My developmentally disabled cousin and I used to rent cheapie soft-porn videos and we'd watch them in hard-on silence like a pair of losers and so it's flabbergasting and appalling to see how today, twenty years later, such films are marketed to gay audiences as artistically rendered love stories perfect for headlining your city's next gay and lesbian film festival.
200 American, O Fantasma, and now Gefangen (Locked Up) all feature semi-naked cast on their posters and boast "tantalising" tag lines about hustlers, forbidden love, and sex. It's criminal to see such slop being shovelled towards a gay market as something they simply have to see and it's embarrassing to see gay consumers take the bait. This film is a bestseller at TLA Video, as are its deplorable peers. Hetero audiences know the difference between soft-porn films and arty films that happen to feature nudity or sex - retrograde gay culture needs to play catch up (as usual) in this regard.
In the style of Un Chant D'Amour or TV's "Oz", Gefangen follows the sex lives of a couple of prison inmates who pursue their passion for each other in a strangely lax and sweaty installation under the surreptitious gaze of horny guards. There the comparison ends. Genet's 1950 masterpiece was produced for the private collections of wealthy French porn collectors and so a) it wasn't pretending to be a narrative film and b) was well-made, quite beautiful and very sexy. Also, Genet made his film fifty-five years ago, making this film's already timid flirtation with gay prison sex also a couple of human generations out-of-date.
Non-existent production values and woeful acting are standard in every scene with the movie looking for the most part like a very-bad porn film with the sex missing. And this is where Gefangen is stranded in a complete no-man's-land. If I wanted to watch attractive guys in a prison-esque setting having sex with each other, there are about 7, 564, 893 such gay porn titles I could chose from. Why would I want to see this half-on thing, where sex is the only thing pursued, but then only implied, self-censored and left to the imagination. We do get to see the handsome, sensitive Schlutt wanking in his cell, but then I don't need to go to the movies to see a pensive guy masturbate at night - I can see that nightly in the privacy of my own bedroom. I wasn't aware, but on reflection am not too surprised, when outrate.net Contributing Writer Jaap Kooijman told me that a XXX version of the film was filmed at the same time - see it here.
That pretty much explains everything, since if all that's required to differentiate a XXX gay porn flick from an "arty" and meaningful gay film festival headliner is an editor jumping in and cutting all the "fuck that ass" bits out well then I guess I rest my case.
Anyway, for the record, Dennis (Marcel Schlutt) is in for two years on credit card fraud. For no apparent reason, he forms a crush on Mike (Mike Sale) the burly agony aunt in C-Block who's doing life for murder. Their ill-starred affair incites the wrath of the prison governor, a couple of guards, and a dozen or so prisoners who are all jealous of Dennis and Mike's affair, for various reasons. Bullying inmates force Dennis to become a drug runner, while one guard feels left out because he thought he was Mike's exclusive bitch.
The action is rushed into at such a pace and the characters so underdeveloped that everything quickly blends into mash and any tension or emotional impact is sent packing. Cheap synth music accompanies the quasi-sex scenes and builds to ominous crescendos when lips meet, or pants are unzipped. Such hilarious exclamation marks are completely at odds with the film's intention to be an in-the-know gay sex steamer and the whole thing ends up worse than Fortune And Men's Eyes.
Related Reading
200 American
O Fantasma
Fortune And Men's Eyes
Un Chant D'Amour
The Abduction
Review by Mark Adnum
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