CARRIE PRESTON

Bil’s rating (out of 5):  BB.5

USA, 2005.  Daisy Todd Productions.  Screenplay by James Vasquez.  Cinematography by Mark Holmes.  Produced by Sebastian Jobin.  Music by John Avila.  Film Editing by Mark Holmes, Carrie Preston, James Vasquez.  Podcast:  Bad Gay Movies.  

On the roster of bad, low-budget gay movies, this one ranks somewhere in the not-good-but-strangely-watchable category. It features the same cloying narrative we’ve seen a million times (single gay man needs to get over his self-deprecating immaturity in order to find love) with the same trappings (sassy girlfriends and a love interest who has absolutely no substance beyond being impossibly gorgeous, to make up for the fact that in real life single gay men who are this unattractive never get an impossibly gorgeous boyfriend).

This time it’s the film’s writer James Vasquez playing a near-thirty year old theme park employee who doesn’t have the perfect body or full head of hair that he thinks would get him further in the gay world. Reaching an impasse at his life, he examines his relationships with his friends while constantly missing the goo-goo eyes that an organic coffee house employee (Mike Doyle) is making at him, all the while trying his hand at disastrous romantic attachments that go nowhere.

It has moments of fun, and the performances are better than you would expect, but considering how whiny and uninteresting the main character is, there’s no reason for Doyle, whose character is just nice and pretty and not much else, to be interested in him other than to defy Hollywood notions of hot people meeting up with average humans.