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Nine Dead Gay Guys
written and directed by Ky Mo Lab
Glen Mulhern, Brendan Mackey, Michale Praed, Simon Godley, Raymond Griffiths, Deban Aderemi, Rickardo Beckles-Burrows, John Michaels, Steven Woodhouse, Abdala Keserwani
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The banality of gay films is a common complaint among both critics and audiences. Sure, there are people who actually enjoy flicks the likes of It's In the Water or Defying Gravity. But as even average queer moviegoers would aver, such films suffer an amplitude of blandness. They are "feel-good," and lack edge and bite. Satire and irony, central to gay wit and sensibility for centuries, is currently AWOL from our movie screens.

In many ways Nine Dead Gay Guys written and directed by Ky Mo Lab, is a bracingly fresh departure from this dire dearth of irony. This is a film that revels in taking chances, pushing the envelope, and taking its material to the very edge of good taste and commercial acceptability. The plot is simple: Kenny (Glen Mulhern ) has come from Dublin to see his friend Byron (Brendan Mackey), who has gone to London to find work. Unable to attain traditional gainful employment, Byron has become a male hustler and makes his money by blowing older men. (One of the charms of the film is that these hustlers actually service their clients-- a lovely Alice-in-Wonderland reversal of real life.) Kenny is a little hesitant to enter the life, but gives it a go. Meanwhile The Queen (Michael Praed) has been killed, and Kenny and Byron's lives become a whirlwind of intrigue. Various characters attempt to figure out where the money is hidden in the home of Golders Green (Simon Godley), an orthodox Jew who lives a gay, somewhat closeted, life. There is a great deal of plot here-- almost none of it essential-- that revolves around characters such as a dwarf (Raymond Griffiths) whose dick is just too small for the delectations of others, several West African brothers (Deban Aderemi, Rickardo Beckles-Burrows, John Michaels) whose dicks are highly sought-after, especially by Catholic Father Ted (Steven Woodhouse) and Cheese-Dick Deepak (Abdala Keserwani), a Pakistani cab driver whose bathing habits are wanting. Most of these people are murdered for one reason or another, hence the title.

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The plot, however, doesn't matter much at all, but Ky Mo Lab is interested in juggling absurdities and stereotypes to keep us amused and off-guard.

When this works, it is great. The film has more energy and spunk than most. And visually it has a free-for-all tone that resonates with early Richard Lester films like The Knack or even the brilliant Hard Days Night. Ky Mo Lab's inspiration here is less what we've come to see as the contemporary genre of "gay film" and much more the tradition of the dark comedies of Joe Orton, early 1960s British cinema, and even the looniness of British satire such as Beyond the Fringe and The Goon Show.

The energy in Nine Dead Gay Guys stems from its efforts to be offensive and when this works it is terrific. There is a no-holds-barred attitude here that is very refreshing and often perfectly on-target. But the problem is that when the film tries too hard to be offensive it feels manufactured, and becomes just silly. You can hear the film makers thinking "rich Jew-- that's offensive; lets go with that," "Africans with big dicks great, that'll offend people," etc. And while some of this works, too much of it doesn't. The problem is that just offering up stereotypes may be shocking, but it's schoolboy stuff. When Nine Dead Gay Guys works it is because the stereotypes are in service of a wacky, frenzied vision of the world that is both out of control and makes perfect sense. It's like the conceit of hot, young straight hustlers sucking off older gay men-- this is not how the world works, but as comic revisionism, it's a treat. It's funny, that is, because it highlights how the world does not work. This is the basic conceit beneath Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloan or What the Butler Saw an all out attack on propriety and convention. The problem is that Orton was unrelentingly savage in his attacks and went for the jugular, and Ky Mo Lab just seems to want to have a good time and tease us.

There's nothing wrong with this, but it takes the potential guts out of Nine Dead Gay Guys, so that while we laugh and gasp a lot, there's nothing here that outrages; there's no substantive, deeply-felt vision of what's wrong with the world, and so nothing to offer in its place. As a new twist in gay movies, Nine Dead Gay Guys is great. Unfortunately it doesn't live up it is own vision.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com