The Greatest Movie...

... in which Saddam and Osama rape and murder George Bush?
(Am I going to get tagged by the Feds for typing that sentence?)

Skull & Bones

I'd been wanting to see director T.S. Slaughter's gay horror flick ever since QTA reviewed it last year, and finally got the chance this week. Ah sweet antidote to my Fosse-leaning as-of-late ways! S&B is a huge load to the face of ass-raping fun! (Man I wish that could go on the DVD cover...).

Somewhat stifled by a a low-as-low-can-go budget and some amateurish acting, the film still manages to deeply offend by... well, going there. Going where nobody else is going. And I gotta give Slaughter props for that. And behind the offensiveness there are some messages to be had, even if they do get a bit scattered as the film goes on. Like Lucky McKee's May, it takes on the fetishization of the abnormal and how that can lead us into places we never thought we'd go - where May gave us a group of characters who thought May was so "cool" for being different that they didn't see they were feeding her manias, here we have two leads that fetishize the cult of serial killer-dom - they get awfully excited by those serial killer playing cards - and think it'd be cool to get back at the elitist frat boys that've been making them feel like shit. And they slowly slide off the deep end...


... as it were. The film doesn't just push buttons, it leaps up and down maniacally on them like a deranged orangutan, which is the best thing it has going for it. And it's not empty button-pushing like the Saw films, which are just about showing us the sickest things they can think up. There's a real subject to be tackled here, one I understand only too well, and have wished for a film to take on for quite some time - there is an mostly unspoken-of-these-days anger at being marginalized within us homosexuals. Anger doesn't make friends though, so we don't see it given a voice very often. Skull & Bones ultimately tries to say too many things, and with wildly varying tones, but I love the fact that the film exists and doesn't just bring the subject up - it slaps you in the face with it.


Now somebody just needs to give T.S. Slaughter a shitload more money so he can tackle this stuff properly. I'd take a sequel to this film a thousand times over another bittersweet coming-of-age coming-out drama that's really a barely disguised wistful bout of pedophilia that passes for so much of "gay cinema" these days. Harvard here we come!
.