Watching Latin Boys Go To Hell is just like watching soap. It is difficult to decide whether the actors are very bad, or instead very skilled ones who succeed in imitating the amateurish acting style of the average soap. Moreover, the film is inspired by the Spanish-language telenovela format, which, with all its melodrama and hysteria, is surely the soapiest soap genre of them all. Latin Boys Go To Hell revels in soap’s guilty pleasures and celebrates soap’s artificiality by suggesting that the overly exaggerated reenactment of love and revenge, so typical of soap, actually comes closer to a real experience of life than other forms of art.

Set in Brooklyn, Latin Boys Go To Hell presents the lives of two young gay Latin guys who both are addicted to the Spanish-language telenovela “Dos Vidas” (Two Lives). The main plot of “Dos Vidas” centers on a dangerous love triangle: Rodrigo, the macho boyfriend of Sombra (Shadow) cheats on her by sleeping with her twin sister Luz (Light), eventually resulting in a bloody revenge. Like the two soap sisters, the two Latin gay guys are identical in their sexuality, but differ from each other like day and night. The cute but shy Justin (Irwin Ossa) doesn’t dare to admit that he is gay (his bedroom wall is covered with posters of Pamela Anderson and other big-boobed pin-ups, though a male pin-up hangs above his bed), while the flamboyant, out-and-proud Braulio (Alexis Artiles) refuses to listen to his faghag Andrea (Jenifer Lee Simard) warning him that his hot boyfriend Carlos (Mike Ruiz) means trouble. And just like art imitates life, in Latin Boys Go To Hell, life imitates soap.

The two lives of Justin and Braulio come together when Justin’s cousin Angel (John Bryant Davila) hooks up with Andrea, and Braulio’s boyfriend Carlos makes a move on Justin. Angel has just moved in with Justin’s family, sharing his bedroom, and Justin just seems unable to make up his mind whether to lust after Angel or to envy him. But when Carlos fucks Justin from behind, images of Angel pop up in his mind. Bordering on pornography (but never becoming explicit), the fuck scene is a rapid montage sequence, intercutting between close-ups of Carlos mechanically pounding away and close-ups of Justin losing himself in the pleasure, reaching a climax. It becomes apparent that Angel is Justin’s true love, while Carlos, who insists on having unsafe sex, is just a mean fuck machine. Subsequently, in a later scene, Carlos gets shot by a disguised killer and is found in his bedroom with his cut-off penis stuffed in his mouth, just as bloody as the revenge in “Dos Vidas”.

The strength of Latin Boys Go To Hell is that it never becomes screamingly camp, but rather stays adroitly within the just-this-side-of-the-hysterical borderlines set by telenovela it imitates. The film is filled with cheap but fitting symbolism connected to both Latin Catholic pop culture (close-ups of a crying statue of the Virgin Mary) and horror cinema (close-ups of scary clown dolls, similar to those in Stephen King’s It). At the same time, however, the film presents realistic scenes that suggest depth and true emotions. Throughout the movie, we see Justin and Angel return to the kitchen, where Justin’s Spanish-speaking mother makes them breakfast. Justin’s mother continuously favors Angel over her own son, and, although homosexuality is never presented as a problematic issue, one cannot help to recognize that Justin fails to live up to his mother’s image of the ideal son.

Latin Boys Go To Hell also comments on the reduction of Latin men to objects of exotic and sexual desire. Both Carlos and Angel pose for the white female photographer Monica (Annie Lobst) – with Justin as her assistant – who photographs the Latino men nude with corncobs, skull-heads, and roses replacing their penises. It is during the opening of her “Latin Boys Go To Hell” photo exhibition, held in the honor of the brutally murdered model Carlos, when the film comes to a melodramatic climax. Ironically but tellingly, just as much as the film comments on this sexual exploitation of Latino men, the semi-pornographic and extremely erotic images also make Latin Boys Go To Hell such a pleasure to look at; it is no coincidence that one of the photographs taken of Carlos is used as the film’s poster. There is a thin line between pornography and soap, the film suggests, as both are exploitive guilty pleasures.

Like in a real soap, the final climax is predictable, but this doesn’t matter. Latin Boys Go To Hell thrives on its soapish clichés. The film has been negatively, though unfairly, compared to the work of the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. Undoubtedly Almodovar would have made more professional and thus perhaps a richer film, but the comparison is a false one, and is apparently only based on the notion that every queer Latin movie inspired by pop culture must be a poor Almodovar imitation. In fact, the extremely effective amateurism of Latin Boys Go To Hell is much more reminiscent of queer cinema like Bruce LaBruce’s early films and David DeCoteau’s Leather Jacket Love Story. Rather than being reduced to an Almodovar wanna-be, Latin Boys Go To Hell should be perceived as a successful imitation of the Spanish-language telenovela, one with a significant and convincing queer edge.

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