Another Gay Movie is a reworking of the plot and theme of American Pie — a bunch of school-leaving teens go all-out to lose their “cherries”. Except they’re all gay boys, and instead of the requisite pie it’s a quiche.
There’s a lot of fun to be had here, some of it very silly — on a couple of occasions just too silly. Comedy is obviously hard to do, and requires a fine sense of what’s amusingly absurd and what’s just too absurdly over-the-top, as a film such as Balls of Fury will amply demonstrate.
Two of the jokes in Another Gay Movie cross that boundary, at least to my mind. See what you think: the frazzled-penis joke and the gerbil joke were too much for me, the former because is it is just too unrealistic, the latter because it is marginally offensive (as well as entirely implausible — who ever believed that gerbil legend anyway?).
Otherwise, though, Another Gay Movie is not just another gay movie; no angst about coming out of the closet, and none of the usual thematic concern so common to present-day (increasingly generic) American gay movies — the standard promiscuity-versus-commitment debate. And there are parts of Another Gay Movie that touch wittily on the sexual politics of gay male life, too.
ALSO ON THE SHELF
Matthew Krouse on the latest chillers and slashers
The Keeper
Dennis Hopper stars as sicko Lieutenant Krebs in this grim tale of abuse. Krebs’s house is a real lock-up-and-go, with a cage in the basement for women who remind him of his dead mother. See what happens when he “befriends” a stray pole-dancer one lonely night.
The Return
Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is the star of this incomprehensible chiller about a girl reliving her childhood nightmare in small-town America.
Hostel Part II
Eli Roth’s second instalment about backpackers being savaged by the rich for gross sums of money is about a giggling gang of girls studying in Rome. You need a strong stomach to withstand the horror.
The Rival
This badly acted psycho-slasher is about a deeply disturbed woman called Alice trying to come to terms with a pretty, blonde surrogate-mother employed to carry a child, living in Alice’s house. Corny, creepy and at times amusing.
Prey
Local boy Darryl James Roodt had a good idea in making this bloody bush thriller about an American family trapped in the wild by savage lions. But in execution the drama is limp and hardly riveting. Lions don’t exactly make for hateful villains in a world now sensitive to the plight of wild animals.