What if ‘Hellraiser’ was Gay(er) and DTF?

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Short Takes: ‘Mascara’ (1987) ★★

Mascara was distributed by
Cannon Films, but it’s clear
director Patrick Conrad wanted it
to be part of the Artificial Eye/
Curzon catalog.

Mascara comes sooo close to being great Eurotrash. It ticks all the right boxes: Sexual secrets! Murder! Sleazy set-pieces! Michael Sarrazin in drag! Unfortunately, Belgian director Patrick Conrad decided to aim for the art house crowd, so prepare for your exploitation expectations to get doused by a cold glass of pretension and boredom.

Wealthy Gaby Hart (Charlotte Rampling) and police director Bert Sanders (Sarrazin) are an elite, opera loving couple, but fuck Gaby, this movie is about Bert. While watching a performance of Orpheus and Eurydice, Bert becomes transfixed—not by the lead diva’s performance but her costume (think Bob Mackie if he were designing for a more modest Cher). He immediately approaches costume designer Chris (Derek de Lint) about borrowing the gown for a friend to wear at her birthday party. Chris refuses, but he’s as transfixed by Gaby as Bert is by the gown, so he relents thinking that doing so will further ingratiate himself with her. Except, surprise, the friend Chris has in mind is not Gaby but Pepper (Eva Robins).

Other surprises follow, as well as a fair amount of sleaze and murder. Bert wants Pepper to wear the gown as she lip-syncs opera on stage at Mister Butterfly, a literal underground club featuring a variety of sexual nonconformists and kinky exhibitions, including an extra from Cats giving bloody blowjobs, an androgynous man eating oysters from a gimp’s mouth, and a man lowering his jock-strapped ass over a woman’s face (at least I think it’s a woman; the genders of the performers are often as murky as the lighting). You’d think with all these titillating sideshows that Pepper’s performance would be ignored, but the audience is spellbound, especially Bert, who appears a little turned on. Yet when Pepper offers her naked body to him (“I know all there is to know…about the crying game”), Bert is enraged that she’d think he’s anything other than heterosexual and kills her. When his attempt to dump the body is interrupted, he decides the best way to cover up the crime is to kill other trans performers and frame Chris.

Just as things are getting interesting, Gaby and Chris begin an affair. A very calm, tasteful affair. It’s the type of affair that would drive you back to your spouse, just to spice things up. What I’m trying to say is Gaby and Chris’s relationship is tragically dull, and a tragic waste of Rampling, who has little to do other than strut through the movie wearing chic-for-their-time pantsuits and smile enigmatically. At the risk of spoiling things (skip to the next paragraph now if you must), the character of Gaby would’ve been better used as Bert’s co-conspirator rather than the movie’s tragic heroine.

Mascara sort of reminded me of the 1989 giallo Arabella: Black Angel, if Arabella tried to be classy. Fortunately, Arabella knew what it was. Mascara, like its main character Bert, wants to keep its salacious subject matter at an arm’s distance when it would’ve done better to fully embrace it. As it is, Romy Haag’s Marianne Faithfull-at-half-price cover of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” will likely stick with you longer than the movie’s Madonna music video-style kink. 

Short Takes: ‘Mr. Wonderful’ (2022) ★ ½

Shouldn’t documentaries have a point? One would think so, but then one isn’t Larry Costa, the director of Mr. Wonderful, a 47-minute documentary which purports to tell the story of Charles Phillips, a middle-aged gay man, presumably unhoused, with a long rap sheet, substance abuse issues, and delusions of grandeur.

Phillips’ stream-of-consciousness rambling about his past is oddly compelling, even if it’s clear that much of it is bullshit. Costa juxtaposes Phillips’ tales of resisting a marriage proposal with his many mugshots, as well as a list of his many charges (DUI, drug dealing, abduction). When Phillips talks of helping older people, Costa inserts text on screen revealing that Phillips was convicted in 2010 of abusing a 65-year-old neighbor. Often, the onscreen text is sarcastic, e.g., when Phillips loses his place in his story (“Damn, that reefer good!”), the text on the right hand on the screen reads “Intelligent!” When Phillips finds his place in that story and talks of being hired as a butler/gofer for a wealthy man, replacing his predecessor to whom Phillips regularly sold crack and ass (crack and crack?), because he showed “respect, honesty and loyalty” to his client’s boss, the text on screen reads: “Tip: Get friend fired, then take his job.” Phillips also has ambitions of being a rap artist, which Costa encourages, offering him a chance to record a few tracks, but it’s clear Costa is more interested in getting footage of Phillips making an ass of himself than helping him pursue his dream. Phillips biggest failure as a rapper, by the way, is his inability to stay focused long enough to spit out more than a single bar.

Wisely, Costa refrains from the snarky chyrons when Phillips graphically recounts the sexual abuse he endured at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend when he was 6 years old. It’s also one of the few times Phillips is likely telling the truth. Had this documentary been about LGBTQ+ homelessness or queer sex workers, the abuse revelations might have been allowed to provide insight into Phillips’ life of bad choices. But that’s not a story Costa is interested in telling; he just wants the viewer to know Charles Phillips is full of shit.

Charles Phillips doesn’t necessarily deserve the viewers’ sympathy, but viewers do deserve a real documentary. Mr. Wonderful has more in common with a YouTube video of teens ridiculing homeless people in the park for views, only it’s not that honest.

A Bizarre (and Kinda' Hot) Love Triangle

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Short Takes: ‘Swallowed’ (2022) ★★★

Not to be confused with Swallow [NSFW].

A body horror movie written and directed by the same man who gave us Jamie Marks is Dead and The Passenger, with full frontal male nudity and featuring the star of Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge as a vicious queen? You don’t have to ask me twice.

Making Carter Smith’s Swallowed even more intriguing—for me, at least—is Smith makes his story decidedly queer. When we first meet one of its protagonists, Benjamin (Cooper Koch, recently in Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story), he’s celebrating his impending escape from his dead-end hometown in rural Canada, his joining an L.A. gay porn studio’s stable being his all-expense-paid ticket to a more exciting life. His best friend Dom (Jose Colon) thinks Ben is naïve (“Those guys are going to want all that money back, man”), but celebrates with him, nevertheless. Dom is supposedly straight, yet it’s obvious he’s not that straight. Just as obvious is Ben very much hoping tonight’s the night they take their friendship up a notch, or at the very least, Dom consents to a farewell BJ. Alas, despite pointing our minds in that direction, the movie’s title is not an oral sex reference.

On the drive home Dom takes a detour to check on his cousin, DiDi. He and Didi had worked out a deal to smuggle some drugs into the U.S, the money from which Dom was going to give to Ben as a going away present (dude, you could’ve just agreed to let Ben blow you). Except, Didi is now too stoned to act as the go-between, so Dom now must deal with her girlfriend Alice (Jena Malone), who is neither congenial nor compromising, pulling a gun when Dom balks at having to swallow condoms stuffed with product. That gun also comes in handy when Ben needs to be convinced to swallow some condoms as well.

Crossing the border into Maine is the easy part, it turns out. Complications arise when Dom attempts shitting out the contraband and discovers it’s not a drug—but its bite can induce a high. By the time Alice arrives to retrieve the product, she finds Dom catatonic and pants-less and Ben freaking the fuck out. Her boss Rich (Mark Patton) isn’t going to like this.

Though Swallowed is labeled a body horror, don’t go in expecting Cronenberg (David or Brandon) wrapped in a rainbow flag. It feels more like a homoerotic crime thriller, with the tension derived from the unpredictable situation Ben and Dom find themselves in, without any grotesque physical transformations (you can expect some blood and shit, however, as well as one prosthetic dick* that’s almost convincing). Smith has shown in his other films that he can get a lot from a limited budget, and he gets more than his money’s worth with Koch, Colon, Malone and Patton, all great in their roles. Unfortunately, Smith tacked on a silly epilogue that’s tonally at odds with everything that came before it and dismisses all Ben has gone through. It doesn’t ruin the movie, but it did leave a sour taste in my mouth.

*Not counted as the movie’s full-frontal male nudity.

Short Takes: ‘The Holiday Exchange’ (2024) ★ ½

Does anyone really care if rich people find love? Like, has anyone kept up at night worrying—about bills, about work, about the next four years—ever spared a thought about Peter Thiel’s love life? I know I haven’t. Though, now that I’m thinking about it, is Peter Thiel even capable of love?* 

Anyway, because Christmas—or rather, because there is a dearth of LGBTQ+ holiday TV movies this year—I decided to check out The Holiday Exchange, which re-teams two of the stars of Shoulder Dance as two rich, attractive gay men who exchange houses when faced with the prospect of spending the holidays single, which, in the world of TV Christmas movies, is tantamount to a pancreatic cancer diagnosis.

In Los Angeles, we have Wilde, played by Taylor Frey, who has recently broken up with his actor/screenwriter boyfriend Sean. Across the pond, Oliver, played by Rick Cosnett, a well-mannered and well-off divorce attorney, has just found out that the man he hoped to spend the holidays with has other plans that pointedly don’t include him. Fortunately, there’s an app to the rescue: Grindr mister B&B. Wilde treats himself to a holiday vacation, and rents Oliver’s cozy manor house in the fictional Brilfax. After a quick FaceTime call, Oliver decides to rent Wilde’s garish Los Angeles mansion. Wilde’s U.K. vacation is interrupted by Oliver’s movie actor cousin Henry (Daniel Garcia), who shows up needing a place to stay after the pipes at his house freeze. Oliver, on the other hand, ingratiates himself with self-help author Julius (Samer Salem) at a book signing. Low-key conflicts arise (Julius is butt-hurt when he learns Oliver is a divorce attorney; Wilde jumps to conclusions when he sees Henry at a pub with another man), but love, Christmas, etcetera.

I promised myself going in that I would give The Holiday Exchange a chance, even though it is directed by Jake Helgren. There’s a scene early on, when Wilde’s ex Sean (Kyle Dean Massey) shows up to discuss their breakup, that has the expected energy of holiday rom-com, as does a later scene featuring Ashley Fink as a spunky bookstore manager. But these moments are mere teaspoons of rum in a what is otherwise a full glass of egg slog. Most attempts at humor fall flat, such as Wilde being locked out of Oliver’s house after a snowstorm, wearing just a scarf and plaid boxer shorts, his motivation for going outside in the first place not readily apparent. Some actors, such as Kyle Richards, as Wilde’s overly supportive mom Lola, and Camila Banus, as Julius’s publicist/friend Naomi, deliver sit-com style performances, talking really fast and loudly, with nothing funny to say. Richards’ performance in particular leaves the impression that Lola is the type of mom who tried to bond with her son by sharing her cocaine.

The Holiday Exchange is more concerned with the rom than the com, anyway, but even there it falters. Cosnett’s Oliver is blandly charming and there is some chemistry between him and Salem, but Frey’s Wilde is spoiled and smug to the point that I was more invested in him getting punched in the face than kissed. However, this holiday lump of coal isn’t entirely Helgren’s fault. He didn’t write this fucker, his leading man Frey did. However, characters doing an ad read for mister B&B? That has Jake Helgren all over it.

*Thiel has a husband, BTW, though being married isn’t the same as being capable of love, so that question remains unanswered.