Big Gay Picture Show

Taking a look at the world of film through gay eyes - news, reviews, trailers, gay film, queer cinema and more

Taking a look at the world of film through gay eyes - news, reviews, trailers, gay film, queer cinema & more

Ouija: Origin Of Evil (Blu-ray Review) – The spirit board unlocks evil in the 1960s

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Set 50 years before 2014’s Ouija movie, this prequel takes us into the same house in the late 1960s. Alice Zander (Elisabeth Reaser) is running a fake séance business from the property, telling her clients what they want to hear about their deceased love ones. She decides a good gimmick would be to add a Ouija board to the ‘act’. However, as soon a she starts using it, her youngest daughter, Doris (Lulu Wilson), starts hearing voices that she believes are her dead father contacting her.

Alice initially thinks this is great, as Doris’ gift means that they can do the psychic thing for real and maybe even reconnect with the dead dad, but her other daughter, Lina (Annalise Basso), isn’t so sure. Turns out Lina’s uncertainty is well founded, as evil forces within the house start to possess Doris and make their malevolent presence known. [Read more…]

Jonathan (US DVD Review) – A young man’s struggles as he finds out his dying dad is gay

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Jonathan is a young man stuck on his family’s farm in rural Germany, where he must not only ensure the animals are cared for, but also look after his dying father, Burghardt. He dreams of possibly having something else, but feels the obligations weighing upon him. One bright spot emerges in the form of a romance with his dad’s nurse, Anka, but even that can’t hide the problems.

The issues aren’t just that Jonathan’s father is extremely sick. His aunt lives next door, but won’t speak to his father and won’t say why. Jonathan also wants to know more about his mother, who died when he was young, but his taciturn father finds it almost impossible to open up. [Read more…]

Julieta (Blu-ray Review) – Pedro Almodovar returns with a new Spanish tale

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The latest from Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar follows Julieta (Emma Suarez), a middle-aged woman contemplating leaving Madrid and going to live in Portugal with her boyfriend Lorenzo (Darío Grandinetti). A chance encounter with a childhood friend of her daughter who informs her that her estranged child is now living in Switzerland and has three children, causes Julieta to rethink her plan to leave Madrid, in case her child ever wants to contact her again.

The film then takes us back to a young Julieta (Adriana Ugarte), a woman just starting out in life, who meets Galician fisherman Xoan (Daniel Grao) on a train, where their passionate encounter results in both a pregnancy and the start of a love affair. Once their child, Antia, is born, Julieta tries to juggle her job, motherhood and Xoan, attempting to create an idyll for their child. However, a terrible accident changes everything and eventually leads to a separation. [Read more…]

Downriver (Iris Prize Screening/DVD Review)

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James (Reef Ireland) has just been released from a Youth Detention Centre, having been locked up when he was an adolescent for his involvement in the drowning death of another child. However, due to having an epileptic fit on that day, he doesn’t know what happened to the body, which disappeared and therefore left many open questions, not least from the kid’s mother.

Despite being told his probation is dependent on not returning to where the events took place, he heads there on a determined quest to discover what happened and where the body ended up. Most believe the dead child was washed down the river and cannot ever be found, but James thinks something else might have happened. [Read more…]

The Cobbler (DVD Review)

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The Cobbler is not Adam Sandler in zany mood, but he’s not being 100% serious either. He certainly pulls things back from his usual performances and enters mumbling mode, which is admittedly more watchable than he often is. He is Max, a cobbler who is forced to use an old shoemaking machine when his newer one breaks. He discovers that the machine has magical properties, as he now has the ability to put on somebody else’s shoes and literally become them.

At first Max thinks he’s going to be able to have some fun with his powers (including a creepily rapey sequence involving a cameo from Dan Stevens and a woman in a shower), but he soon gets caught up in a tricky situation with a bunch of bad guys. Looking into the lives of his customers also makes his re-evaluate the attempts to save his neighbourhood, which he’d previously ignored, and so he sets out to use his powers to stop the baddies destroying everything. [Read more…]

Vacation (Blu-ray Review)

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The reboot of the Vacation series didn’t get a vast amount of love from critics at the cinema. It meant that, as I often don’t even like comedies others do think are good, I approached this one with a bit of trepidation and little hope that I’d enjoy it. However, I was pleasantly surprised that while by no means a masterpiece, I found it decent enough to watch for 100 minutes.

The film truly is a reboot rather than remake, as it picks up the story of the Griswolds 30 years on from National Lampoon’s Vacation. Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms) is now grown up and has a family of his own. They’re a bit stuck in a rut though, with his wife, Debbie (Christina Applegate), feeling the sparkle has gone out of their marriage, and sons James (Skyler Gisondo) and Kevin (Steele Stebbins) constantly fighting – although it’s the younger child bullying the older. [Read more…]

Angels With Tethered Wings (Review)

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Last year Steven Vasquez’s erotic horror anthology, Eroddity(s), hit DVD, offering a collection that had a lot of penises but was only sporadically successful in storytelling terms. Now he’s back with Angels With Tethered Wings, which is a step up from Eroddity(s) but still suffers from a few of the issues of the earlier release.

Although it tells one complete story, the film is split into three parts. The first chapter shows us what happens before and after part two, introducing us to identical twins Grant and Garret Gleason (both played by Cory Tyndall). Garret is a mean and callous porn producer who’s just received a briefcase containing $200,000 dollars, which he must hand over to the mysterious Carmine. After an argument with his main star, Timothy (Brandon Rife), the twink storms out, with Garret thinking the young man has taken the money with him. [Read more…]

Mindscape (DVD Review)

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With a largely British cast, a Spanish director and a mix of American and European money, it’s fair to say that Mindscape (released as Anna in the US) is a pretty international production. It follows John (Mark Strong), a memory detective who is able to use technology to go into other people’s minds and see their memories. However following the death of his wife and then suffering illness, he’s no longer at the top of his game.

To help him out he’s given what should be a relatively easy assignment – to go into the mind of 16-year-old Anna (Taissa Farmiga) to find the psychological root of her refusal to eat. Her father seems certain his daughter is dangerous and needs to be locked up, but very quickly from what he sees in her mind, John begins to suspect there might be something else going on. [Read more…]

The Sapphires (DVD)

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The Sapphires was a major hit in Australia and recently swept the Australian Film Institute’s AACTA Awards, picking up 11 gongs. However it’s struggled to find a huge audience outside its home country, despite the presence of Chris O’Dowd. It’s a bit of a shame, as while it’s not amazing, it’s a sweet, entertaining movie that tells an interesting true story.

From their youth, Gail, Julie and Cynthia have sung together, although due to the fact they’re aborigines, they’ve had difficulty getting anyone outside their own community to take any notice. In 1968 they meet the slightly schlubby Dave (O’Dowd), a man who’s down on his luck but who knows music. The girls have found an advert asking for acts to audition to play for US troops in Vietnam. They think that perhaps with Dave as their manager, they might have a chance of being taken seriously as a singing group. [Read more…]

The Baytown Outlaws (Blu-ray)

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Your enjoyment of The Baytown Outlaws is likely to be directly proportional to how much you like watching assholes (of the figurative not literal kind). There is pretty much nobody in The Baytown Outlaws that could be considered a nice person, and indeed the lead trio are in some respects the worst of the bunch, with their only redeeming feature being that we stick around them long enough to discover there is some humanity under the Southern redneck violence and willingness to kill absolutely anybody without a second thought. [Read more…]