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

REVIEWS

Cinema, DVD and Blu-ray reviews

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…]

Make The Yuletide Gay (DVD)

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Olaf ‘Gunn’ Gunnunderson (Keith Jordan) is an out and proud student at university, but hasn’t told his parents he’s gay. Although he doesn’t have any plans to tell them when he goes back home for Christmas (just in case they react badly), his situation gets more complicated when his boyfriend, Nathan (Adamo Ruggiero), turns up. Nathan doesn’t know Gunn isn’t out at home, and so has to pose as his boyfriend’s roommate, while Gunn’s parents encourage their son to get together with his old school friend, Abby. Nathan gets rather annoyed with this, especially as he can’t see Gunn’s problem with telling his parents the truth, which puts pressure on him to come out. [Read more…]

Little Ashes (DVD)

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I have a new theory. If you want to become really famous, you need to make a period movie where you’re a bit gay for a while but then decide that you’re actually straight, and if you’re playing some kind of artist, all the better. It’s worked for Hugh Grant with Maurice, Leonardo DiCaprio with Total Eclipse and now Robert Pattinson with Little Ashes. I’m not quite sure how the mechanism works exactly, especially as both Little Ashes and Total Eclipse were made before but released after the star’s breakout hit, but there definitely seems to be something going on. [Read more…]

I Dreamt Under The Water (DVD)

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I know the world can be a dark place, but some filmmakers and artists seem to believe that just because a story is unrelentingly bleak, it’s good or realistic. I Dreamt Under The Water suffers terribly from this. Angel’s lover dies in his arms from a drug overdose, and after that he descends into a hell of intoxication, public gay sex and life as a rent boy.

I’m sure if your lover died it’d be terrible, but here it just becomes tedious, mainly because the film is more interested in making you think the world is a terrible place than telling a story with momentum that actually seems rooted in the real world. Unfortunately, it’s difficult not to wonder whether the film got a release more because it includes brief hardcore gay sex shots, rather than the merits of the film itself.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

Third Man Out (DVD)

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Private eye Donald Strachey is asked to look into an attack on a man called John Rutka, who’s famed for outing powerful people as gay. While Strachey and Rutka’s ideas on gay politics differ dramatically, the PI gets pulled into the case after his boyfriend is attacked and Rutka is killed. [Read more…]