MQFF Day Two

I'm having a lazy festival this year, which I'm rather enjoying, aided by the fact that I've already watched preview discs of several of the films. My over-committed lifestyle has also ben a factor, but truth be known, I'm rather enjoying the relaxed course I've set so far.

The first film I saw today was one I was quite looking forward to: Eleven Men Out (aka Strákarnir Okkar), which combined several of my interests simultaneously: manlove, football and Iceland. The President of Queer Sports Alliance Melbourne introduced the session with an interminable speech about a worthy cause (a fund-raising program for the Melbourne 2008 Asia Pacific Outgames - because after all, sport is the new black in the queer community don't you know?) after which, finally, the movie got underway.

Opening with the hard-to-swallow premise of having Iceland's top football player, Ottar Thor (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) coming out in a fit of pique during a magazine interview - because his ego demanded that he grace the cover at all costs - the film failed to improve from there on in.

Plots and subplots struggled to find a workable balance: Ottar's relationship with his alcholic ex-wife and moody teenage son dominated, but lacked substance, while another plot thread involving the self-absorbed Ottar's relationship with his family (including his misogynistic arsehole of a brother, and a homophobic father who coaches Ottar's A-league team, but who kicks him off it once he comes out) lacked anything resembling resolution.

A third plot focussed on Ottar joining an amateur football team, soon known as Reykjavik Pride, once most of its straight members quit and are replaced by gay men. He swiftly develops a relationship with a fellow player, but a lack of sexual tension between the actors meant their scenes together felt stilted, while the story arc of their falling in and out of 'I really care about you' was fatally under-developed.

Eleven Men Out film suffers enormously from its uneven tone, as if director Robert I. Douglas was unsure if he was helming a comedy, a serious drama, a classic struggling-team-makes-good sports flick, or something else entirely. The drama was stilted, and key scenes were clumsily established and executed, or altogether absent.

While the central characters of Ottar, his former beauty queen wife and their son Maggi are relatively well developed, other character, especially the remaining 10 members of Reykjavik Pride, are not only criminally undeveloped, they're also boringly stereotypical.

I actually know a gay football player, as well as numerous other queer amateur athletes, and they're far from all being drag queens and fairies (a flaw also seen in another, albeit stronger gay football rom-com, the German film Männer wie wir, or Men and Balls as it's known internationally; released locally on DVD simply as Balls).

Cliched, predictable, borderline misogynistic and almost completely lacking the drama and unpredictablity of sport (as well almost any actual sporting scenes) this was a deeply underwhelming and disappointing film, and not at all recommended.

Thereafter, instead of plunging into another session straight away, I lingered in the festival club over wine, conversation and dinner, returning to the cinema for the faux-horror film Dead Boyz Don't Scream at 10.30pm.

Unlike last year's excellent HellBent (a clever take on the slasher genre that managed to be both satire and suspense-inducing homage simultaneously), director Marc Saltarelli's flesh-filled trash-fest Dead Boyz Don't Scream refused to take either itself or its genre seriously, to its disadvantage. One shouldn't set out to make a horror movie so bad it's hilarious, but this appears to be exactly what Saltarelli has done.

A trio of vain, vaccuous, muscle-bound and straight models are packed off for an 'artistic' photoshoot by their manager after a drunken party they're attending goes horribly wrong. Hoping that their distance from the city will assist in hushing up details of the rape and consequent death they were asociated with, the boys go along for the ride. Once up in the hills, accompanied by a photographer and her gay assistant, their manager and her lesbian lover (a park ranger), the photographer's personal assistant and rival models 'the Poodles' - self-obsessed and incestuous Nordic brothers - clothes are ditched and the photoshoot begins: followed by a series of gruesome murders (cue dramatic chords).

Any attempts to generate real chills or thrills were swiftly undone by the film's self-conciously camp approach to narrative and genre. Stilted acting, bad special effects, laboured dialogue and 'dead' characters who visibly blink would have made this film hilariously bad viewing if they'd been unintentional. Instead, its laboured attempt at deliberate schlock provoked derisive laughter, but little more.