into the woods

I have fevered and festered over a dissertation on the works of M Night Shyamalan.  There were drafts covering everything from studio politics at Disney to the recurring motifs in Shyamalan's often redundant twist endings.  I experimented with a shot by shot exploration of his specific choices in DPs (always the best in town) for each project.  Along the way I realized something I never understood before - something much more important than critical analysis:

The Village (2004) is actually quite good.

"Be cautious, you're holding the bad color."

"Sometimes we don't do things yet others know we want to do things so we don't do them."

"I find dancing very agreeable."

"Christop, you needn't be scared.  We have the magic rocks.  They will keep us safe."

"We can move towards hope - that's what's so beautiful about this place."

There has been a lot of smack-talk about M Night Shyamalan and justifiably so.  For all intents and purposes, he's an egomaniacal prick.  Shyamalan gets so caught up in his ideas (and he has a lot of ideas) that he has no concern about communicating them to the audience.  That's not good.  He did, however, buy his assistant a house.  Unlike the earlier films, based solely upon their twist-endings which do not play well in second viewings, The Village is the gift that keeps on giving.  Bryce Dallas Howard gives a breathtaking performance and Adrien Brody plays a retard without ever being offensive.  Get into it!

hungry like the wolf

"That's enough with the biting."

I’m gonna tell you a secret: sometimes I get a little hungry for a happy ending. Socially awkard girls with no marketable skills and borderline lesbian tendencies get to swoon over sparkley hipster vampires and LatinX werewolves. Women of a certain age have Nancy Meyers romantic dramedies with terrible overhead lighting and self-hating female leads. For me, escapism is imagining a world where gays can live happily ever after in functional relationships (if they so desire) with a craftsman homes and reasonable taxation for representation. 

While it’s wicked awesome that Milk and Brokeback Mountain can make piles of money and get progressive soccer moms to feel like they’re reaching out to minorities – these movies still make a martyr of the fags.  We die so people feel “woke.”

But then I had to wonder: Can we ever have a happy ending?

From time to time, when starved for any reflection of the contemporary gay experience, one begins to see gay subtext in the mainstream. 

You don’t have to be Nancy Drew to see that the Neil Jordan/Jodie Foster movie, The Brave One, was clearly intended to be a lesbian revenge thriller - no one gets bashed for being heterosexual in Manhattan.   Popularized by Quentin Tarrantio and Kevin Smith, once you look at Top Gun through the gay kaleidoscope, it’s impossible to see it as anything but a story of two men coming to terms with their love for each other…no straight guy would sing karaoke to Kelly McGillis. 

Wes Craven (always a friend to the gays) and Kevin Williamson (always gay) made a movie that no one saw called Cursed (2005). Cursed uses werewolf bloodlust as a metaphor for dormant sexuality with the 1990s popcorn horror paradigm as its model, only it was released in 2004.  Both pastiche and ahead of its time, Cursed may be the gayest entry in the Craven oeuvre and it comes SO close to presenting a gay happily-ever-after that it merits exploration.

Jesse Eisenberg and Christina Ricci are siblings who are touched by The Wolf. Christina wears ill-fitting business suits and styles her hair in a bun to imply that their parents are dead.  Like Judy Greer and Portia DeRossi (who also ham it up in Cursed), Christina doesn’t exist without a gay audience.  Her performance counters realism. Always mindful of her deaf fans, she makes a lot of faces and indicates everything.  She is drawn to emotionally distant men (amen) and men are drawn to her. Pacey from Dawson’s Creek is her boyfriend and he has perpetual stubble on his face as to indicate that he is a werewolf.  Milo Ventimiglia is the captain of the high school wrestling team. He drives a camaro and he’s in love with Jesse Eisenberg. 

Jesse and Milo pretend to compete for the attention of an anorexic girl to make her feel better about herself, it’s very sweet, but they really just want to wrestle with each other. When push comes to shove, Milo comes out to Jesse and, together, they fend off the werewolf hoards and still have time to go out on the town with Lance Bass and his obnoxious Florida friends.

Let there be no question that when a movie has its climax in front of a Cher mannequin, it's a GAY MOVIE.  So why does Jesse never say, "Hey cool, Milo - I think my neurotic misanthropy is actually a smokescreen to cover-up my stifled homosexuality as well, let's make out!"?  

Why must we read between the lines?  How can a movie be so queer as to have Judy Greer play an evil publicist who happens to be the Queen of the computer-generated Wolves in a Bob Mackie slit-to-the-crotch purple gown and not have the balls to just let its secondary lead live happily ever after with a hot (albeit physically and emotionally diminutive) boyfriend?  Considering that Hollywood still refuses to let women carry movies, I suppose it really isn't homophobia as much as it is misogyny and the bottom-line.  At this point in his career, post-Scream and Dawson's Creek, Williamson could have done better.  He could have pushed boundaries instead of uncle tom-ing his gays.  If you try to appeal to everyone (ie: the Weinsteins), you wind up making no money and your movie is exiled to the graveyard of castrated opportunities.  Lesson learned.

Looking for Mr. Gaybar

"It's Halloween, bro."

What happens when a generation no longer has to fight for the right to dance in their small town? What happens when we're raised from kindergarten to be well aware of safe sex practices and how we are all free to be you and me? What happens, my dear friends, is the arrival of the "Post-Gay" gay film. These movies no longer ghettoize the gay characters and I can count them on one hand. 

Queers no longer have to be a martyr so the heroine can live happily ever after (Single White Female, I'm looking at you!); we are no longer sexually repressed into manic rages and killing sprees. Despite the fact that their numbers are few, their existence should nonetheless be heralded from every bell tower! My favorite of these post-gay gay horror movies is Paul Etheredge's Hellbent.


Hellbent opens on a happy couple of bros walking through the mythical West Hollywood forest at night. They're on a date and ready to go all the way in the front seat of a 1970 Chevy Nova full of balloons. Nothing is hotter. Nothing.  Bro #1 leans his head out the window to give bro #2 a better angle. Unbeknownst to bro #1, this is the perfect angle to get his head chopped clear off. You see, there's a killer on the loose and he's hunting gays...in West Hollywood...on Halloween.  This is progress!

Eddie is a misguided Hot who wants to be a cop for some reason like his dead dad before him but his Sammy Davis Jr. glass-eyeball keeps him tied to a desk job. Like Halloween’s Laurie Strode before him, studious and chaste, Hot Eddie partakes in lollipops in favor of having drinks with the boys and spends his time off papering the neighborhood with flyers warning of a killer on the loose (good thing gays don't read more than a couple paragraphs at a time). But there is a scratch in Eddie's goody-two-shoes veneer: has a taste for bad boys! 

He sets his sights on Jake, a piece of rough trade he can't seem to stop running into all over town. Faster than you can say "Scarecrow and Mrs. King," they are out to solve the mystery and do everything in their power to make it out alive so they can finally hook up.

If there was one lesson we all learned from those years of Sex and the City, it's that friends are the family you make for yourself!  As queer people, we are here for one another - even that bitch we hate with the book deal and the fancy apartment you have no clue how he pays for - if he’s in trouble, we’re there.  That’s what we do. That’s why the straights are so scared of us. We have community.  

The real heart of Hellbent is found in the dynamic between Eddie and his friends. These boys are a good family. They help each other with their problems (having a crush on a guy who you can never seem to get away from his bitchy queen friends, being chased through the Halloween parade by a homicidal muscle daddy, etc) and they love each other a whole lot. No one is winking at the camera, no one is playing the gay panic, they all just exist.  How crazy that just seeing people exist on camera is a revolutionary act, but here we are. 

Like John Carpenter's Halloween, this movie takes time to establish character and context. Hellbent has some great visuals, lots of blood, and more intermittent-fasting-induced abs than you can shake a stick at. 

If A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is the Citizen Kane of gay horror, then Hellbent is definitely the Showgirls.  At least I think that’s so.