay content, and yet each of them has become an iconically gay piece of work. Wait til see you see the movie of Dreamgirls (and you will, you know you will). You’ll see just what I mean.

Here’s a movie made by two white gay guys (writer-director Bill Condon and producer Laurence Mark) based on a Broadway musical made by a bunch of other white gay guys (director-choreographer Michael Bennett, playwright-lyricist Tom Eyen, composer Henry Krieger, and producer David Geffen) loosely based on the real-life story of four young black women from Detroit in the early ‘60s whose singing group crosses over from R&B to Top 40 and launches the superstardom of their lead singer.

Lord knows, gay guys aren’t the only people in the world who love the Supremes or the Broadway show loosely based on their story. But the same mysterious alchemy by which chubby nerdy mamma’s boys all over the world identify with a spunky pubescent girl in pigtails and a checked gingham dress singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” seems to operate inside the mythic landscape of Dreamgirls. (read the full article)

Serene and telepathic, the fair lady of the wood, the Elf Queen who keeps her innermost thoughts hidden, Galadriel stares at the ring of ultimate power that Frodo offers her.

She has long wanted it, and now here it is, being offered freely by a guileless hobbit, an accidental ringbearer, who wearies of its weight, fears its pull.

In an instant Galadriel sees how the ring would overpower her — even her, with all her forest sorceries. The grove where she is standing takes on an eerie green glow, positive and negative light switch. “In place of a Dark Lord,” she warns the hobbit, “you will have a Queen! Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Dawn. Treacherous as the Sea.” She grows immense before his eyes. “Stronger than the foundations of the earth.” Her voice thunders with a multitude of shrill over-voices:

“All shall love me and despair!”

And then, in one of the most fateful turns in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, she rejects the offer, as she is destined to. “I pass the test,” she gasps in relief. “I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.” (read the full article)

Booze, dope and showbiz. How can we resist?

The Valley of the Dolls is finally out on a deluxe 2-disc DVD — just in time for Gay Pride Day. And what a celebration it is! From its shocking-pink plastic case to its tons of queer-centric extras, we have never seen a DVD cater so hard — or so lovingly — to a certain kind of fabuloso gay mania.

Here you will find extras that include: Karaoke versions of the film’s dumbly worded songs where you follow the bouncing Rx bottle. Commentary by a camp-savvy but earnest Barbara Parkins (who hated her boxy, beige good-girl suits when all the other actresses got to wear sparkly Travilla gowns.) Remarks from Patty Duke (who hated the director and was accused of beating up too hard on Susan Hayward in the the film’s campfest finale, the ladies room cat fight.) And comments from a supporting player, who noted that it was a movie where all the actresses hated each other, upstaged each other, and saw their roles as pivotal career-changing opportunities. (read the full article)

Now, fresh from 2-disc DVD rehab, David K and editor John Calendo discuss the magic, the myth, and the madness of Valley of the Dolls.

David K: For years I’ve been smitten with the publicity still of the three girls on the bed. It’s the most famous image associated with the film.

John Calendo: It’s too bad the three actresses never appear in the same scene together. As to what they might all be doing on a big ‘ol Hollywood bed except trying on each other’s falls, I will leave to the girl-on-girl aficionados.

DK: That image symbolizes the heart of what I love most about Dolls: It’s a movie about glamorous, beautiful women … with big hair. But for all its pinky glamor the photo is also disturbing. The way the trio is juxtaposed on the bed, but not relating to each other — that signals complications. Goodie! A movie about Gals in Trouble! That fact shoots the film into the queer stratosphere. Beauty and chaos intermingling — it’s an addictive combo. (read the full article)