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By David N. Butterworth Begetting awards at comedy, gay, and lesbian film fests and prompting walkouts with equal aplomb, the subversive Brit comedy 9 Dead Gay Guys is neither for the politically correct nor the sexually squeamish. (Oddly enough I was the only person guffawing loudly in an appropriately gay section of the city so maybe the joke was on me, although being British certainly helps one’s understanding of some of the “finer” humor.) This raw and raucous import features a couple of unemployed Irish dossers, Byron (Brendan Mackey) and Kenny (Glenn Mulhern), who head to London and quickly learn its streets are paved with, er… “shite.” To hold him over till “Giro week,” Kenny has learned there’s “legitimate and lucrative” money to be made servicing old gay guys down The Elephants Graveyard (playwright Steven Berkoff flamboyantly plays Kenny’s john du jour and “detox week” quickly becomes “Jeff week”). Until Jeff dies on the job, that is. What’s so entertaining about Lab Ky Mo’s film is its brazen singlemindedness, its charming stupidity, and its roster of outlandish characters. We’re introduced to a Hasidic Jew named Golders Green (who lives in Golders Green but nobody knows where), a minicab driver called Dick-Cheese Deepak, and a desperate dwarf known as The Desperate Dwarf. And when The Queen (Michael Praed) also dies, our two self-identified straight boys start their search for a stash of bed-ridden cash. Filled with a bazillion references to bottoms, BJs, and bovine manipulators (the cattle prod being a popular favorite), director Mo’s deliberately repetitive, singsong script is poetry in motion, even going as far as to poke fun at itself when one of the West African brothers espouses the misuse of the ethnic stereotype. For 9 Dead Gay Guys spares nobody, poking fun at people of every race, religion, and sexual persuasion alike. |
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