Thursday, January 28, 2010

He cannot be trusted.

What do...


these couples...


all have in common???


Invariably, one of them will die a horrible death leaving the other irrevocably broken hearted and empty for the rest of their days on earth!!!


We're on to you, Nicholas Sparks.  Fool me once, shame on me - fool me twice, shame on you! 
We will not be fooled or die silent deaths any more.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

There is peace and serenity in the light.

Rest in peace, Zelda. We love you very much.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Natasha Lyonne is not dead

If you're lucky enough to be San Francisco adjacent and if you are at all worth a damn, then I don't need to tell you that Peaches Christ is the undisputed Queen of the midnight movie.  Having showcased such classics as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Re-Animator, Blood Feast, and many a Showgirls spectacular, her taste and track record are as impeccable as her looks.

Lucky for us all, we won't need to trek up north to get a taste of Peaches this year.  Her alter-ego, Joshua Grannell, has made a horror comedy for all the world to see.  All About Evil.  In the tradition of Herschell Gordon Lewis and John Waters before him, All About Evil is set to be a film to behold.  But you don't have to take my word for it! 

Check out http://www.allaboutevilthemovie.com/ for everything you ever wanted to know and more.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

This is the moment...

Hello everyone and welcome to the first annual FaggotyAssAwards.  The red carpet is star-studded.  Just look at who came out to celebrate!



Barbra Streisand and her gay son, Jason Emanuel Gould...








Broadway songstress and star of ABC's Private Practice, Audra McDonald...













Brandon Routh...












That hot born-again Christian guy from Friday the 13th V: A New Beginning...


But, enough of all this hobnobbing, let's get to the awards!!  We all know that no self-congratulatory awards show is complete without a lavish production number:



I was once real hung up on some gay and my dear friend turned to me and said "Jeff, don't be Ali Larter. Look like Ali Larter."  No truer words were ever spoken. 

It is my honor to present this year's FaggotyAssAward for Best Actress to Miss Ali LARTER!!!!!



Ali couldn't join us this evening, but she was good enough to tape her acceptance speech.



Thanks for that, Ali.  We love you, too.

NOW. 
The moment you've all been waiting for!
The 2009 FaggotyAssAward for Best Movie goes to....


THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL!!!


Good job, Ti West.

100days, you win the gift basket for referencing belladonna and for losing in both categories.

Everyone, go home. There's nothing more to see.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Tinsel and Glamour!

We’re sitting on another awards season, darlings. For all the smack-talk I have been laying down regarding the current state of horror cinema, 2009 was a pretty good year. I thusly present you with the first annual FaggotyAssAwards nomination spectacular!

Best Actress:

Megan Fox - Jennifer's Body


Ali Larter - Obsessed


Alison Lohman - Drag Me to Hell


Charlotte Gainsbourg - Antichrist


Penn Badgley & Amber Heard - The Stepfather


Best Film:

The House of the Devil


The Orphan


Drag Me to Hell


Antichrist


Don't on hate me, but I have removed the "Guy I'd go Gay For" category from contention because there were no hot men in any movies this year. So, the award automatically goes to Joe Seely.  Congratulations, Joe!



Vote away to your hearts content, dolls.  The results will be tallied and the winners will be sent FaggotyAss gift baskets with grapefruits, gay dvds, and a copy of the Legally Blonde: The Musical soundtrack!  Very exciting!!!

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Bros Before Hos

"If you take it seriously you just get depressed all the time."


Maybe I’m showing my age, but I don’t think it’s all that bad for us city queers nowadays.  Don’t get me wrong, forty years have passed since Stonewall riots and we still don't have equal taxation for representation - but we aren't dying off like flies either. This is progress?
Sure, we may not be able to make-out aggressively against a jukebox in a Montana gay bar like trashy straights, but we’re prominently featured in primetime television shows starring Sally Field. We are a minority, but we can be a vocal minority.  We’ve moved away from "gay neighborhoods" and "gay bars" and towards becoming fully integrated members of society. Ellen doesn’t even have to dance like a monkey every morning to get ratings. Progress.
With forward momentum, there’s inevitably a hiccup in the matrix - our acceptance is conditional.  In the five years since Will & Grace (inoffensive and sexless, but nonetheless iconic and funny), I see the media bending over backwards to paint the homosexuals as being "just like you." Gay men are not, in fact, a threat to “decency” unless that means shopping at JCrew and buying unethically sourced furniture from Pottery Barn.


My favorite current in this media sea change is the emergence of the straight best friend. Not since the days of Jews and African Americans bonding together against a common foe has a camaraderie so warmed my cold heart. 
Unlike gay on gay best friend dynamics, which can be messy and turn on a dime, there's no drama to be had here. There's no competition. It's just bros being bros - idiots free of subtext. Whether watching Jurassic Park with a thirty-pack of miller high life or approaching strangers at a bar, there's no better wingman than a woke straight guy. This brotherhood runs deep. Take, for example, Fred Dekker's genre-bending classic, Night of the Creeps (1986).


If you look past the ax-wielding zombies, the exploding heads, the creepy crawlies, and the overall collegiate tomfoolery, Night of the Creeps is about the bromance between a crippled gay kid named J.C. and the second Rusty from the National Lampoon Vacation movies (wearing lots of makeup for some reason).



J.C. is the perfect friend. He's clever, funny, and a snappy dresser to boot! We never doubt that he has Rusty's best interest at heart, even to his own detriment. He is the kind of gay who's perfectly content in getting forcefully penetrated by space-leeches in a public bathroom if it means that his best bro gets to have a night with the girl of his dreams. That's love. 


What makes Night of the Creeps so absolutely transcendent is its handling of this relationship between Rusty and J.C.. Never played for laughs, never playing for "gay panic," this movie is unafraid to explore platonic love between besties with complete sincerity. The performance of Steve Marshall as J.C. transcends genre and should be commended for giving this quirky b-movie a heart and soul.

Of course, this was the eighties and that meant that the gay had to die so that the straights could live happily ever after. Hopefully, forty years from now, we can have our own happy gay endings. One day we will be the ones carrying the flamethrowers and getting the guy in the end. 
Until then, there's Night of the Creeps.


Please note: Allan Kayser doused himself in buckets of peroxide to play the film's antagonist. If you aren't familiar with Allan's semen-al work as "Bubba" in Mama's Family, learn history!

Monday, January 11, 2010

No Man's Woman

There's something inherently fabulous about watching a woman going through hell and living to tell the tale. For the same reason that we flock to a romantic comedy where fanciful men from Western literature of the eighteenth century court Sandra Bullock, we go to a slasher movie to see ladies who just can't get a break and still coming out on top. It's profoundly cathartic. These are the good girls who are doing it the best they can. They pay their bills, do charity work, call their mothers, and they still can't get a date.


I was all set to serve up a fevered diegesis of Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 (2009).  I saw this gem a couple months ago in that creepy, abandoned Avco movie theatre on Wilshire - you know, the one that hasn't been touched since 1987?  I love it there.  There were only two other people in the entire theatre and I had the time of my life! So immersive was my experience that I really thought Michael Meyers was gonna follow me into the men's room and bash my head against 1980s corporate AMC theatre backsplash.


John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) was a perfect movie and, sorry to be a contrarian, Halloween 2 (1981) was not.  Halloween 2 is ass.  Jamie Lee Curtis being chased barefoot through an abandoned hospital for eighty minutes in a dollar store wig.  No one is any different or better off than they were at the start of the picture.  Nothing is gained.  Pass!  I hate bad wigs.


I thought a proper Halloween 2 redux could have erased the leftover stink hovering around Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007) and I could finally have a dvd to sit comfortably on my shelf between Halloween '78 and Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (1982) - something of an alternate universe, arthouse follow-up to the adventures of Jamie Lee and Nancy Loomis. 

Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 picks up exactly where the original Halloween left off.   The first fifteen minutes of this movie are amazing.  The humanity and affection between Laurie and her bookstore besties is everything that was lacking in Zombie's first endeavor.  It's gorgeous.

I love that he made a movie that examines what happens to the final girl after she survives one of these slasher movies.  Laurie is deeply disturbed and haunted and angry and frightened.  She can't make connections or move past the events of that one night.  How do we move past trauma?  How do we go back to our jobs and buying groceries when so much horror exists in the real world?


So I got comfy-cozy on my bed with a little champagne (don't you dare judge me, it's still new year's month!), eager to write in praise of a director's unadulterated, original vision of a horror franchise sequel.   Where to start?  I appreciate the look of it - it feels like an Alice Cooper Halloween special from 1979.  The scenes of gore are violent and graphic and frightening.  But it's not perfect - there's a redundant, unforgivable Doctor Loomis subplot (wherein he's meant to represent Vincent Bugliosi who exploited the Manson family victims for his own financial gain) that gums up the tone.  There are no set pieces;  beyond Laurie, who is in a constant state of PTSD malaise, there is no one for us to relate to as an audience.  My mind began wandering to Caroline Williams. 


Caroline Williams was the final girl in a much better sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986).  Clad in bedazzled cut-off denim short shorts with a bandana firmly tied around her matching denim boots and sporting a southern drawl that could make Holly Hunter feel disingenuous, Caroline Williams is a star whose time has come!  Caroline Williams is the final girl that I aspire to be.


Unlike most sequels, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is completely unconcerned with mimicking the original film.  Tobe Hooper creates a parody of red-state, good old boys and sequelitis excess.  His heroine, Miss Caroline Williams, fits this aesthetic like a cowhide glove!  This is a world where the mass-murdering family from the first film enters chili cook-off competitions, where Dennis Hopper comparison shops for the best chainsaw and prep school boys drink shiner bock in their Mercedes at 70mph.  Caroline Williams plays "Stretch."  She is a small-town radio DJ with a big personality and legs as tall as the Texas sky in August.  Unbeknownst to her, Stretch finds herself cast opposite Leatherface in an unlikely production of Beauty and the Beast worthy of Jean Cocteau himself. 


What fascinates me is how Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 can be complete a farce with theatrical lighting and a third act set in an amusement park, but still feel less affected than Rob Zombie's Halloween 2.  Whether by the competency of the filmmaker (Tobe Hooper already had the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Salem's Lot, and The Funhouse under his belt at this point), through an understanding of basic story telling, a respect for the vocabulary of the slasher genre (chainsaws represent the phallus: go!), or the charisma of its leading lady, the proof is in the slasher pudding.  Eat up, kids!

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

at the ballet