9 Dead Gay Guys

Gaysploitation cinema has its cake and eats it. Embracing tired stereotypes in order, allegedly, to defy them, the film parades stock comic characters from the fantasy nightmares of a repressed right-winger in order to inflame them. Going in blind, viewers might wonder if the film-makers are witless homophobes or witless homophiles. Two non-dead and avowedly non-gay guys, Irish lads Byron (Mackey) and Kenny (Mulhern), preserve their sloth-and-Guinness lifestyle by servicing clients at an opulent queer pub in London. Overlapping social circles ripple out from this decadent milieu. Sex-mad clerics, sex-literate old ladies and a sex-starved dwarf screech and claw for screen space alongside the boys' amply displayed hardbodies, hugely endowed Africans, a Capote queen and terrifying matriarch, the Iron Lady, who sports lethal smothering breasts. When they're not erratically pursuing the titular murder trail, the room-mates spend a great deal of time discussing blowjobs and the fact that they're not gay with a scatological aggro-fury oddly reminiscent of heteros like Guy Ritchie and Kevin Smith. Byron and Kenny share their callow, hair trigger insecurity with the film itself, a strange, grisly collision of snide self-congratulation and ugly self-loathing. JWin.