Filmmaker Dean Francis makes B-movie bunk occasionally look alluring in Body Blow, a queer neo-noir about a closeted cop who goes rogue. The journey from good apple to total outlaw, however, is more a short dash for Officer Aiden.
Tim Pocock (X-Men Origins: Wolverine), giving as wooden a performance as you’ll ever see, stars as the suburbanite constable, still fresh to the force and reassigned to a unit in Sydney’s gay district. Neon-lit and framed like an ’80s music video by cinematographer Franc Biffone, it’s an impressively seedy side of the city.
Seemingly everybody is in on some form of crime or corruption. That might include Sgt. Steele (Sacha Horler, not wooden but not convincing), the lesbian officer who recruits Aiden to go undercover as a gayer-looking, peak-era Jean-Claude Van Damme.
“Guys dress like this?” Aiden asks, befuddled in his new skin-tight jeans and muscle tee. “Yes, gay guys,” Steele responds.
The film’s acidic humor hits with a handful of jokes, usually courtesy of Australian stage and screen vet Paul Capsis as the film’s flamboyant villain, Fat Frankie. A drug-addled drag queen and impresario, Frankie rules like a mob boss over her namesake club Fat Frankie’s. Minions like mohawked twink Cody (Tom Rodgers, decent as a detestable character) call her Daddy.
As Fat Frankie’s becomes the center of whatever haphazardly plotted investigation Steele is running, that means too many opportunities to see Daddy perform live at the club. Capsis does not do for original songs like “Ring a Ding Ding,” written by Francis, what he’s able to do with some of the one-liners.
The songs — recorded just days before filming, according to press notes — are painful, and only part of the displeasurable aural experience. The movie’s emaciated sound mix leaves spaces sounding as hollow as the dialogue, which, ten times more frequently than it lands a zinger, drops a clunker like, “Cop smell gets me hard.”
The crystal-meth-loving Cody gets the worst of the script’s attempts at hard-boiled banter. He’s also the bottom in a not-sexy scene of sexual role-play that’s played at gunpoint, and serves as an example early in the film that Aiden is a dumbass and a bad cop, long before he confesses to sexually assaulting a male suspect who might have been a minor.
Francis undercuts Aiden’s descent into corruption by giving him little room to fall further than he already has. At least, the lingering guilt and titillation from that one incident open up an intriguing avenue of story for him.
Trying to abate his homosexual tendencies by abstaining from arousal altogether, Aiden dons a cock cage, fascinated by the forced impulse control. Fittingly, although Body Blow features a bevy of eager sex scenes, more is implied than actually shown. There’s more nudity on an episode of Heated Rivalry, even if we’ve yet to see any of those dudes lock their puck in a cage.
Aiden’s obsession with not masturbating is by far the most interesting thing about him, and — relative to the wan romance with Cody, disjointed police procedural, and hackneyed action — the most distinctive element in the film.
Aiden focuses his anti-onanist attention through the guidance of macho men’s guru Duke Ironheart (Dominic McDonald). Ironheart’s batshit instructional videos drone on in the background of Aiden’s life, and this movie, offering adages of self-control: “This cock does not rule me. I rule it.” Harness the power of your semen by not dispersing it willy-nilly, he urges.
Once or twice, a choice line floats out of his ceaseless spew. “Young men are drawn into the easy allure of this pornographic world,” Ironheart cautions, as Aiden’s path weaves through orgies and bars and bathhouses. For a second, it might sound like wisdom, before Ironheart goes back to droning on about the diamond contained within your loins.
Body Blow (★1/2) is available via Digital and VOD on Google and YouTube Movies. Visit darkstarpics.com.
George Michael said it best in a song: “Sex is natural, sex is good, not everybody does it, but everybody should.” But should you do it with your boss -- especially if it entails becoming her sex slave?
Amusingly awkward artist’s assistant Elliot answers with a resounding “Yes, ma’am” in I Want Your Sex, the latest cinematic provocation from perpetually cool indie filmmaker Gregg Araki.
An audacious post-#MeToo satire of sexual politics and art world absurdity, the film easily might have landed as just a thinly veiled male sex fantasy were it not for Cooper Hoffman’s soulful, vulnerable turn as Elliot, and an endlessly enjoyable Olivia Wilde as his turned-on and totally toxic boss Erika.
Before it all falls fabulously apart in The Play That Goes Wrong, and every sort of onstage disaster befalls the hapless cast of the play within the play, we have to believe that these members of a local drama society truly believe in their little production that could.
Because they fight hard for it. Even as cues are missed, lines are forgotten, fixtures fall off the walls, and actors are rendered unconscious, this fictional company bands together and wills their show to go on.
That indefatigable determination and showmanship was baked into the comic soufflé by the show's creators Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields of London's Mischief Theatre Company, and it courses through the gung-ho cast of Keegan Theatre's new production of The Play That Goes Wrong, directed by Michael Innocenti.
In the grand tradition of cross-dressing pioneer Divine playing Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, or John Travolta as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, comedian John Early stars in Maddie's Secret, as Maddie, an everyday woman with a song in her heart and a husband who loves her. She also has...a secret.
The secret is not that she's a drag queen. Maddie Ralph is a biological woman, and Early, a gay man, is playing her. A two-time Emmy nominee for the comedy specials Would It Kill You to Laugh? and John Early: Now More Than Ever, Early also wrote and directed the film, a sincerely campy send-up of old-school TV-movie melodramas, à la Lifetime Movies for Women.
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