Todd Stephens’s Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild aims for a self-knowingness that could conceivably be mislabeled as camp by any one of its prick-brained lead characters. But, of course, any movie that features Brent Corrigan, of all porn stars, calling another character “sketchy” is operating on a pretty fragile sense of meta. This sequel to Another Gay Movie (a film whose very title would’ve seemed to be humorously attacking the interchangeability and futility of gay cinema as much as Gays Gone Wild misguidedly embraces it) features only one of the quartet of cute twink actors from the first movie, killing the other three off in a bloody dream sequence before the lovable mom of the fourth, Nico (Jonah Blechman, not coincidentally one of the movie’s executive producers), “reintroduces” three new “actors” to inhabit the vacated “roles.” But not before turning to the camera and obliquely addressing the original cast members and lamenting agents that tell their clients “you shouldn’t do two gay movies in a row.” Did Stephens miss the part about camp being naïve and un-self-aware? Did he miss everything that didn’t fellate his homogenized sex drive?
Pretty much. This new film dumps the original’s satirical take on the joys of discovery and, instead, catalogues the horrors of experimentation as the boys take spring break in Ft. Lauderdale (the part that doesn’t allow women unless they’re post-op) and enter a contest to see who can earn the most fuckstamps for promiscuity. All the while, Perez Hilton takes a satisfying blow to the head that knocks him, Looney Tunes-style, into an amnesiac heterosexual Bible-thumper who keeps barging into the movie with irritating regularity. But by the end, another blow converts him back to homosexuality and (presumably) his laptop, constituting the least triumphant ending in gay movie history.
If those sound like the words of a homophobic reviewer (the type of reviewer who could find artistic merit in Cruising, for example), consider the outcomes of each and every tryst: crabs, electric shocks, projectile vomit, bleeding ass and (in another horrific dream sequence) fatal, gut-busting fistings forcefully delivered by a mob of bathhouse zombies. These Pavlovian dick slaps to the horned-up quartet, and the fact that the femme Nico’s inability to attract even one sex partner when everybody is buffed, waxed and bronzed, is all supposed to lead up to Nico’s 11th-hour plea for widened horizons in sexual taste. But since Stephens is clearly all about the perfect “Jaspers” of the world, and because Blechman does, after all, have a killer six-pack, all it does is widen his maximum cap-ass-ity as every freak, transsexual, geek and grandpa in Ft. Lauderdale descends on him in an orgy of “Free to Do You and Me” sentiment. He wins the contest, and Stephens hastens to the same porn websites he product-places throughout the film to assemble his next cast.
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