Double Takes: ‘Nighthawks’ (1978) ★★★ / ‘Strip Jack Naked: Nighthawks 2’ (1991) ★★★

Being gay sure seemed sexier when I was in the closet. Not that I regret coming out—Lord knows, I stayed in the closet far longer than I should have—but I when I finally did it seemed, I dunno, anticlimactic. Oh, there were tears shed by my family, with assurances that they would love me “even if you were a child molester.” (Pro tip: if someone comes out to you, please don’t ever tell them this, no matter how well meaning.) This I was prepared for and considered it the price of entry. Having paid it, I was ready for all the sexy fun. Instead, I discovered that living as an out gay man was not, as I’d hoped, like living in a Falcon or Kristen Bjorn video, but instead just as mundane as living as a straight man.

I might have been better prepared if I had watched Ron Peck’s 1978 film Nighthawks instead of all those Falcon and Kristen Bjorn videos. The movie follows Jim (Ken Robertson, delivering the film’s most natural performance), a young-ish schoolteacher who spends his nights prowling London’s gay clubs for fresh cock. That lurid premise is amplified by the film’s grainy cinematography and unpolished acting that gives Nighthawks the aesthetics of a ’70s porno flick.  

The well-built Robertson's nude scenes notwithstanding, Nighthawks isn’t all that lurid or sexy. Peck and his collaborator Paul Hallam are more concerned with capturing the awkward moments before and after Jim’s hookups, how in each instance either Jim or his Mr. Right Now make it plain that they hope this one night might lead to something more, even as they have an eye peeled for Mr. More Right. The movie perfectly captures the quiet desperation of being rejected, as when Jim waits hours in a pub for his cutest hookup to arrive for a second date, refusing to believe he’s been stood up. Yet Jim is shown to be equally callous when the hard-on is in the other man’s pants.

The film also nicely captures the delicate dance gay men of the time had to maintain between their private and professional lives. Jim is careful to drop his tricks off a block away from their jobs the next morning. Even though several of his colleagues know he’s gay, Jim tries to be discreet at his job—until near the film’s end, when one of his students asks if he is “bent.” Jim, fed up with having to hide his true self, tells the student he is, then proceeds to answer all his students’ follow-up questions, no matter how offensive. Surprisingly, he is not fired for doing so, only reprimanded, suggesting that 1978 London was still better than present-day Florida.

Nighthawks may be a significant movie, but it is not exactly an entertaining one. At nearly two-hours, this plotless film often rambles and is frequently boring, with several scenes that left me wondering if the movie had a point. There are scenes of Jim just standing in nightclubs, his eyes darting around, scoping out potential tricks, that go on for several minutes—minutes made more excruciating by Nighthawks’ atrocious ersatz disco soundtrack. 

Peck’s 1991 follow-up Strip Jack Naked: Nighthawks 2 isn’t a sequel so much as a personal essay mixed with a making-of documentary, with some bonus footage of naked men wandering around for no apparent reason other than shoehorning in some prurient content. The movie features several scenes cut from the original film (among Peck’s revelations is that the initial cut of Nighthawks was nearly three and a half hours long), and in showing them you begin to see the potential for a better edit than what was ultimately released. I, for one, would’ve gladly sacrificed one of Jim’s morning after scenes for the scene in which he goes home with a man who wants to play rough as the scene illustrates the darker side of hooking up. Then again, since this scene is explicitly sexual it may have been cut for censorship reasons. 

More compelling are Peck’s reflections on growing up queer, including a schoolboy crush gone wrong, coming out, and navigating gay life in the 1970s, when he was always on the hunt for sex but secretly hoping to find Mr. Right. “And when I thought I came close, I saw another who I thought would take me closer, and another, and another. And many a time he’d give me the slip after one night…or turn down the offer of a drink or a cigarette with a smile before walking away, as [I] did [myself] to so many others.”

Perhaps more relatable to today’s audiences are Peck’s recounting of the election of Margaret Thatcher and her government’s attack against civil liberties, specifically those regarding the LGBTQ community. The emergence of HIV-AIDS in the 1980s only added fuel to the homophobic fire. “Across the media, gay now equaled AIDS,” Peck observes. He does end Strip Jack Naked on a hopeful note, because one had reason to be hopeful in the 1990s. Not so sure about 2024.

Double Takes: ‘The Louisiana Hussy’ (1959) ★★ / ‘Desire in the Dust’ (1960) ★★★ 1/2

Great title, so-so movie.

I love a good, sweaty Southern melodrama, and I can love a bad one even more. Books and movies about horny Southern belles, hunky rednecks, conniving good ol’ boys and scheming trailer tramps always pique my interest, so I was immediately drawn to these two movies from the Eisenhower era that promise all sorts of sordid shenanigans in the Deep South.

I knew I had to see The Louisiana Hussy the moment I discovered it streaming on Tubi. Its title made it all but mandatory. Nan Peterson, who sort of resembles a pre-plastic surgery Melanie Griffith, plays the titular hussy, and she causes plenty of trouble when she arrives in the bayou shanty town known as the Pit. Well, she doesn’t so much arrive as she’s brought there by brothers Jacques and Pierre (Peter Coe and Robert Richards, respectively) after they find her in the woods, unconscious after having been thrown from a horse. She comes to long enough to give her name as Minette Lanier and accuse Jacques of stealing her jewelry, before returning to a state of semi-consciousness.

The plot synopsis on Tubi says that Minette “sows discord” between the two brothers, which is only partially true (Tubi also describes New Orleans as “a small bayou town,” so maybe don’t put too much stock in their synopses.) Jacques was already pissed at Pierre for marrying Lili (Betty Lynn, before she joined the cast of The Andy Griffith Show as Thelma Lou), whom he had the hots for, but Minette just makes things worse. First, she seduces Pierre—on his wedding night no less—then, when he starts getting too suspicious about her past, she runs to Jacques, claiming Pierre forced himself on her, only to belie that accusation by promptly fucking Jacques. Jacques, the big lunk smiling for the first time in the movie, is now firmly on Team Minette, and is none too happy when Pierre relays Doc Opie’s (Tyler McVey) discovery that the real Minette Lanier committed suicide in nearby Grange Hill. Jacques’ refusal to believe him spurs Pierre and Lili (who never learns of her husband’s cheating with the hussy) to take their pontoon boat across the bayou to Grange Hill to find out just who the fuck is this woman claiming to be Minette Lanier. 

Pierre and Lili not only find out the backstory of the Pit’s visiting vixen, but they also uncover why The Louisiana Hussy isn’t quite working as a movie: the interesting part—a sexy young woman ingratiating herself into the lives of a wealthy couple, seducing the husband and driving his wife to suicide—is a mere subplot, told in flashback. The hussy of Grange Hill doesn’t sound like a woman who would be content to hang out among the poor folk of the Pit, even if she is screwing its two most attractive men (pickings are slim in the Pit, OK?), but this inconsistency is of no concern to screenwriters Charles Lang and William Rowland. Their movie is about Jacques and Pierre; the hussy is just a device to titillate audiences.

Director Lee “Roll’em” Sholem, as befitting his nickname, keeps things moving along at brisk pace, continuity be damned (Peterson is wearing flats when leaving one location, but arrives at her destination wearing high heels), delivering a few grindhouse thrills along the way, including a daring-for-its-time skinny dipping scene. But for all the movie’s efforts to appeal to audiences’ prurient interests, The Louisiana Hussy never lives up to the awesomeness of its title.

20th Century Fox transformed Harry
Whittington’s 1956 pulp novel into
a very sweaty Southern melodrama.

1960’s Desire in the Dust, also set in Louisiana, is not only better, but sweatier, too. Seriously, almost every shirt actor Ken Scott wears in this movie is sopping wet. Scott plays Lonnie Wilson, the hunky son of sharecropper Zuba (Douglas Fowley, who’s sweaty and dirty). At the movie’s opening, Lonnie is returning home after doing time for killing the youngest son of town big wig Col. Marquand (Raymond Burr, wearing dry suits but frequently wiping perspiration from his scowling face) when driving drunk. Newspaperman Luke Connett (Edward Binns) has his suspicions Lonnie was wrongly convicted, but Lonnie has more pressing issues than confirming Luke’s hunches, specifically the issue pressing up against the zipper of his pants. “After six years of goin’ without it ain’t likely he’s gonna like to be sittin’ around chatting with us,” Zuba tells his oldest daughter Maude (Margaret Field, Sally’s mom) after Lonnie drives away in the family Jeep on his first night home.

Marquand’s blonde bombshell daughter, Melinda (Martha Hyer, giving a performance that should appeal to Morgan Fairchild fans), is the woman who relieves Lonnie’s six-year case of blue balls (I can’t believe he served his entire sentence without once messing around with a cellmate, but such things weren’t acknowledged in 1960). Lonnie’s post-nut bliss is quickly dashed when he learns Melinda has married Dr. Ned Thomas (Brett Halsey). “I waited six years for you!” Lonnie rages. “You had no choice,” Melinda smirks. Melinda is content to keep Lonnie as a side piece, but Lonnie doesn’t want to share. But can he get his revenge before Marquand—with the help of Sheriff Wheaton (Kelly Thordson, also very sweaty)—silences him for good?

At the movie’s periphery are Marquand’s mentally unbalanced wife (Joan Bennett), who refuses to believe her youngest son is dead and goes ballistic whenever her nurse (Irene Ryan, better known as Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies) tells her the truth; Paul Marquand (Jack Ging), who is basically the Eric Trump of his family; and Cass (Anne Helm), Lonnie’s little sister, who’s having an affair with Paul but getting impatient for him to stand up to his domineering dad and marry her.

Desire in the Dust benefits from a strong cast (Burr, Scott, Hyer and Fowley are all great in their roles) and William F. Claxton’s direction is solid if not exactly distinctive. The movie’s greatest strength, though, is respecting Harry Whittington’s 1956 novel on which it’s based. It’s not 100% faithful, but it’s close enough to where I’d say the movie is just as good as the novel. Some aspects of the movie are a bit icky, however, and by icky, I mean incestuous. Marquand and Melinda’s interactions often suggest they are lovers rather than father and daughter, and upon seeing his little sister Cass for the first time in six years Lonnie leers, all but saying he’d like to tap that. Not sure if the suggestion of incest is meant to play into Deep South tropes or not, but it’s definitely there. It should also be pointed out that each movie features exactly one (1) Black person and they are servants to their movie’s respective wealthy characters, which just doesn’t reflect the population of either movie’s setting, though this very much reflects the time in which these movies were made.

Its uncomfortable familial interactions and unrealistic racial representation aside, I love Desire in the Dust and credit it with introducing me to the work of Harry Whittington. The only thing that would make it even better is if it had been made in the mid-1960s by Russ Meyer. Unfortunately, Desire in the Dust is not available for streaming or on Bluray. However, if you’re not too picky about video quality, you can get a DVD-R here.

Homeschooling Can Really Fuck Some Children Up

Way back in 2020, when I reviewed Stephen Lewis’ novel The Love Merchants, I mentioned that I planned on reviewing his 1982 gothic horror Buried Blossoms someday. Well, that day has come.

When I first teased this eventual review, I referred to Buried Blossoms as a “Flowers in the Attic knock-off,” an observation I based solely on the book’s cover. There are some similarities between Blossoms and V.C. Andrews’ mega-hit Flowers—a wealthy, fucked-up family, children living in isolation, incest—but it’s not a direct rip-off. In Blossoms, the children of the wealthy Hazeltine family aren’t the victims of evil adults but rather corrupted by their domineering father, who uses his money to isolate himself and his family from the New England town in which they live.

That town is Eastfield, Massachusetts, the founding of which we learn far more than is necessary to the story. All you really need to know is the town has planned a bicentennial celebration July 4, 1896, and Paul Hazeltine, owner of the Hazeltine Buggy Works, the town’s largest employer and responsible for Eastfield’s current notoriety and prosperity, has been tapped to be the event’s keynote speaker.

His acceptance of the gig is something of a surprise as Paul Hazeltine has made it abundantly clear that he gives not one shit about the silly residents of Eastfield. He keeps his family sequestered in a palatial estate outside the city limits, his beautiful, compliant wife Olivia and their children only venturing into town for infrequent shopping trips. The kids don’t even attend school, Paul Hazeltine insisting that they be home schooled instead, not for religious reasons (he’s a staunch atheist) but because he doesn’t want his children mingling with the lowly town folk.

His son, Paul, Jr., buys into the belief that their family is superior. When he’s taunted by one of the local boys during one of those rare shopping trips, Paul, Jr., calmly tells him to stop.

“Why?” the boy who started [sic] teased. “What are you gonna do about it? Fight?”

Paul Hazeltine, Jr., shook his head. Instead of the reaction his tormentor had expected, his face was set in a superior smile.

“What then?”

“I’m going to tell my father,” Paul said. “And then your father won’t have a job. And you won’t have any food. And you’ll die.”

Unlike her brother, the oldest Hazeltine daughter Francine isn’t interested in being superior to other kids, she wants to be one of them, to have friends (she wants a friend so badly she later invents an imaginary one named Jane). Her mother wants the same thing, and even summons the courage to ask her husband if they could, perhaps, host a party at their house. His response is immediate and harsh: “Certainly not!” Olivia demurs, because it’s 1896.

The day of the bicentennial arrives, and the Hazeltines make their grand entrance driving to the event in an electric car developed at the Buggy Works. Paul Hazeltine touts it as a sign of things to come. Electricity, he tells the crowd, will power carriages and power homes. This being a time before people worshiped the rich and took their word as gospel, the crowd is skeptical, some of them mocking Paul Hazeltine for suggesting such a ridiculous idea. Eventually, he wins residents over, selling them on the idea that Eastfield, currently benefitting from the success of Hazeltine Buggy Works, will soon grow exponentially when the Hazeltine Electric Car carries them into the 20th century.

The novel doesn’t really get hopping until it jumps to 1903. Olivia’s fifth child (besides Paul, Jr., and Francine, there’s Margaret and Constance, the youngest) is stillborn, and so deformed it’s barely recognizable as human (Its mouth and nose were one. There were gill-like slits at its throat and rigid flaps of skin where its arms and feet might have been.) The Hazeltine Electric Car has stalled and died, losing out to gas-powered cars. Rather than live with his failure, Paul Hazeltine, locked alone in his study, kills himself by drinking ink, of all things.

It's Olivia, deciding to surprise her husband with a midnight visit to his study, who discovers his body and promptly loses her mind. Refusing to admit the reality of his death, Olivia tosses Paul’s suicide note into the fire and then drags her husband’s corpse out of the house, which sort of strains credulity. Olivia is described as having a slender build and, at this point in the story, has a growing dependence on morphine. It seems unlikely she could drag her husband’s dead ass through the house by herself without drawing the attention of one of her children or their maid, Brigid. But no one ever hears her, and so Olivia drags Paul’s body out to the ice house and buries him there.

No one hears Olivia as she disposes of Paul’s body, but her teenaged children Paul, Jr., and Francine see her from their bedroom windows. Her children don’t confront her the next morning, however, even when Olivia announces that their father has been called away on business. “But we have a man of the house all the same,” she tells her children, referring to her son. Paul, Jr. The little fucker immediately embraces his new role, asking if he could take his father’s place at the head of the table until his father returns, knowing he never will. Olivia agrees, before drinking a glass of morphine-spiked water, because ladies don’t mainline.

Jove Books gave Buried Blossoms a snazzy keyhole cover

Incest, Madness and Murder

Paul Hazeltine was cold and domineering. His son, on the other hand, is a little psychopath. He overhears Francine telling her imaginary friend Jane that Olivia is mad and confronts her, slapping her and pinning her to the floor.

Paul’s hand covered her mouth, then his face pressed against hers and his hands were all over her at once, along her legs, under her dress.

When she tried to pull away, he pinched her, butting his head against her face. He forced his hand between her legs, laughing to himself as she shook with terror. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the attack was over.

“I’m the man of the house now,” Paul told her, standing up, smiling, leaving.

Buried Blossoms is better edited than the typo-riddled Love
Merchants, but a copyeditor clearly lost his/her place when 
copying and pasting sentences in this paragraph.

It’s not long before Paul, Jr., is sexually assaulting Francine on a regular basis (though Francine is sometimes aroused when her brother forces himself on her, which adds another layer of shame). But Francine isn’t the only one of his sisters that Paul, Jr., assaults. The maid, Brigid, checks on Margaret and Constance taking a bath, only to discover Paul is with them, coaxing his little sisters into mimicking the acts from a pornographic illustration found in one of his late father’s books (“We’re playing French ladies.”)

The maid is horrified further when Paul takes a cross from his pocket—a cross that Brigid had given Francine earlier—and slips “the chain over his penis, so that the cross dangled from it.”

Brigid flees the bathroom, intending to flee with the girls, but making no effort to get them away from their brother at that very moment. Paul, Jr., doesn’t remain in the bathroom, instead following Brigid, taunting her with his cross-festooned dong. Were it not for what transpired immediately prior, the mental picture of Brigid fleeing in terror from a teenager brandishing his hard-on is kind of funny. The laughter ends when Brigid is at the top of the stairs and Paul throws the crucifix at her, sending a startled Brigid tumbling down to the first floor, to her death.

Francine realizes escape is necessary if she’s the avoid the fates of Brigid or her mother, who is now floating through her days zombified on morphine and wine. During a trip to town to collect the family’s mail from the post office, she’s offered a ride from a young traveling salesman named Ned. Ned’s motives are sus, but Francine doesn’t give a shit. Not only is the salesman cute, but he’s also a potential savior. So what if it takes a blowjob and a quick fuck to convince him to take him with her?

One of the bigger surprises in Buried Blossoms is that Francine’s planned escape with Ned goes off without a hitch. I really expected Ned not to show up to their planned meeting at the train station, or for Paul to stop her from keeping the date, but Ned does, and Paul doesn’t. Ned does ditch her not long after (turns out he was already married; I knew he was a piece of shit), but Francine doesn’t care. She’s out of Eastfield and away from her fucked-up family.

While it’s great that Francine got away from her horrible life in Eastfield, we’re only at the novel’s midpoint, making it a little soon to dismiss her awful family from the story.The author evidently realized this, as he returns Francine to Eastfield 20 years later.

In those 20 years, Francine became an actress. Now known as Francine Le Faye, she travels the country in touring productions of Broadway plays, which is how she ends up in Eastfield. She’s understandably nervous about being there—she has, in the past, turned down roles in plays that would take her in the vicinity of her family home—but she’s also curious about what’s happened to her family, her mother and sisters especially. So, against her better judgment, she pays them a visit.

She’s alarmed to discover that the Hazeltine estate has fallen into disrepair, its once-cultivated gardens overgrown with weeds, the house itself overgrown with vines. Margaret and Constance answer the door, and though they are grown women they act like little girls, and they behave as if they’re members of a religious cult. Their answers to her questions are cryptic: their mother has “gone away”; their brother is “the same.” Creepy as they are, visiting with her sisters is reasonably pleasant. That changes when her brother. enters the room.

But Paul, Jr., coldly indulges Francine’s visit, giving equally evasive answers to her questions about their mother. Margaret and Constance then give her a cup of tea. “You wanted something of Mother’s,” Paul said. “So now you have her favorite. Her medicine.”

Francine’s visit becomes imprisonment, during which her brother and sisters cut off all her hair and repeatedly sexually assault her. It should be mentioned here that although Lewis’ writing career was primarily made up of porny “exposés” about prostitution (Massage Parlor; Teenage Hookers; Housewife Hookers) and novels about the sexploits of the rich and famous (The Best Sellers; Expensive Pleasures), and the 1980s still being a time when the marketplace rewarded graphic descriptions of sex, no matter how repugnant the circumstances, the descriptions of sex acts in Buried Blossoms are relatively restrained. In fact, Lewis or whoever (see below) adopts an almost stream-of-consciousness style as Francine struggles to make sense of what’s happening to her, thinking it’s a dream. 

It’s not a dream, but it’s not a nightmare from which she’ll wake up anytime soon, even after she escapes, burned, battered, bald, and batshit. For the rest of the book, Francine will remain hospitalized, in a catatonic state and unable to tell the investigators her name, let alone what happened to her.

The remainder of the book concentrates on Paul, Jr., Margaret and Constance, detailing their lives in the early1940s as an incestuous throuple, Paul, Jr. hunting game (and killing a kid who dared knock on their door), Margaret cooking their meals with assistance from Constance. Rather than any great dénouement, however, they merely get old and die, one by one.

Was Blossoms Ghostwritten? Let’s Speculate!

Buried Blossoms was not Lewis’ first foray into the horror genre, at least judging by titles in his bibliography. He previously published Something in the Blood and Natural Victims, though I couldn’t even find a cover of either online, let alone synopses, so their being horror novels is an assumption on my part.

Stephen Lewis’ author photo from
the back of his 1973 book, Sex
Among the Singles.

I couldn’t find much about Lewis, either. That’s not surprising. He wasn’t exactly the type of author that got profiled in Publishers Weekly, though the Glorious Trash blog found this 1974 profile in the Detroit Free Press. Among its revelations: Lewis never went to college, he watched game shows while he wrote, and at the time he raked in $250,000 annually cranking out paperback originals.

So, given Lewis’ history of writing sleaze and not putting much effort into doing so, I really had my doubts he’d be as adept at writing horror, yet Buried Blossoms is actually pretty effective. It’s superior in many ways to the other Lewis novel I’ve read, The Love Merchants. As much as I enjoyed The Love Merchants, I could fully believe that it was cranked out while he kept one eye on his game shows. But Buried Blossoms reads like it was written with a bit more care, like Lewis was interested in doing more than just getting paid and left the TV off. However, Blossoms was published a year after his death, with the copyright belonging to a George Kuharsky. At first, I naively thought Kuharsky was a family member or partner who inherited Lewis’ unpublished manuscript, but I'm now more inclined to believe he was a ghostwriter hired to complete Lewis’ unfinished book.

Adding credence to that ghostwriter suspicion is the uneven quality of Blossoms, which never adds up to a satisfying whole (mitigating factor: The Love Merchants wasn’t exactly a fully satisfying read, either). It either needed to be a lurid family saga told in 400-plus pages, or a more concise gothic horror, told in under 200. Instead, it’s a meandering 297 pages, not really getting to the creepy stuff until nearly 80 pages in. I’d be tempted to blame this on Lewis trying to reach a specific page count, except some of the chapters seem a little too fussy, like the five pages detailing Eastfield’s founding. Beyond being four more pages than Lewis would ordinarily supply, this chapter includes way more research of Massachusetts history than I’d expect from an author more inclined to detail the sexual adventures of hookers while he watched The Price is Right. But, who knows, maybe Lewis took an interest U.S. history before dying in his early 30s.

Despite its uneven storyline, and regardless of who finished it, Buried Blossoms is worth checking out, and usually pretty easy to find for sale online, at affordable prices, too. Reading it made me tempted to check out one of Lewis’ other (presumed) horror novels, which are also for sale online. However, I’m more tempted to read and review his other posthumously published novel from the gay publishing house Alyson:

Stephen Lewis’ last (?) published novel.

Short Takes: ‘Addicted’ (2014) ★★

Not to be confused with Addickted (click at your own risk), because this adaptation of Zane’s 1998 book is for the ladies and therefore above such crudeness. The dick is merely implied.

And lead character, Zoe Reynard (Sharon Leal) is all about the dick, though, as she explains to her therapist Dr. Marcella (Tasha Smith, acting like an Oprah-bot), she has a very fulfilling life, with a loving (and very hot!) husband, two beautiful children, and she owns her own successful business merchandising artworks of up-and-coming artists. Plus, all her employees love her! Her assistant Shane complements Zoe’s fashion sense the moment she walks in the door, and her best friend/…um, I’m going to say vice president, Brina (Emayatzy Corinealdi), is so devoted to her job that she dismisses the very idea of Zoe paying her more to do it. There’s no sex and I’m already getting a semi just thinking about this woman’s life.

But Addicted wastes little time getting to the sex, showing Zoe and that hunky husband of hers, Jason (Boris Kodjoe) enjoying some hot R-rated boning less than 10 minutes in. After they come, Zoe reaches beneath the sheet for Jason’s sticky dong, asking if he’s ready for round three(!), only to be disappointed when Jason drifts off to sleep. (Lady, give him a chance to recuperate from round two; you two aren’t 18 anymore.) Then, just like that, Zoe deems her sex life boring and goes to her home office to get off to Internet porn, which she evidently does frequently as she keeps a vibrator in a desk drawer. Lord help her if her children or her mother—who lives with them to take care of the kids and give her daughter “hmm-hmm” looks—goes hunting for a pen.

That all changes when she meets famed (but, implausibly, never photographed) artist Quinton Canosa (William Levy) at Atlanta’s High Museum. Quinton understandably sets her girlie parts a-tingle, so it’s no surprise that she readily fucks him. Well, “readily” might be overstating it, as Zoe does try to push Quinton away, telling him that what they’re doing is not right, a protest he quickly silences by going down on her.

But Quinton is not enough. Zoe hits the clubs, hooking up with the dangerously sexy Corey (hey, it’s Tyson Beckford from Chocolate City) in a suspiciously vacant (and clean) restroom and sneaking out to join him at artfully lit sex parties. Zoe is so hooked on cock that she begins to neglect her family and her business. She knows she needs to quit both these guys, but she’s too busy getting rocks off to worry about hitting rock bottom.

Though it’s not the trash treasure I hoped for, I kind of enjoyed this one. The acting is fair, though Levy often comes off as smarmy rather than seductive. Director Bille Woodruff at least knows his audience, meaning Leal’s body is decoratively covered while her male co-stars’ are frequently exposed (no full frontal, but a fair amount of man-ass). As an Atlanta resident I had some fun spotting familiar locations on screen (I loved that the now-shuttered Radial Café, very much a casual dining spot in its day, is presented as a restaurant so exclusive it requires strict punctuality for reservations). What stops the movie from being satisfying trash is its uneven Lifetime-y script. Sometimes it’s the fun type of Lifetime movie, but too often it’s just bland, and its portrayal of sex addiction way too sanitized. There’s sex addiction, where otherwise respectable people pull trains with hobos on their lunch hour and sneak off after putting the kids to bed to go writhe naked in urinal troughs, and then there’s “sex addiction,” an affliction (primarily male) celebrities diagnose themselves with when they’ve been caught cheating (or worse). Zoe’s problem falls squarely in the second category, and no amount of last-minute daytime TV psychodrivel can convince the audience otherwise. 

(Not-So-)Short Takes: ‘Mea Culpa’ (2024) ★ 1/2

It’s as bad as you thought it would be.

With his latest Netflix venture, Mea Culpa, Tyler Perry tries his hand at writing and directing an erotic thriller with predictable results.

Kelly Rowland stars as Mea (oh, for fuck’s sake...), a very successful Chicago attorney with a very stressful homelife. Her husband Kal (Sean Sagar), a recovering addict, lost his job and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to find a new one—a fact he’s keeping secret from his overbearing mother Azalia (Kerry O’Malley, who might as well be wearing a mustache so she can twirl it) and his smug older brother Ray (Sean’s real-life brother, Nick Sagar), neither of whom approve of Kal’s marriage to Mea. Mea grudgingly keeps her mouth shut about Kal’s past drug problem and current unemployment because Mom’s got cancer and only has so much time left, but playing nice is increasingly hard to do. “Don’t worry, son, your second wife will be on time,” Azalia says when Mea shows up late to her birthday dinner (Perry’s writing is as subtle as ever). Mea shoots her a look that makes it clear she just wishes the bitch would die already. The topper of this shit sundae is Kal might also be cheating on her.

Enter Zayair Malloy (Travante Rhodes, a long way down from Moonlight), a famous painter charged with murdering his girlfriend. He wants Mea to represent him, but she’s hesitant. Her punchable brother-in-law, who also happens to be the assistant D.A., is prosecuting the case. But when Kal, Azalia and Ray forbid her to accept the accused murderer as a client, Mea all but volunteers to represent Zayair pro bono. BTW, if you think there’s a potential conflict of interest in her taking the case, Perry is ahead of you, including a scene in which Mea and Ray consult a judge who acknowledges the conflict exists before deciding he’ll just sit back and see what happens.

The newly plot-armored Mea then gets down to the business of building a defense for her client, but it’s an uphill battle. Zayair not only appears guilty as hell, but he also appears more interested in boning his attorney than staying out of prison. Their meetings go thusly: Zayair mumbles some sexually suggestive lines, Mea swoons temporarily before coming to her senses and repeating lawyer-ish lines familiar to anyone who’s watched an episode or two of a TV legal drama (“It’s important you tell me everything you know.”) This goes on for almost a full hour.

Eventually, Mea caves and fucks her client, and from there Mea Culpa goes from boring to stupid, then fucking ridiculous. 

I’ve only seen one other Tyler Perry movie, Temptation (or Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor), which was bad, but in a fun way. However, it was fucking Oppenheimer next to Mea Culpa, the plot of which suggests Perry tried to retrofit one of his past soapy dramas with a thriller plotline. That might have worked if Perry prioritized quality at least half as much as he does quantity.

Mea Culpa isn’t without its enjoyably silly moments, such as when a conversation between Zayair and Mea is interrupted by a naked woman with a speech impediment/accent (I couldn’t tell which), with Zayair then leading the naked woman a few steps away so she can blow him in full view of his attorney (it makes no more sense in context). There's also a scene where Mea follows Zayair to a sex party that's happening in the back of the parking garage of his building. Is that always going on? Do tenants pay extra for that? To his credit, Perry doesn’t shy away from including a few hard-R sex scenes, but they do little to offset the movie’s leaden pacing. The batshit ending might jolt audiences awake, however, forcing them to rewind to figure out how any of it makes sense (spoiler: it doesn’t). That is if they cared, which they likely won’t.

Rowland and RonRaceo Lee, as a smartass P.I., give competent performances, while O’Malley, Nick Sagar and Angela Robinson, as a gallery owner and Zayair’s former lover, act like they’re in a Tyler Perry movie. Worst actor award goes to Rhodes, who mumbles all his lines in a bored monotone (nice body, though). However, it’s doubtful even actors of Kerry Washington and Michael B. Jordan’s caliber could overcome Perry’s indifference to pacing, character, composition, lighting (in Mea Culpa it’s either too bright or too dark, but seldom just right), editing, and believability, not to mention his problematic messaging (i.e., married career women are selfish bitches). The real mystery at the heart of Mea Culpa is how a filmmaker who has written and directed over sixty films and TV series has only gotten worse at his craft.