Monday, August 18, 2008

DAY 288--FLAMING GAY ZOMBIES

At least this 2007 short film had a hook--I'm not sure you could actually call it a plot--unlike most shorts I've seen, which consists of zombies chasing the director's friends through the backyard. And that, my friends, is as close as I can come to praising FLAMING GAY ZOMBIES, a jaw-droppingly terrible production from Sadya Lashua and Aaron Mace.

I'm not really sure what to make of this, since it's hard to tell what the filmmakers were trying to do. It's not a satire, nor a comment on what it's like to be gay. I think it might be a comedy, but with humor this sophomoric and unfunny, I can't say. The story, such as it is, involves a young man who comes across a magical pair of glasses that, for reasons unexplained, enables him to turn other men into zombies with a single bite; only these "zombies" aren't really the living dead, but rather straight men turned queer, a parallel I found terribly insulting and I'm not even gay. This plot device serves no real purpose other than an excuse to indulge in unamusing gay jokes and extended scenes of man-on-man groping. (It amounts basically to softcore gay porn, but if that's your thing, I'm sure you can find better examples elsewhere.)

Pointless and tedious, there's nothing about FLAMING GAY ZOMBIES that makes much sense. I don't think the filmmakers are gay, nor do they know much about male homosexuality--they confuse it with transvestism, for one thing--and at times they come off as contemptuous of gays; certainly the ending does as the zombies "turn straight." (And let's not forget the segment in which our hero pimps out his zombies, taking great pains to emphasize how cheap they are.) It makes me wonder about their motivation, though, since despite a creeping anti-queer sentiment they dwell extensively on sequences of guys writhing on top of one another.

Oh, and can someone explain the ending to me, aside from the cheap symbolism of eating phallic hot dogs?





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