Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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Let the Knife Sink In

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One of this year's strangest and most exciting movies, the super gay giallo Knife + Heart, is gearing up for its March 15th release in NYC (and a week later in LA) with a just released poster and trailer, seen here. Here is my review of the film from the Brooklyn Horror Fest, in which I said:

"This is what it feels like looking from the inside out at our stories. No need to scour the edges of an Argento flick for a little queerish something - it's our time to shine, sweat and semen and blood on the dance-floor."

When I sat down to see it I was worried that a movie so entirely in my wheelhouse would disappoint but it did not. It's sexy and ridiculous and gorgeous and scary and strange and truly genuinely about something on top of all of that. Don't be surprised to see this movie factor in on my Best of 2019 list when the time comes - you should certainly be seeking it out.
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Good Morning, World

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Well since we just wished Looking a Happy 5 yesterday it only seemed right to check out Tovey's Insta and whaddya know, there this was. Russell Tovey is always on it.

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Great Moments In Movie Staches

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So in 2014 Raoul Bova co-starred in an Italian rom-com called Scusate se esisto!, which basically translates to "Excuse me for existing!" but which got liberally translated to Do You See Me? for its international release.  I'm basing that suggestion of an "international release" strictly on the fact that it has an English title on IMDb, because I feel like if I'd known in 2014 that there was a movie...

 ... where Raoul Bova did a mustachioed homosexual strip-tease I maybe probably would have mentioned that fact here on the site in 2014... much less some time before, checks watch, two-thousand-and-fucking-nineteen. Good goddamned grief where have I been?

Well we're here now, I suppose that's something. Hit the jump 
for lots more gifs plus the video of this scene...

Happy Belated 5 To Looking

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This past Saturday marked five years since HBO's show Looking premiered - starring Jonathan Groff and Frankie J. Alvarez and Murray Bartlett as three San Francisco based friends slash homosexuals who fucked and flirted across two seasons and a movie, Looking was a lightning rod for criticism from all angles (including my own) and I miss it all the damn time, you guys. How about you? I'm one of like ten people who preferred its first season to its second but I wish we could've gotten a third, fourth, fifth season all the same. What are your thoughts on Looking five years out? (PS the entire thing is streaming on HBO Now, by the way.)

Name Your Favourite

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The above photo is nice and all (see more here) but it's so darn respectable - I really want more photoshoots of the three ladies o' The Favourite glamming it up;  I want something really sexy and provocative, like the movie. Okay there's an awful lot of gout in the movie that somewhat dulls the sexiness, but you know what I mean. You've got three gorgeous and talented-from-space ladies here - give us some images to remember, photographers! Have some fun! On that note this week's "Beauty vs Beast" at The Film Experience is tackling at least two of these performances - click on over to make like Queen Anne and choose your number one lady in waiting.

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Which is Hotter?

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I cannot fathom how it's taken twenty full days for me to direct y'all to the greatest thing happening on the entirety of the internet in 2019 -- my pal Sean T. Collins, noted writer for the New York Times and Rolling Stone and such and so on, is marathon-posting about the 1989 goddamn classic of a film Road House every single day this year, and it's gold, my friends. GOLD. Click on over to Sean's site to find as of this minute 20 fine essays, as of tomorrow 21, and so on and so on. I don't know what I did good in this life to deserve such treasures, but I got 'em coming. 

Anyway inspired by Sean's a couple of posts I got to thinking about the two hot guys whose name ain't Dalton in this humdinger of a whiskey-soaked cornball opus - there's the sleazy sex-n-skim bartender Steve (played by Gary Hudson) seen humping in the back-room directly above (and previously covered by us right here) and then there's the Real Bad Dude Jimmy (played by Marshall R. Teague) who gets one of the best lines in a movie full of 'em...

In a movie so gay it makes me feel butch these two horned-up mullet freaks were part of what kept me coming back  (and coming) to Road House time and time again as a closeted teenager, and they're still doing it for me here a full forty years later. (PS make sure you put May 19th in your calendar since that's its big anniversary!) So now I must ask -- even though Dalton dispensed the wisdom that nobody wins a fight -- ask y'all...

bike trail guide

Quote of the Day

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"People feel sorry for me, but they shouldn’t. I really believe I got the best kiss in that movie, hands down... We were both very broken-hearted when we made that movie. He had just been dumped, I had just been dumped. I remember the day we had to film, we were both slumping to the scene. He was like, ‘Laura, my heart is broken,’ I was like, ‘So is mine.’ I turned to him and said, ‘Well, all day long we get to make each other feel better.’"

I don't know who these people are that're feeling "sorry" for Laura Linney -- I guess because her character has to bail mid-way through Love Actually's make-out session with Brazilian dream-boat Rodrigo Santoro -- but I'm glad she sets them straight (watch the video here) because clearly Laura Linney has lived enough life for all of us and her lips should be torn from her body and gilded and put on display in a museum. Okay that's a bit much, but you get my point. 

A Goldmine of Velvet

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It's only eleven days until we gets to see Velvet Buzzsaw, the satiric art-world horror flick reuniting the team behind Nightcrawler, aka Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo and writer-director Dan Gilroy, and they're really kicking up the PR blitz now - after the other week's trailer (watch it here), not to mention last week's whispers that Jake is going gay again, we've now got that poster above (thx Mac), and Netflix has also finally added the film's page to their website so you can actually add it to your list now, huzzah! Once Midnight February 1st rolls around you wouldn't want to have to wait the time it would take to click, would you? Now you can spare yourself all that. 

The new web-page also gives us these two new promo images of Jake and Rene and Zawe Ashton on the right there in character; Ashton was featured in a previous promo photo for the film (see it here) and when I posted that it reminded me that I hadn't watched Wanderlust yet since Ashton co-stars in that Netflix series alongside Buzzsaw's not-pictured-here co-star one Toni Collette, and also Wanderlust was created by playwright Nick Payne, who's written most of the plays that Jake has done on Broadway. God, that's a convoluted web of connections. Anyway I bring all that up because I watched all of Wanderlust this weekend, and it's really fucking great, and you should watch it. Right, Rene?

Rene says right.

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Jail Bait (1954)

Dr. Gregor: This afternoon we had a long
telephone conversation earlier in the day.

With dialogue like that you know you're in an Ed Wood film and sure enough, this is one! Jail Bait was Wood's second picture after the infamous Glen or Glenda, and right before Bride of the Monster - somebody's who's seen Tim Burton's 1994 bio-pic Ed Wood recently will have to remind me if Jail Bait gets any mention in that movie - I haven't watched Ed Wood in far too long but don't recall Jail Bait being mentioned and the film's Wikipedia summation skips right over it too. So why do I bring up Jail Bait today?

Because Jail Bait was the first movie that future Hercules Steve Reeves ever acted in, and it's Steve Reeves' birthday today, that's why! Reeves would be turning 93 if he was still around. I found an interview with the actor from 1994 (right before Ed Wood came out) and this movie came up; here's what Steve had to say:

"The picture was originally called The Hidden Face. It's about a criminal who goes to a plastic surgeon who changes the criminal’s face to resemble his own. Somewhere in the film there was something about 'jail bait,' so they decided the title Jail Bait was more commercial. It was my first film, and I got my Screen Actors Guild card for it.... Wood was a very cooperative guy who let you do things the way you wanted to, and if they weren't quite right he would direct you. But he wasn't the kind of director who was always on you. The shoot lasted two or three weeks for me, off and on. I played a young detective, and I had a suit on at all times. I even had a tie. Only took my shirt off once. Those were the days, huh?"

"I even had a tie." Oh, Steve. You can watch all of Jail Bait right here if you, you know, feel up to it. It's not even an infamously bad Ed Wood movie like Plan 9 From Outer Space so it takes a real adventurer to brave those wilds but I'm sure I've got a few of those around here. Anyway we were just speaking of Steve Reeves a couple of weeks back...
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... on a big screen today was all the Xmas gift I need pic.twitter.com/SdOZ2dRmxO

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) December 27, 2018

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... when they screened The Giant of Marathon at FSLC for their Jacques Tourneur series, which was a ton of fun. Portions of it were filmed by Mario Bava and they're easy to tell because things go ultra-colorful and hyper-violent all of a sudden. It's a decent sword-n-sandal flick as far as those things go - I'm not the biggest fan of the genre but if you wanna see Steve Reeves in obscenely short skirts wrestling dudes you do what you gotta. (And all of The Giant of Marathon is on Amazon Prime, btw.) But I won't make you go through all that to see some Steve Reeves skin -- all you gotta do is hit the jump for the Total Steve Reeves Birthday Suit Experience...

Steven Yeun Four Times

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Don't Not Do What You Said

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I'm pretty sure if I went back through our archives that I could find quotes from Edgar Wright saying his next movie was going to be a straightforward horror movie since like around the same time he ended up making Scott Pilgrim instead. So basically this entire decade he's been saying this would happen. But he really really means it this time, according to Empire:

"Talking to Empire, Wright revealed his next project is a straight-up psychological horror-thriller – he cites Don’t Look Now and Roman Polanski's Repulsion as influences – set in London, and starring a female lead. “I realised I had never made a film about central London – specifically Soho, somewhere I’ve spent a huge amount of time in the last 25 years,” Wright tells Empire in the new issue, out 24 January. “With Hot Fuzz and Shaun Of The Dead you make movies about places you’ve lived in. This movie is about the London I’ve existed in.” The film will shoot this summer from a screenplay co-written by Krysty Wilson-Cairns."

Krysty Wilson-Cairns was a writer on the (beloved) show Penny Dreadful. Anyway I hope he's telling the truth! I've been reporting on this news every time he's said this news because I want this to actually happen. (Plus it'd be nice to wash the stink of Baby Driver off of everything.) Oh and it's funny that he cites Don't Look Now since his fake horror trailer for Grindhouse in 2007 was this genius...

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Five Frames From ?

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What movie is this?

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Good Morning, World

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View this post on Instagram

Wen u donet evin like cats

A post shared by Noah Reid (@olreid) on Jan 16, 2017 at 8:24am PST

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It is very cold and I would prefer to be snuggling with Patrick 

(and/or David) from Schitt's Creek this morning. Make it so!

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James McAvoy Feeds the Beast

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Given the weekend's stultifying forecast -- they keep throwing the world's worst phrase "wintry mix" around willy nilly -- I'm having a hard time deciding whether I'll head out to a movie theater to see Glass or not. It really is just the weather and not the shit-ass reviews dampening my devotion to seeing James McAvoy get his big-screen Beast back on (pic via) -- I was only going for James's Shirtless Rampages anyway and those be review-proof. But perhaps I'll go and perhaps I'll review it, we will see -- if any of you do venture thus please feel free to share your thoughts and prayers in the comments. And with that, bye until Monday!

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"I guess we're more the 'Art Fag' types."

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When I posted the trailer for Jake Gyllenhaal's upcoming art-thriller Velvet Buzzsaw here on the site a week back I didn't make mention of my homosexual suspicions towards his character... I took those suspicions straight to Twitter instead:

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Current Status: Trying to figure out if those legs under Jake are male or female, and trying to figure out what, if anything, Jake is wearing pic.twitter.com/xCY8UNZv7n

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) January 10, 2019

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Well now it looks like we might have confirmation that the legs, they be of fella origin. That is if Queerty is to be believed, as they've said as much in their run-down of 7 Queer Movies to see at Sundance:

"Writer/director Dan Gilroy of Nightcrawler (if you haven’t seen it, do it now) fame reteams with Jake Gyllenhaal in this new thriller which sees the actor return to playing a gay role. As an art critic, Gyllenhaal begins experiencing a series of murderous supernatural events surrounding the work of a dead artist. Oh, and he does have a sex scene but we are not sure whether or not the handsome star bottoms again."

Well if that shot from the trailer's any indication it would seem that Jake's moved up top this time around, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see when the flick hits Netflix in just exactly two weeks, on February 1st.
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Great Moments In Movie Shelves #175

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It should be noted that 99.9% of the rooms inside the luxe seaside Italian houses featured in the 1970 giallo The Forbidden Photos Of A Lady Above Suspicion are entirely shelf-free - these characters do not seem to have much of an interest in reading! - but it was either give this ridiculous moment of dramatic turtle revelation some love via the shelves glimpsed there in its background or give the movie some love via a "Great Moment in Movie Staches" post, and...

... ain't nobody here for calling that tragedy sitting astride the inspector's upper lip "great." Egads. Still I have been wanting to give The Forbidden Photos Of A Lady Above Suspicion a lot of love this week after watching it and falling in love, and not just so I could cut and paste its typically giallo-ian elongated title twenty times, but rather because this shit is a hoot and a blast, it's a bloot and a hast, and you should probably go find the blu-ray that Arrow Films just dropped on us, the unsuspecting public. It has everything...

Insane mod costumes, BDSM,

turtle action sequences, air-bound SCUBA interludes...

... excessive tranquilizer use, sheer curtains cordoning off 

one's telephone, hairy shoulders, a woman addicted to wigs...

I might go on and on...

... seriously I could go on and on, but it'd be better to let y'all discover the pleasure of this movie on your own. Unlike many of the lesser giallo The Forbidden Photos Of A Lady Above Suspicion isn't in the slightest a nonsensical slog - it's frothy fun, a soapy cocktail of Rosemary's Baby and Valley of the Dolls, all set to a cooing Ennio Morricone score. Go forth and watch, groovy babies!