"Killer Klowns from Outer Space": Gayer Than You Think

Why have I not seen Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) before? Other than the ridiculous premise, that is.  It's a gay-subtext classic.

We open at a lover's lane, where some of the parked cars are not occupied by boy-girl couples!  There are two guys, and two guys and a girl!

Mike (Grant Cramer) and his girlfriend Debbie (Suzanne Snyder) are parked, but not kissing!

Why have I never heard of Grant Cramer before? I thought I was up on all the 1980s hunks.  It was my decade!

Let's have another look at Grant Cramer before continuing.

An ice cream truck passes by, run by the Lenny and Squiggy-like the Terenzi Brothers, Rich and Paul (Michael Siegel, Peter Licassi):  "We'll give you the stick -- you give it a lick."  Promises, promises.

Mike notes that he knew the boys from high school.  "Whenever you want a good time, you call Rich and Paul.  A night out with those guys is a real adventure."

Um...so you like hanging out with guys? Is Debbie actually your girlfriend, or a buddy?

Meanwhile, at the sheriff's station, two college boys are brought in for "boozing it up in the park."  One is wearing a New York t-shirt.  They had a bottle of wine.  Were they, like, on a date?

The Sheriff roughs them up, and when Deputy Sheriff Dave intervenes, asks if he's got a"thing" for them.

And we're only 12 minutes into this movie

Deputy Sheriff Dave is played by John Allen Nelson, seen here on Baywatch, but with blond hair.

Ok, I've got to ask, who did the casting for this movie, and why did they hire two super-hunks, when neither actually shows any skin?

On camera, anyway.

Ok...um...the story.

Mike and Debbie stumble upon an alien spaceship that looks like a circus tent, where  aliens who look like scary clowns attack them with popcorn-guns and a balloon animal that comes to life.

You have to admire the dedication to the premise.

They barely escape, and rush to tell Deputy Dave. He leads them into the station, his arm around....Mike's shoulders.

They take Debbie home and go off to investigate, Mike's hand never far from Dave's shoulder.  Dave appears to be Debbie's ex-boyfriend, and goes into a little spiel about how he still loves her, etc., etc.

Meanwhile the Klown invasion is in full force. They shoot ray guns at people to encase them in cotton candy cocoons, feed them to popcorn-monsters.  They attack a woman in the shower. She's not naked.

Lenny & Squiggy join the battle, using the clown statue on their ice cream truck to distract the Klowns.

They act like a gay couple, too.

Somehow Debbie is cocooned but still alive, so they rush to Klown headquarters to rescue her, Mike's hand on Dave's shoulder  Did those guys only just meet?

Dave sacrifices himself to save the day. The alien spaceship takes off, defeated.  Then Dave appears, unharmed, in a clown car shuttlecraft.   Debbie rushes up to hug him.  Then Mike rushes up, and all three hug.

Fade out to pies in the face.

I count three gay-subtext couples and no heterosexual hijinks except for a brief kiss.  Not even any female nudity.

Producers/writers/directors Charles and Stephen Chiodo, along with a third brother, Edward, are well known animators, graphic artists, make up artists, and puppeteers, with projects as  I Go Pogo, Critters, The Lost Boys, Land of the Lost, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and The American Music Awards. This is their only full-length movie: apparently they created some scary clowns and wrote a script to go with them.  Gay subtexts were probably unintentional.

On the other hand, I was unable to find any reference to Charles Chiodo having a wife.  Maybe he's gay.

"Don't Feed the Humans": "Big Brother" with Anal Probes

Don't Feed the Humans, on Mondo Media and Youtube, is a 5-minute long webseries created by Jeff Shorkey.  It is set in an alien zoo, where a disparate group of abductees is forced to live together in a "human habitat."  Sort of like Big Brother with anal probes:

Jack, the central character, the voice of reason.

From left to right:
A Roman gladiator
Jack
A 1950s housewife
A professor of gender studies
A 1920s silent movie star
A redneck
The Girl

Episodes involve zookeeper Horf's misunderstandings of human culture and his attempts to increase patronage with tie-in merchandising, "human mating day," and so on.  There are also escape attempts, flashbacks to life before abduction, and some hetero-romantic entanglements.

The animation is cut-out, like South Park, with few changes of position or perspective, but the characters are pleasant, with a surprising amount of depth for animated paper dolls.

Almost everyone has past or present heterosexual interests, but the professor of gender studies is a lesbian, and there is extensive male bonding, even an occasional hint of homoerotic activity.  For instance, when Horf invites the aliens to his house for dinner, the redneck bonds with his teenage son, and the two go off to the bedroom together, ostensibly to get high.

Plus we get to see a lot of Jack.

Definitely worth an hour-long youtube binge.

"Rim of the World": Missed Opportunity for Gayness

The first third of Rim of the World (2019) is a comedy about sardonic counselors at an elite summer camp:  the two black guys who discuss white privilege, the guitar-playing lesbian, the stoner, the one with a chest.

Then we shift focus to three mismatched kids, who for some reason are left behind during a camping trip:

1. Alex (Jack Gore), a socially awkward video game addict with a smothering helicopter mother.

2. ZhengZheng (Miya Cech) from China, who conned her way into the camp for reasons that are never explained, and who doesn't speak. Until she does.  Her reasons for pretending to be mute are never explained, either.

3. The bling-wearing, girl-crazy, ultra-rich Dariush (Benjamin Flores Jr.), who lives in a mansion with his ultra-rich father and his trophy wife.  With all that excess, one expects Dad to be a famous actor or musician, but actually he owns a car dealership.  Several statements make it clear that Dariush is scripted as Persian, but the actor is black.

Suddenly there are explosions in the air, a "mandatory evacuation" text appears on their cell phones, and this becomes an alien invasion movie.  They return to camp to find it deserted.  And a fourth kid appears:

4. The mysterious Gabriel (Alessio Scalzotto), who won't say where he came from and doesn't know some of the basics of modern society, like how to read numbers.  I thought he was either an alien in disguise or the actual angel Gabriel, but his secret is much, much more banal.

Aliens attack the deserted camp.  One of them has a dog, which results in a Jurassic Park raptor-in-the-kitchen scene.

Another extrudes a long tube from its head into Dariush's mouth and deposits something.  We expect that Dariush will develop super powers, or turn into a half-alien hybrid, or something, but nothing comes of it.

The kids find a key that can be used to destroy the alien mother ship, and have to cross 40 miles of deserted, destroyed Los Angeles to the Pasadena Space Center to use it (that's right, the entire greater L.A. area was evacuated in a few hours).

On the way, with no prior warning, Alex and ZhengZheng fall in love.  They hold hands; they spend the night cuddling; they kiss to lush triumphant music.  The closing montage that shows the kids being lauded for saving the world includes a prom picture.

Equally without warning, the sparring Gabriel and Dariush fall in love.  They hug; they almost hold hands; they spend the night spooning.  But just as we think that they're going to become a canonical gay couple, they break away, and spend the closing montage on opposite sides of Alex and ZhengZheng.

So are they a couple or not?

The spooning scene is worth the price of admission, but they could have been much more open.

Just another one of the missed opportunities in this movie.

Beefcake:  The counselor with the chest appears for about a second.

My grade: D

"Roswell, New Mexico": At Least the Gay Guys Kiss

The poster of the new tv series Roswell, New Mexico shows a man and a woman in a heterosexual embrace, and the promo shows four hetero lip-locks!

I'd be noping out of the room, but I heard that there was a gay male relationship, as rare as hen's teeth on tv, so I stuck it out, watching one episode and fast-forwarding through the rest, looking for gay romance.

The story involves three alien children who survived the spaceship crash at Roswell in 1947, were in stasis pods until 1997, and then emerged in the shape of human 7-year olds.  They had various traumatic experiences in high school (2004-2008), revealed in flashback:

1. Max (Nathan Parsons) killed a man who was attacking his sister.  The trio buried the body, and kept the awful secret.

2. Isobel (Lily Cowles) started a romance with Rosa, then for no apparent reason killed her and two other girls.  The trio made it it look like a car accident.

3. Michael (Michael Vlamis) started a romance with Alex (Tyler Blackburn), but Alex's homophobic father Jesse caught them together and attacked.  Jesse was not only homophobic but alienophobic, involved with a top-secret government alien-hunting project.

After high school the trio apparently just sat around for 10 years, waiting for the plot to start up again.

It starts when their high school classmate Liz Ortega (Jeanine Mason), a failed biochemist and Rosa's sister, returns to town.  She learns the truth about the aliens, and starts sniffing around about Rosa's death.

She starts dating Kyle (Michael Trevino), her high school boyfriend, who is investigating aliens on his own.

At that moment, Wyatt (Dylan McTee), whose sister died in the "crash" with Rosa, decides to start killing people, either in revenge or to keep them quiet about a secret of his own.

Oh, you're wondering about the three aliens:

1. Max, now the town deputy sheriff, starts dating his coworker Jenna.

2. Isobel is now "happily married" to Noah (Karam Oberoi), who unbeknownst to her, is also a survivor of the spaceship crash.  He lived for many years in Isobel's body (why she was dating Rosa -- it was all entirely heterosexual!).  Then he took over a male body (top photo).  Nice choice!

3. Michael, now a drifter, reunites with Alex, who discovers the truth and breaks up with him for his own protection.  Not dissuaded, Michael starts a relationship with Maria.  Then Alex returns and wants to be "friends."

Gulp.

 Well, maybe they will end up together in the next season.  If there is one.  The reviewers are panning the series for being derivative, convoluted, and silly, and for skimming over the interesting parallels:
Homophobia and alienophobia.
The government tracking down both spaceship aliens and undocumented aliens.

Beefcake: Not a lot.  Occasionally a guy will rip his shirt off.

Heterosexism:  Between two and four scenes of men and women kissing or having sex with each other per episode.  But at least Michael and Alex get a scene together in most episodes, too.

"Now Apocalypse": Beefcake, Gay Romance, and Reptilians at the End of the World

Well, the first episode was free on Amazon Prime.

Now Apocalypse (2019) begins with a slacker named Ulysses or Uly (former Disney teen Avon Jongia channeling Johnny Depp) wandering through a bleak urban wasteland done up in surreal colors.  A man approaches him!  Dark, sinister music plays.  Is this an assault?  Nope --  in the next scene, Ulysses is hooking up with him -- a glimpse of the trick's muscular naked body.

Any tv series that begins with a hookup and a brief glimpse of anal sex is fine in my book.

But then Ulysses goes home to his grim Brutopian apartment to find his roommate Ford (former Disney teen Beau Mirchoff, right) having sex with his girlfriend.  She bounces up and down on him, facing the camera so we see everything she has.  An entire conversation ensues.  No fair! Uly gets five seconds, the girl three minutes.

Uly informs us that Ford is a Kinsey 0, totally straight, but that doesn't stop him from fantasizing about his hunky roommie.  Uly himself is a Kinsey 4, bisexual tending toward gay.  But hookups make him feel "gross and pagan" afterwards, so he's looking for love at the end of the world.

It turns out that this bleak urban landscape is the Los Angeles that lies beneath the sunshine and palm trees, and everyone is looking to get into show biz somehow.

Ford, an aspiring screenwriter, is approached by a producer with the odd name Barnabas (Kevin Daniels).

Their other friend, Carly, an aspiring actress, also runs an online BDSM service, where she forces a clients to read lines with her.  She's dating a guy with the odd name Jethro (Desmond Chiam, left).

Now I'm looking through the cast list for other names from 1960s and 1970s pop culture.  I find Leif (Garrett), Magenta from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Daphne and Velma from Scooby Doo, and Cat Woman.

Back to Ulysses, wandering around the bleak urban wasteland, looking for love.   He meets Gabriel (former Teen Wolf teen Tyler Posey, tatted up also channeling Johnny Depp.  At first I thought Ulysses was hooking up with himself).  They hit it off, proclaiming that "not to be all stalky psycho," but it seems that fate brought them together.

On the way home, Ulysses is smoking a giant doobie, when he falls off his bicycle.  The next scene may be a dream or a vision: he sees a homeless man being raped by a reptilian humanoid.

Oh, no, this isn't going to be another Naked Lunch, is it?  Where disgusting reptilians are infiltrating the world, but maybe it's just a despondent end-of-the-world nightmare.

Then I saw that Gregg Araki wrote this.  He specializes in grim, bleak, nihilistic dramas about lost souls in urban wastelands.  It's not that they're despondent over the approaching end of the world.  It's that the end of the world has already happened, and there's nothing for them to do but get high and have sex and be really sad all the time.    The titles tell you everything: The Long Weekend o'Despair, Totally F*** Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere, This is How the World Ends, Kaboom...

There are always gay characters, in that postmodern, post-gay, pansexual, "if it's alive I'll screw it; if it's dead, I'll think about it" way.  But the potential for beefcake and gay romance is not worth the Gregg Araki weirdness.

I won't be buying the full season on Starz.