Bore-fest

LLGFF Report: House of Boys.

Summary: a bore-fest of unutterable tedium. I was embarrassed for them all.

A Luxembourgeois film (which should have tipped me the wink), this tedious Euro-pudding strives to be A Great AIDS Film. Instead it finds itself vying for the title of "Worst Film Seen at the LLGFF", a title for which there is normally stiff competition.

It supposedly tells the story of a hot teenager who leaves home to become a go-go boy in 1980s Amsterdam, where he rooms in a bar/brothel with a (gay for pay) straight American go-go boy with whom, of course, he falls in love. And who turns gay, too, so there can be a happy ending.

Except that this is An AIDS Film so there can only be a tragic ending, enabling us to have lots of scenes which are basically stolen from Longtime Companion (a vastly better film if equally didactic), with lines spoken by actors who are not a patch on the originals. In the final kiss of death, Stephen Fry appears as himself a lovely, humane doctor.

More to the point: the Cock Count was zero. Yes, in a film set in a brothel, they managed to avoid showing us a single winkie. For fuck's sake, we needed the distraction so badly.