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What Goes Around
Rating: 3 Stars
Directed by Steven Brewer. Edited by Tarren Barnes and Darrel Eve. Music by 247 Lock-In and others. Starring Dean Monroe, Daniel Leger, Spike, Grant Pearce, Aaron Slater, Christopher James, Ryan Williams, Chip, Sebastian O'Neill, Benjamin Web, David Johnson, and Josh Thomas.
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This isn't the first gay porn scenario modeled on Reigen, Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler's ten-scene pinwheel of interconnected lovers. J. Brian used the same premise 35 years ago in First Time Round; other versions followed. Made in England in 2004, What Goes Around sometimes cushions its erotic kick with film-school artiness, but it's entertaining, occasionally hot, surprisingly fresh, and easy to take at 152 minutes.

In Reigen, an 1896 classic better known in the US as La Ronde, what goes around is venereal disease; in What Goes Around, nothing spreads but benign, freewheeling horniness. In the opening vignette, itinerant businessman Dean Monroe, the best-known member of the cast (in Chi Chi LaRue's Heaven to Hell, he was Satan), receives rent boy Daniel Leger in his hotel room. After fleeting hesitation ("I've got a boyfriend," Monroe confesses), the pair has sex, with Leger topping his client.

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Leger then goes off to an evening bartending job, where, after hours, he fools around with a customer, sweetly punked-out Spike, who moves on to a disco where, in the men's room, he meets closeted novice Grant Pearce, who returns to his waiting girlfriend, who doesn't notice Pearce being cruised by Aaron Slater... and so on, as link follows link. In the ninth and penultimate segment, dewy sprite Sebastian O'Neill cavorts at a sauna with Benjamin Web, who-- after slurping up a mouthful of O'Neill's semen-- returns to a boyfriend who, not surprisingly, is Dean Monroe.

Some cast members can't read lines intelligibly; most approach the sex with unabashed zest. Standouts include Web, the supple, spirited host from Steven Brewer's Ultimate Boy Party; British-born sometime Falcon star Monroe, looking fit and relaxed on his home turf; and angelically whory Ryan Williams, whose twinkly lewd stare merits further study.