Another Gay Movie (2006)

Image credit: Another Gay Movie: Christopher Stephens

'GAY' ROMP From Hatch on, no one is playing it straight in this teen comedy

It's got four horny high school seniors who make a pact to lose their virginity. It's got a video-voyeur scene and a quiche masturbation scene (don't ask). It's got gerbil jokes, S&M jokes, a take-what-little-is-left-of-my-dignity cameo by Richard Hatch, and enough sploshing bodily fluids to gross out the most jaded teen-comedy enthusiast. What Another Gay Movie doesn't have is a message, and that, it turns out, is a good thing. I mean, really, when was the last time you saw a gay movie that was liberated from all socially redeeming value? With its punky-pink tinsel-and-Colorforms decor, its stylized acting that turns teen stereotypes into camp and then back again, Another Gay Movie is American Pie restaged as a debauched queer in-joke.

The movie isn't a parody, exactly. It's clear that the director, Todd Stephens (Edge of Seventeen), grew up watching mainstream teen flicks, and that he identified with them, too. He stages Another Gay Movie in a style of low-budget fluorescent overkill, but a handful of the gags are low-down funny, and I got caught up in the freshness of Stephens' transmutation of trashy straight youth culture into trashy gay youth culture. His heroes, like the sprightly geek Griff (Mitch Morris) and the Liza-eyed, cockatoo-haired club-kid mama's boy Nico (Jonah Blechman), have no angst about being gay, but they vent their insecurity by coming on as sexual ''tops''; they have to — how can I say this? — embrace their inner bottom. Maybe that is a message, but a nicely unredeeming one.