The Gang's All Here

Finally, on our tour of LGBT horror, we come to the indie-camp side of things.  We do so because it must be done.  Because the gays do love puttin' on a show and if we're gonna do it, we might as well do it big so the whole world can see it. 

Seriously?

OK, see, it's gonna SOUND like I hate this...

Our trip into Really Bad Stereotype Town starts with a Nancy Sinatra knockoff (that I can't really tell is a drag queen or not but I'm betting on tucking) singing about how we have to "Watch Out for the Straights".  After she's done freakin' me right the fuck out, our first line of dialogue is "Dammit!  Fucking cell phones."

Really, Sean Abley?  You couldn't have called this shit out, Mr. Producer Man?  LOVE YOU!  Mean it. 

So, yeah.  We then get introduced to our cast of stereotypes all on their way to the Blue Party.  The leather sash-queen (whose name is actually Dom...) and his boy/surreptitious drag queen, the sugar daddy and HIS boy, the self-loathing Log Cabin Republicans and their sex-starved ALA (alternative lifestyle assistant... I'm not a fan of the term "fag hag"), the pretty lesbians and the crunchy granola lesbians complete with folk-singing action.  They ALL get greeted, separately, mind you, with the same overdone welcome speech by the owner of the Sahara Salvation Resort, Helen and her freaky Igorina-like daughter, Luella. 

Helen, of course, has a hyper-religious plot to get Luella a husband by way of converting a gay dude.  Because bitch is psycho-nutty.  For realsies. She serves mincemeat muffins.  Mincemeat muffins that contain actual meat.  The source of the meat is unknown but pretty fuckin' obvious.  There's an earring involved.

Oooooooh, girl.  You got She-Mail.

You know, I'm not sure that I'm going to do this movie justice with a description so I'm gonna show you some pretty pictures for a few...

A gay boy that can't swim just won't go into the water.

Water wings?  Seriously?

Oh, wow.  Let the giggling begin.

A little club soda will get that right out.

How did this guy get away?  The dude he was HAVING SEX WITH (not his partner, by the way) just got massacred WHILE HIS DICK WAS IN THERE, a la Friday the 13th.

What the hell did I just watch?

No, really!  This movie has it all!  Sex!  Violence!  Occasional peen!  Gallons of fake blood!  A Fred Phelps analogue!  Overgrown flipper-babies!  Bobaloo from The Great Food Truck Race as a nun!  Rabbit fur, kitten head purse!  From Tuscany!

And it's BAD!  But hilariously so.  The acting is kind of horrendous, no gay people dress like that, and it's a little long-winded and convoluted, as if the editor just kind of switched scenes around and didn't tell anybody.  It's all kinds of "but black people call each other the "N-word" and, god dammit you can't help but to watch it all the way through just to make sure you didn't miss any of the freaky.

And freaky it is.

What the hell is up with 30 minutes of the film being wasted with a girl carrying around an ice bucket?  The bastard child of a hundred Republican National Convention delegates? Did you guys SERIOUSLY refer to a character as "Darren Stevens"?

Freaky.

This is the kind of craziness that people spread like a virus because OMGYOUHAVETOSEETHISBECAUSEIT'SHORRIBLE!  It's the cinematic equivalent of "Does this taste bad to you?"

I'm OK with that. 

Stress Kills

Now, I wouldn't be a proper, politically correct, pro-feminist blogger if I didn't mention Alexandre Aja's 2003 masterpiece of the slasher genre, Haute Tension (High Tension in the US).  This was one of those movies where people fought like rabid stoats over revealing the ending.  Considering the movie is now 10 years old, and the statute of limitations for spoilers has lapsed, I'm going to warn you now that this article contains spoilers.

Like any decent French film, it starts with a dream.  A young woman in a hospital gown.  Screams for help.  Bloody hands and open wounds.

Marie, our dreamer, is on a road trip with Alex, her bestest friend in the whole, wide world, to visit Alex's parents and study over the weekend.  She gets a tour of the house, they have dinner and they go to bed.  Well, Alex goes to bed.  Marie stays up flicking the bean. 

"I'm totally gonna masturbate in your guest bed."

Ruining the mood, some asshole rings the doorbell and Marie gets up to investigate, as does her father.  Of course, because this movie is French, there's no explanation for the serial killer at the door but, really, do we need one?  Alex's dad, who doesn't really need a shave, gets a straight razor to the face then gets decapitated by way of the staircase and a bookshelf.  This, of course, wakes up Alex's mom who gets to find her dead husband.

As the brouhaha continues, Marie gets up and rearranges the guest room so it looks like no one is staying there and hides under the bed.  Of course, the killer makes the cursory inspection and doesn't find her.  Sensing that the coast is clear, Marie makes her way to Alex's bedroom and finds her chained to the bed.

Kinky...

In the process of finding a phone, Marie has to hide in a closet and witness Alex's mothers death.  Alex's younger brother gets chased into a cornfield (minus children) and gets brutalized.  Marie returns to Alex and promises to get her free but as she's searching for the tools to do so (and a butcher knife to defend herself, Alex is taken into the killer's truck and whisked off for a night of fun and excitement.  Marie, of course, manages to get aboard before the killer locks the door.

When they stop for gas, Marie gives Alex the knife and sneaks into the gas station to get help where she gets to watch the attendant get an axe to the chest.

Does socialized medicine cover this?

Marie, like a smart woman, takes the attendant's car keys and follows the killer's truck down a deserted road where, because she's not really all THAT smart, the killer rams her car off the road into a ditch.  She's hurt but she's really determined to get herself killed by the madman holding her friend so she runs into the forest and arms herself with a fencepost wrapped with barbed wire.  She gets to beat the killer in the face with it a few times before he grabs her by the throat.  She suffocates him with a plastic bag and then goes to rescue Alex who seems HORRIFIED by the prospect.

And then we go over the tapes.  (Spoiler alert!)  Marie is the killer.  She bound and gagged Alex.  She killed Alex's family.  She slammed an axe into the gas station dude's chest.  SHE, is murderously in love with Alex.  

 

Lesbians and power tools... seriously?

 

It's all very Single White Female only without the "If I can't have you, I'll just BE you" angle.  

A lot of people didn't care for this movie but I think it's kind of amazing.  Watch it with the subtitles and you'll get it more than if you watch it with dubbing.

The way they played the killer versus Marie through the first half of the movie is nothing short of brilliant except for a HUGE plot hole.  How the hell is Marie following the killer in the truck with a stolen car if Marie IS the killer?  You know what, though?  I don't fucking care.  Movie magic strikes again.  If it's all a delusion, Marie probably didn't steal the car.  For that matter, I don't care where the killer got a truck to begin with, since Marie didn't drive herself to Alex's place.  All that matters, since this is a delusion and we don't know WHAT the facts are, is that Marie is a cold-ass psycho bitch.

The only thing that bugs me is that they chose to portray a psycho-lesbian again.  I know that the plot could have been played with a straight couple but the idea that the killer was A) a woman and B) a lesbian was calculated to shock the audience.  I get that but it plays into the "evil and mentally unstable" stereotype of gay characters (and gay people in general since I come across a whole slew of people that still think, even after 40 years of the scientific community telling them to cut the shit, that gay people are mentally ill).  It pisses me off a little, but, then again, this movie is kind of determined to do that regardless of WHO the killer was.

If you haven't seen this, see it.  If you HAVE, see it again.  It makes a little more sense the second time around.

Nooooo. Meeser Happy Ending No Here...

In fiction, gay people just can't get a break.  In horror fiction (and, frankly, just about any kind of fiction), if you get attached to the gay guy or gal, especially if they're the depraved homosexual villain, they're probably gonna end up cooling their heels on a slab in the morgue. 

Jennifer Jason Leigh made a whole lot of women avoid roommates and get ugly haircuts.

If you ever get the chance to watch The Celluloid Closet, there's a huge montage of dead gay and lesbian characters covering the entirety of film history up until the 90s where gay characters, both sympathetic and not, are bumped off left and right.  And the reason for this is simple.

Religion.

Seriously, this trope goes back to the Bronze Age in the form of the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Never mind that the original text indicates that the story is about hospitality and proper treatment of your neighbors, Jewish authors, around 100BC were already using the story as a direct morality tale against homosexuality.  In the 14th and 15th centuries, things started to get REALLY bad for homosexuals and S&G narratives became more common with the first English work being Cleanness by the Pearl-Poet.  This asshole gave us a full description of the S&G carnage including a dead sea, flaming pooches and ashy fruit.

Fast-forward to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and we not only have both bisexual characters killed but one of them was obviously depraved.  Wilde's personal sexuality aside, the story can be seen either as a "gays are bad" tune or a reflection of how homosexuals were treated in Victorian England.  Pick your poison, really.

Obviously, because of the religious song and dance, when they weren't being used for comic relief LGBT characters were killed off in cinema because they were viewed as sinful, regardless of how pleasant they were.  In 1924's landmark German silent film Michael, even though Claude does manage to get a pleasant death, he's still a dead gay who was in a relationship with a duplicitous thief.

Alfred Hitchcock even got into the game with his 1940 version of the Daphne Du Maurier novel, Rebecca.  Mrs. Danvers is all psycho-crazy about anyone replacing her beloved Rebecca.  She basically builds a shrine to the woman, saving her clothing and other belongings, and dies in flaming wreckage when she burns down Manderley.  (She gets away in the book.)  When they made a play of the work, Mrs Danvers dies wearing Rebecca's nightgown.

What I did foooooor looooooooove!

SO, let's bring this to current cinema.

With the shift in public opinion regarding gay people since Stonewall, you would think that this trope would just go away but it hasn't as of yet.  We have films like Trailer Park of Terror where everybody gets a "sinfully-appropriate" death BUT the gay guy who just gets hit by a car because showing HIS "sin" would be completely inappropriate compared to the drugs, adultery and violent death displayed elsewhere in the movie.  We only know he's gay because he gets bullied by another character.  But don't worry.  A straight person survives.  Grrrrrrrr.

And, then, we have 2001 Maniacs, where the gay guy gets impaled from behind in preparation for the barbeque.  Granted, this was a movie where the black guy gets squashed in a cotton press so I'm not sure this is about the character's being gay any more than it is for inappropriate humor.

Mmmmmm.  Entrails.

Also?  Fucking Dumbledore.  Quiet, avuncular, role-model, Dumbledore.  Granted, we didn't KNOW he was gay until JK Rowling announced it but still.  Her announcement DID validate a whole lot of internet slash fiction, though.

I won't even begin to cover all of the 80s and 90s films that exploit HIV/AIDS by knocking off gay dudes left and right.

All in all, though, I do see this trope disappearing.  We should be aware of this trope and point it out when it occurs but as the LGBT community is seen more and more as normal, we can only hope that this trope will eventually discredit itself.

What Am I Doing In This Basket?

Yes, I had to do it.  I'm sure you all remember that I mentioned Hellbent a while back.  Well, now I'm actually going to talk about it.  Like a gossipy drag queen, I must expose the shame.

Our tale starts with one of the most iconic of horror movie images, the young couple making out in the car.  I'm not sure if there were "woods" or not because they're in L.A. but it's nice to imagine things.  And, then, by sheer serendipity, they get attacked by a muscle-y dude in a devil mask who beheads them both with a sickle.

Who, apparently, always walks around with mood lighting.

Oh, and did I mention it was the day before Halloween?  Because that's totally a factor, here.

On Halloween proper, our protagonist, Eddie, a police technician, is handing out flyers detailing the murders for everyone's safety.  He's not actually a policeman but he wears his father's old uniform as a costume.  He gets to flirt with Jake, the motorcycle-ridin' tough guy.  'Cause that's new or anything.

Later, Eddie meets with his roommates, Chaz, Tobey and Joey, because living in L.A. without at least one roomie sleeping in the closet is unheard of, and they decide to go traipsing about the woods to see the murder scene.  Because the California sun has baked their skinny-ass brains into oatmeal cookies.  While there, they actually see the devil-face dude and they think he's cruising them.  Because they're gay and live in Hollywood and are, therefore more vain that the wicked queen in Snow White.

More fuckin' mood lighting.  Seriously?  Is that necessary here?

There's some kind of carnival that the friends all go to and promptly leave when Eddie sees Jake go into a bar called The Meat Locker.  Ooooooh.  Original.  Can somebody tell me what the gay community's obsession with puns is all about?  This is why we can't have nice things.

So, anyway, Eddie goes after Jake, Joey is all obsessed with Jared but gets shot down and goes to cry in the bathroom.  Chaz consoles him but then leaves him alone to sob into the toilet paper.  Jared catches up with Joey and makes everything all better and then Joey gets hacked at.  Woooooo.

That's the BEST place to be found headless.

Chaz decides to go to another club where the killer, who, like all movie serial killers, can teleport, guts and beheads him on the dance floor where no one notices this happening because to the filmmaker gay guys are all fucking dumb and blind.  Excuse me while I seethe for a minute.

OK.  I got it together.

Anyway, Tobey, who's in really bad drag, is pissed that no one's hitting on him so he takes things into his own hands and tries to hit on the killer who, of course, collects his fucking head.

Worth it.

So, Eddie and Jake get back to the Meat Locker, since they'd disappeared to go do other stuff, and find it closed because of the discovery of the body.  Joey goes to get his bike and Eddie follows him but finds that Jake has already circled around.  Of course, Eddie gets attacked by the devil-dude and manages to get himself locked in to where the killer can't quite reach him but he does manage to get his eye scratched by the killer's sickle.  This SHOULD have warranted a trip to the ER but Eddie's eye is totally fake.

So, yeah.  Because they're both traumatized, they go back to Eddie's place to make with the horizontal mambo but Jake won't let Eddie kiss him.  Can we say "self-loathing gay"?  Jake finds Tobey's license with blood on it but he doesn't know what that means because, again, according to the film maker, gays are stupid.  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

 

So, because every sane person allows themselves to be handcuffed on the first date, Eddie allows Jake to handcuff him to the bed on the first date.  Jake gets stabbed while looking for condoms which is pretty much the only smart thing anyone in this movie has done. 

And then?  HE STRIKES!  The killer has, through the auspices of Tobey's driver's license, found out where Eddie lives and as he's coming for Eddie, prone and helpless, Jake stabs him with a kitchen knife.  Eddie manages to get a hand free and thus begins the claustrophobic apartment chase. 

A Shining reference?  Really?

Eddie pulls out his dad's gun but in the process of loading, Eddie gets attacked and has his fake eye literally sucked out of his head and gets knocked over the fire escape railing.  While the killer is going after Jake again, Eddie fires but because he has no depth perception he hits Jake first and then lands a headshot.  It's only after this that Jake allows Eddie to kiss him.

Yes, this barker was left open for a sequel.

OH.  MY.  FUCKING.  HEAD!

You know, I'm all about supporting my community and that means their artistic endeavors as well but damn.  There comes a point where "If you build it, the gays will show up and redecorate the place" wears right the fuck off.  There's a serious problem in Hollywood and it's this:

 

Gay people are people.  Yes, we run with our own crowd but that's a safety issue because the world outside does not treat us like we're people.  That's why it's only recently where gay people stopped being treated as fey comic relief and were introduced as supporting characters in straight films.  Now, that being said, yes, there will be movies that portray us within our protective bubble and this is one of them.  The problem is that THIS film chose to show us at our very worst.  We're portrayed as self-centered jerks who don't pay attention to the world around us.  The dance floor scene is the epitome of this.  A person is violently attacked and the gays directly on the scene do nothing.  They're in their own little world, not caring about anyone but themselves and the good time they're having.  It's a HUGE stereotype and it pisses me off.

For an indie film, the production quality is actually not bad and the music by Pansy Division, Nick Name and Three-Dollar Bill is good but I have to give this a thumbs down for content.  

I'm not going to say for you to skip it, though, because I need people to see it and then hunt down Paul Etheridge-Ouzts and inflict the death of a thousand cuts on him for being an ass.

That Sweater Is Just Tacky.

You may or may not be aware of this but June is National LGBT Pride month.  This is the month where we celebrate who we are and remind others of our struggle for equal rights because it is around the anniversary of both the Stonewall and the White Night Riots.  This is the month where we remind ourselves that a whole lot of us keep our rock-throwin' arms in fantastic shape, that those shoes don't go with that top, that drag queens are deceptively strong, that lesbians do not have the kind of boobs you see in girl-on-girl porn and that gigantic, muscular men in black leather often have tiny purse dogs.

It's fun stuff.

ANYWAY, that being the case, this week you're gonna get, if not entirely LGBT-themed horror, a good chunk of it.  If you don't wish to read about it, that's fine.  I'm not here to change anybody's mind on anything.  Please note, though, that I WILL delete hateful commentary.  It doesn't belong here.

All of that being said, let's get on with the show.

And, we're gonna kick it off BIG with probably the gayest mainstream horror flick EVER, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge.

Director Jack Shoder, in 1985, brings us a pre-AIDS paranoia gay-coming-of-age story even if he won't fucking admit it.

Because greased-up Dawson's Creek casting is just de rigueur in Hollywood...

So, here's the dealio.  5 years after the events in the first movie, the Walsh's move into 1428 Elm Street, Nancy's old house and Jesse, our protagonist with the sexually ambiguous name, moves into Nancy's room.  Because this is a Nightmare on Elm Street movie, he starts having dreams about Freddy demanding that he kill for him since Nancy fucked up or something like that.  To do this, Freddy wants to be inside him.  Literally.  

Now, you'd never guess it or anything but Jesse has a girlfriend.  He has a girlfriend like I had a girlfriend in high school.  All for show.  Anyway, Lisa, said girlfriend, finds Nancy's diary in Jesse's closet which, of course, covers all of her interactions with Freddy.  He gets all panicky like a fluffy bunny and brings it to his parents who, of course, argue with him about it so he storms out.

And, somewhere along the line, he shoots dicks out of his mouth.

Now, like any repressed gay kid, Jesse finds himself walking late at night being all pensive and shit.  Because this is 1985, he takes himself into a bar where he finds his gym coach who's all decked out in his butch top S&M leathers and ready to ask "hips or lips".

Come to Daddy.

Now, seeing as how they aren't in school or anything, we know why Coach takes Jesse back to school to run some laps as detention.  Jesse doesn't but that's because Jesse is a fucking moron.  "Hit the showers?"  Seriously?

It's OK, though, because Freddy likes a little light bondage and knife play.  He slices up Coach but good and leaves his non-existent butt to hang.

The safe-word is banana.

But, when the steam clears, it's Jesse that has the glove on.  Of course, he panics like a little bitch and runs away.

In the meantime, not-girlfriend Lisa has done some digging into Krueger and has found both the power plant where he worked and brought his victims.  At the same time, Freddy pays a call on Jesse's sister but when she wakes up, Jesse's standing over her with the glove.

To counteract these increasingly creeper-like actions, and to try and get the taste of Freddy penis out of his mouth (it had been there during a make-out session with Lisa during her pool party but he LEFT the party and ran straight to his dude-friend's house instead of continuing with his girlfriend because, y'know, dong), Jesse has his bestest buddy Ron watch over him as he sleeps.  Not his girlfriend.  A dude.  Of course, this doesn't work because Ron is an ass who falls asleep right after Jesse does.  As soon as Ron's eyes close, Freddy begins clawing his way out of Jesse.

That's gonna leave a mark.

Of course, the door is jammed so Ron's pretty much helpless against Krueger.  Duh.  

So, Jesse, who had apparently gone to bed at about 1 in the afternoon, legs it over to Lisa's house where her pool party is still... ummm... happening. 

When he gets there, though, he takes control of Jesse again and decimates the party.

'Cause this is Thriller...

Lisa saves Jesse/Freddy from being shot, because she's stupid, and runs to the power plant where she tries to use fucking conversion therapy on Jesse.  She's all "Pray the Freddy Away" and tries to cure him with a kiss.  Because this never works, Freddy accosts them on the school bus the next morning.

I think they're gonna be late for school...

So, yeah.  This is, of course, the black sheep in the Nightmare family but it's kind of culturally significant.  In 1985, not a whole lot of movies outside the art house circuit were about gay anybody.  This one, while BARELY outwardly straight, had so much gay subtext they may as well have just come out and said "Hey, Jesse's totally gay."  Hell, Mark Patton, the actor portraying Jesse was already out of the closet at that point.  The entire movie reads like Marcus Bachmann's autobiography.

In an interview with for Attitude magazine, Robert Englund stated that this was all intentional, including the casting of Patton.  Patton is apparently an idiot in real life because he said he had no idea and Shoder didn't even think about it even though David Chaskin's script was written to be extra-gay and Chaskin said so.  Kinda like the Fast and Furious movies.

Flaming Queen.

And, seriously, Nightmare 2 wasn't even subtle about it.  The claw coming through a girl's breasts makes boobs a threat.  Dick tongue.  S&M in the showers.  Snapping towels and flying balls.  The sign on Jesse's door that says "No Chicks".  The inordinate amount of time Jesse spends wrestling with Ron.

This movie is gayer than a San Francisco Pride parade.

It's also COMPLETELY hilarious.  I mean, it's not a good movie.  In fact, it's friggin' awful, but it's definitely that hilarious kind of awful that we all look for.

This one deserves a party with cosmos and finger sandwiches.