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

DVD and BLU-RAY REVIEWS

The latest reviews from the world of home entertainment

Close To Leo (DVD)

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Now nearly 10 years old (it was initially made for French TV in 2002), Close To Leo makes a welcome return to DVD. It’s one of the best movies ever made about HIV/AIDS, largely because it treats it as just one aspect of the characters’ lives, and is actually more interested in the issues the disease raises as people attempt to carry after the diagnosis, rather than being overly angsty about the infection itself – although with enough angst that it doesn’t feel flippant.

Told through the eyes of Marcel, who’s on the cusp or puberty, the film follows a family in Brittany after they discover the eldest son, Leo, is HIV+. Marcel isn’t supposed to know this, but he picks up enough to realise what’s going on, even if he can’t accept that he’s being left out of important family development. While Marcel initially reacts by rebelling, he eventually goes off on a trip to Paris with Leo, where the two attempt to bond. [Read more…]

Unhappy Birthday (DVD)

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I think it’s safe to say that writers/directors Mark Harriott and Mike Matthews must like The Wicker Man. Unhappy Birthday comes across as a bit of a homage to the 1973 Edward Woodward movie, except with a more modern take on sexuality.

Rick is taking his girlfriend Sadie for a birthday weekend away, with their friend Johnny coming along as well. What Rick hasn’t told Sadie is that on the windswept island they’re heading to is a women he believes to be her long-lost sister, and that he’s going to surprise her by bringing them together. However the trio have more issues than just family reunions to worry about, as Rick is partial to sleeping with Johnny when Sadie isn’t around, and she is up the duff, even though Rick might be infertile. [Read more…]

The Cost Of Love (DVD)

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Dale works as a male escort in Greenwich, London, specialising in fulfilling people’s sexual fantasies, whether it’s to have him role play as a schoolboy or to look after a client like they’re a baby. However, away from his work he’s starting to weigh up his life. He’s approaching 30 and while he enjoys the freedom his lack of commitments allow, his real desires begin to leak out when his straight best friend, Raj – who Dale has been in love with for years – announces he’s going to get married. In amongst all this is Dale’s friend Sean, a flamboyant drag artiste, while up on the local heath there’s been a string of brutal gay hate crimes. [Read more…]

Were The World Mine (DVD)

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Given how the musical is known for being popular with gay people, it’s surprising there aren’t more film musicals made with a gay bent. There have been a few, such as the superb Hedwig And The Angry Inch, but not as many as you might expect. Were The World Mine follows gay teenager Timothy, who’s routinely castigated for being a ‘fag’ by the rugby players at his school, even though he secretly lusts after one of them.

After being cast as Puck in the school’s musical production of ‘A Midsummer’s Night Dream’, Timothy discovers a way to make the plot of Shakespeare’s fantasy come true, spraying people from a flower so that they fall in love with the first person they see afterwards. Timothy soon manages to make his crush besotted with him, before spreading gayness around his small town  to give the small-minded townsfolk a taste of what it’s like to live in his shoes. [Read more…]

Zombies Of Mass Destruction (DVD)

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Another day, another zombie movie. Due to the fact they can be made fairly cheaply and generally sell quite well, there really are a ridiculous amount of movies about the undead made and released on DVD every year, most of which are pretty interchangeable and normally fairly dire. However, while Zombies Of Mass Destruction has a title that sounds like it’s going to be utterly dreadful, it deserves kudos for trying to reach above its no budget origins.

While some have compared it to Sean Of The Dead, that would be being a bit generous, other than the fact it’s a horror movie that’s also a comedy. More accurate description is its US tagline, ‘A political zomedy’. The set-up is pretty basic. Port Gamble is an idyllic small town where the locals are going about their humdrum lives when the whole place is taken over by the undead.  As usual a small band of the uninfected has to try to survive. [Read more…]

The Celluloid Closet (DVD)

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It’s a bit of a surprise that it’s taken so long for The Celluloid Closet to make it to DVD. The 1995 documentary, which looks at the history of gays and lesbians in film, won numerous awards and was a major success on its release, and yet it’s only just appearing on DVD now. Based on the book by Vito Russo, which was the seminal work on the subject, it’s a fascinating trawl through a topic that has always been present in cinema, but for most of its history was hidden away and never openly mentioned.

Starting right at the earliest days of moving images, The Celluloid Closet charts the different ways cinema has tried to deal with homosexuality, from Marlene Dietrich dressing in a tux and kissing a woman in 1930’s Morocco, to how The Hay’s Code insisted that any suggestion of homosexuality was stripped out of film adaptations of Tennessee Williams. [Read more…]

Shank (DVD)

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Most gay coming of age movies are rather predictable tales of teen angst. While they reflect a very real experience, they do have a tendency to feel very similar. Shank however manages to find a fresh urgency and danger in its tale of a young man coming to terms with his sexuality on the dangerous city streets. Filmed in and around Bristol, the movie follows Cal, who is part of a gang of vicious teen thugs. However when he’s away from his friends, he goes online to troll for men to have anonymous sex with, even if his partners are likely to be beaten up and robbed afterwards. [Read more…]

Pedro (DVD)

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Pedro is a movie with the best of intentions, but it rarely lives up to its potential. It tells the story of AIDS activist and The Real World: San Francisco contestant Pedro Zamora, who put a face on the disease for the American public in the early 90s and sadly died just after the MTV series aired. Zamora certainly had an effect, generating a public debate among people who’d never ‘known’ anyone who was HIV positive. It even went as far as the Oval Office, with Bill Clinton having been in contact with Pedro and now providing an introduction for the film on this DVD. [Read more…]

Out At The Wedding (DVD)

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Farce is a tough thing to pull off because it takes a lot of skill to build a situation that convincingly grows from a simple mix up to an impossibly complex, over-the-top situation, without seeming contrived or desperate. It’s a line that Out At The Wedding tries to walk with only middling success.

Alex has told her mixed-race fiancé that her family is dead, largely because she thinks her Southern patriarch father is racist. Obviously she hasn’t told her family that she has a non-white boyfriend, with the result that when she goes to her sister’s wedding, a mix-up ends up with everyone thinking she’s a lesbian. [Read more…]

Mulligans (DVD)

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If they handed out Oscars for ‘Most Hand-wringingly Melodramatic Movie’, I think Mulligans might win. Jock Tyler (James) invites his university friend Chase to stay with him and his family over the summer. However Chase has a secret he hasn’t told James – he’s gay – but that’s not the only surprise James has in store, as it turns out that even though his parents have been together for over 20 years, his dad also harbours secret desires for members of the same sex and ends up sleeping with Chase. [Read more…]