‘Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild’ Review: Todd Stephens’s Don’t-Call-It-Camp Misfire

It aims for a self-knowingness that any of its prick-brained leads would mislabel as camp.

Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild
Photo: TLA Releasing

Todd Stephens’s Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild aims for a self-knowingness that any one of its prick-brained lead characters might conceivably mislabel as camp. But, of course, any movie that features Brent Corrigan (né Sean Paul Lockhart), 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 title seemed to be attacking the homogeneity, and as such futility, of gay cinema as much as Gays Gone Wild 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?

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Pretty much. This new film, co-written by Stephens and Eric Eisenbrey, 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 transforms 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.

The outcomes of the film’s sexual trysts include: 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 our horned-up central 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.

Score: 
 Cast: Jonah Blechman, Jake Moser, Aaron Michael Davies, Jimmy Clabots, RuPaul, Lady Bunny, Wil Wikle, Euramis Losada, Brent Corrigan, Lypsinka, Jim Verraros, Colton Ford, Amanda Lepore, Michael Lucas  Director: Todd Stephens  Screenwriter: Todd Stephens, Eric Eisenbrey  Distributor: TLA Releasing  Running Time: 95 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2008  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is a member of the Online Film Critics Society and GALECA.

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