1970, United States. Starring Craig Dudley, Fernando Ascencio, Gary Bennet, Robert Case, J. Will Deane, Gene Edwards, Jimmy Foster, Danny Landau, Robert Nero, Kim Pope, Maureen Sadusk, Wyn Shaw. Directed by Stan Lopresto. Available on DVD from Amazon.

You know, I was sitting around the other day thinking about how Teleport City is full of heterosexual sleaze and how, by comparison, I've let the gay community off pretty easy. This hasn't been so much a result of my unwillingness to delve into the wild world of homosexual sleaze as it has been a reflection of the fact that, for the most part, the movies just aren't readily available. Now I'm not talking about one of those movies where guys in sweaters struggle with their homosexual tendencies against a backdrop of quaint West village eateries and coffee shops. No no, I'm talking stuff on the level of all the other works of art we've reviewed on this site. You know, something shot on a grainy film stock, featuring seedy locales, horrible acting, and lots of gratuitous nudity. Sleaze baby! The fuel for the grindhouse fires that made the 1970s such a wonderland.

So it was then, by sheer act of availability, that we found most of the sleazy movies we were coming across (and we came across a lot of them - you'd almost think we actively sought this stuff out) highlighted naked female flesh, sometimes naked female flesh upon naked female flesh, but really short-changed that desire I know we all have to see grimy, sweaty, hairy-asked guys with weird looking penises and dirty feet rubbing against one another in fleapit hotel rooms.

Well, Something Weird heard the cry for some vintage gay sleaze of the most unappealing and unerotic variety and answered the call with a double-feature DVD containing two prime examples of Something Weird's knack for finding movies that sound hilariously entertaining on paper but are an unsufferable bore to actually watch. Still, Teleport City does have a decently sized gay readership thanks to all those Hercules movies we watched, though I can't say whether or not dragging these grubby old films into the shining light of day is any sort of proper "thank you" for your patronage and patience as we worked our way through a variety of reviews involving boobs. If nothing else, these two gay exploitation films work well as an example of just how polished exploitation filmmaking has become these days.

I'll review both films on the disc as a single piece, partly because they're thematically and physically linked on the DVD, but mostly because quite frankly I doubt I can work up enough words on either one individually. Before I launch into all that, though, perhaps I should give a brief summary of my personal attitudes, and thus the attitudes of this website as a whole, toward homosexuality. The succinct breakdown is that I really don't give a damn. It's not that "I don't give a damn as long as they keep it to themselves and don't let anyone know" sort of thing. It's more just "I don't give a damn in the same way I don't give a damn whether someone is heterosexual." None of it makes any difference to me. I'm more interested in whether a person has funny stories to tell and can handle themselves well on a difficult hiking trail. Whether or not two guys are holding hands or sneaking smooches from each other is no concern of mine, and my reaction to the usual "Homosexuality is okay as long as they don't try and force it on me," is usually, "How often do gays actually try and force homosexuality onto someone?" or alternately, "Hey, how come those guys aren't hitting on me?" I may not be interested but, you know.

You may also notice that I make fun of the guys in these homosexual grindhouse follies more than I would a woman in a similar film. This, again, has nothing to do with my opinion of homosexuality, and is instead directly related to the fact that, gay or straight, I consider us all men and as such and as a member of the population of men, I feel at ease making fun of other men in a way I wouldn't feel comfortable about women. In other words, I apologize now for the crudeness that is to follow, but that's what happens when guys get together.

Which brings us, in our usually roundabout way, to the first film on this sordid double-bill, the sleazy, cheap, and grubby Meatrack. Hey, already we have an appetizing title. I don't think the average gay man is any more interested in a film with a title like The Meatrack than a heterosexual guy would want to rush out and see something called Janine's Ham Pamphlet, but I've always been turned off by comparisons between genitalia and supermarket meat products. There is just nothing arousing for me about luncheon meats.

But as I said, The Meatrack is one of those movies that sounds like a must-see mindwarp when you hear bits and pieces of it recounted to you: a bisexual hustler working his way aimlessly across the country has flings with a fat guy in a dominatrix outfit and cheap wig who makes him dress as a little sailor boy, and eventually ends up being forced to make a porno movie with some lady while being menaced by a couple of knife-wielding drag queens, all the while reflecting back on how his tramp of a mother drove him into this life of shame. To please grindhouse patrons who actually will sit through just about anything, some of the characters also fool around in a theater showing The Screaming Skull.

First of all, if you were looking for z-grade sleazy kicks and a handjob from a raincoat-wearing stranger in some seedy 42nd Street theater, you were probably pretty surprised to have picked such a brutally nihilistic, mean-spirited, and thoroughly unappetizing slice of slime. The Meatrack is one of those movies that just makes you want to take a shower, the cinematic equivalent of rubbing KFC original recipe all over yourself, but with much worse odors. It's the kind of movie that just makes you squirm, and not in the way that stranger was hoping. Gay or straight, I can't think of anything less appealing than a close-up of some dude's soaped-up hairy 1970s ass shot in washed out, grainy 16mm film. Ugh. It's as sexy as filiming similar close-ups of a guy with bad teeth and a scraggly mustache licking his over-plump lips while drinking milk. Sorry about that visual. My point is that considering the downbeat subject matter of The Meatrack, it's really not the sort of film you might want to sit through if you're just looking for some pervy kicks. The picture it paints of its young hustler is relentlessly downbeat and grim.

On top of the general feeling of congealed chicken grease that this film imparts in the viewer, it also manages to be intensely dull and dreary. The director attempts to inject some arty moments in, playing around with the camera, switching to black and white stock, that sort of thing, but none of that masks the fact that we're sitting through a painfully unexciting trough full of cinematic swill. Who knew knife-wielding drag queens could be so boring? I've always been of the opinion that more movies, if not every movie, should feature knife-wielding drag queens menacing the straights, but apparently even something that fabulous can't save a movie this wretched. It's not even worth commenting on the acting and dialogue. After all, these were movies made so people could meet each other in the theater and fool around.

Some respite from the torturous first film can be found in the second feature, the gay '70s Fire Island travelogue Sticks and Stones which, although certainly more playful and entertaining, also manages to pack in a lot more frontal nudity than the less interesting but somehow far dirtier first film. Sticks and Stones has no plot of which to speak. Gay couple Peter and Buddy walk around Fire Island in Speed-O swimtrunks. Buddy is drunk and stoned most of the time, which is fitting since he sort of looks like Peter Fonda, and frequently does little more than mumble his way through conversations. His boyfriend Buddy is insufferably bitchy, the kind of guy who gets a wild party house on Fire Island then spends most of his time whining, "Come on, it's time to go home." You can't help but feel for Peter, decadent as he is, because Buddy is such a bitchy drama-queen with no sense of humor and no sense of fun.

Oh yeah, I guess I should throw out a quick explanation about Fire Island. Well-known among New Yorkers and gay couples up and down the east coast, Fire Island is a lovely stretch of beach jutting from Long Island. While the southern portion of Fire Island is your typically overcrowded New York area beach, the further north you travel, the gayer things become until you hit the heart of Fire Island, a mecca of escape for gay couples with enough money to rent beachfront vacation homes. Sticks and Stones, if nothing else, is a humorous snapshot of the island thirty or so years ago, and frankly very little has changed other than people own better sunglasses and have tamed the hair in their asscrack. In fact, while whiling away a fine summer day a couple years ago on the nude beach up on Fire Island, I saw a guy with a Robin Williams-esque pelt of thick black hair all over his body except for his ass, which was shaved as bare and smooth as a newborn babe's. And in case you're wondering - yeah, a nude beach frequented by gay men is a perfectly acceptable place to hang out even if you're not gay. Aside from getting to swim naked, the beach is much cleaner, much less crowded, has fewer children, and absolutely no teenagers blasting 50 Cent on their radios.

Buddy and Peter are throwing a big 4th of July bash on Fire Island, and they've invited everyone, including the horrendous Lavender Guru, who proves that rambling, full-of-shit new age gay hippies are just as annoying as their straight counterparts. The guy just doesn't shut up, and the film's most painful moment comes when it sticks with his pointless, exhausting rambling. Still, he calls himself the Lavender Guru, so I guess that counts for something. There's also Prince Albert with his famously pierced manhood, two guys who give us the wacky "coupla queers tryin' to change a tire" scene, some surprisingly attractive lesbian named Kim Pope (who would go on to star in tons of sleazy 1970s grindhouse films including The Amazing Transplant and Jackie Starr - X Reporter), who gets to do a wild naked dance with chaps-clad Prince Albert, and a host of other zany characters. The party itself is sort of ridiculously entertaining, but the movie can't help but cut to scenes of Buddy moping and whining and starting arguments with a stoned Peter. You know, petty bickering and sniping is boring and annoying enough in real life. I don't want to pay to see more of it. That's why I skipped out on that reality TV craze.

Sticks and Stones feels pretty much like someone's home movie of a wild party intercut with a poorly written and acted soap opera. The film's best scene, besides the aforementioned tire changing scene and naked dancing, shows some of the partygoers boarding a train in Manhattan and attracting curious and sometimes judgmental glances from the uptight straights. While I don't think anyone would argue that Sticks and Stones is some sort of milestone in the history of gay cinema, it's at least a far more positive and sympathetic glance than that Meatrack thing, not to mention managing to be a lot less boring. But being less of a bore than The Meatrack still leaves plenty of moments for tedium, all ofwhich culminate in the most frustratingly drawn-out and ponderous "final argument" I've ever fast-forwarded through.

Still, there's enough pre-AIDS slice of life decadence here to make the film worth a look, though if you're hoping for something really outrageously over-the-top and flamboyant, you're still going to find yourself drifting off to sleep. If nothing else, at least most of the guys are better looking and not as matted and hairy as the Meatrack crew. Still, from a purely aesthetic point of view, I'll always believe you can't get any uglier than a rear shot of some hairy-assed dude bending over with his yarbles flopping about lifelessly. Really, now, it's a silly looking set of organs to begin with, and this is its least flattering angle.

Speaking of flopping manhood, the thing that makes most Something Weird discs worth owning regardless of how godawfully boring the actual films turn out to be are the extras. They pack a lot of them onto each disc, and this one has a good hour's worth of some of the most hilariously awkward and unarousing gay nudie loops and shorts you could possibly imagine, provided you're prone to lying around trying to imagine laughably unsexy gay nudie loops. Things begin slow with a look at a 1970s gay pride parade on the West Coast, which does little more than show you haw far these parades have come. It's all pretty threadbare and sad looking, though I'm a big fan of whoever made the sign that said, "More Deviation, Less Population." Then there's footage of some Howard Cosell looking newsman interviewing people at a "Gay In," most of whom are spaced out hippie types, and one of whom is some surly gay biker who makes fun of everyone for being blessed out and wimpy and into balloons. Dude, if you're so tough, why'd you come to the hippie Gay-In in the first place?

Things get utterly ludicrous as we launch into our first nudie loop, which features an all-naked, all-male country band sunning themselves on rocks and playing instruments while some beefy Rudy Ray Moore looking black guy does some of that horrible shuffling and jig dancing you're most likely to see being done by slaves in old movies. Jesus! To make things even more surreal, whatever music they were actually playing was never recorded, and so the film is dubbed over with some Lawrence Welk type music. This is pretty much the theme for the rest of the shorts, which features naked guys wrestling with one another, posing for one another, and in my favorite bit, playing buck naked pool. It's all so matter-of-fact as to be utterly devoid of any gay sex appeal. The pool players, in fact, spend so much time stretching and contorting themselves in penis-and-ass exposing stances that you'll soon lose any shock and the sheer amount of naked flesh on screen and just start thinking to yourself, "God, these guys suck at pool. Just stand normally and get this fucking game over with."

So, as you can probably guess, this DVD isn't what would fall into the category of "standard viewing," not for anyone. For starters, the first film is dismal and without any entertainment value whatsoever. The second film drags colossally in places but at least is a little more enjoyable. The extras are hilariously silly. I wouldn't recommend any of this to anyone really, not even my hardest up gay friends. There are a lot of packages on display for all the world to behold, but none of them are presented in a way that could arouse, and they're surrounded by movies that can't entertain. So what's left? But if you're gay, easily amused, or simply in to really astoundingly bad, bottom-of-the-barrel grindhouse fodder, you might want to take a look at least at Sticks and Stones as a timewarp back to an era that was actually less innocent than our own and as a curiosity on the highway of gay cinema and acceptance. But mostly? Our gay readers deserve something a lot more entertaining than this stuff. Like Spartacus or something.

Labels: Netflix Diary, Sexploitation, Year: 1970