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Catalinaville
Rating: 3 Stars
Photographed, written and directed by John Travis. Edited by Dan Pack, Sam Deliloh, Mark Steel, and Josh Eliot. Music by Sonic Seduction. Starring Jeff Stryker, John Davenport, Michael Gere, Brian Estevez, Jeff Converse, Tony Marino, Gary Owen, Danny Russo, Tom Mitchell, Tony Bravo.
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So much effort went into this ambitious, much-hyped Catalina production, shot in at least four cities over a five-month period, that you want it to be better than it is. Catalinaville aspires to be the North by Northwest of gay porn (with a plot trajectory that sends its protagonist east by northeast), but Josh Eliot's contrived scenario is full of distracting lunacies and holes. The MacGuffin is a computer diskette containing "a blueprint for manufacturing some sort of wireless fax technology." Despite a liberal sprinkling of high-tech gobbledygook, the script's computer literacy is scant.

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Steve Rambo, one of the most drop-dead gorgeous hunks now working in gay adult video, heads a cast of 23. While Rambo is intensely likable, his acting skills are small, and he speaks like the late Liberace. As action heroes go, he's just a big pussycat. Fortunately, sex brings out his inner tiger, and his couplings with Brad King, Ray Harley, and especially Cole Tucker, as a goon who wants to kill him, certainly have their moments.

The plot propels Rambo from the shores of Catalina to the sewers of Chicago. Along the way there are seven sex scenes, some of them disappointingly routine and tackily embellished with repeat cum shots. A digressive foursome among Harley's computer students isn't shaped or paced well enough to live up to its potential; poolside carryings-on at a sinister rich sleaze's Arizona compound are so compartmentalized that it seems unlikely that all the participants were ever together at the same location. In the hottest and best-crafted sequence, Rambo takes refuge at the Mr. International Leather pageant, where helpful leather folk come to his aid by orchestrating a backstage orgy that engulfs one of his pursuers.

Eventually someone will assemble a gay porn video that feels like a mainstream feature film infused with sex. This isn't it, but it's an honorable try.