Written And Directed by Carter Smith
Benjamin (to Thee Suburbia): "I'm just grateful to everyone who believed in me and helped me to get to where I am today."
Well, I was craving a little more queer horror and while this one definitely isn't as mainstream as oh say, Knock At The Cabin, there's at least a similar setting for this movie, but everything else here was vastly different and a little a bit gnarly too.
Best friends Benjamin (Cooper Koch) and Dom (Jose Colon) are having one last night of fun before the latter headed to LA to make a name for himself in the gay porn industry. Dom's such a supportive friend (but supposedly straight) that he wanted to earn a little extra cash to help Benjamin fund his new life. It's a nice gesture. Unfortunately Dom's means of wanting to help his friend was fraught with disaster.
The means being something of the drug smuggling kind where Dom's contact Alice (Jena Malone) forced both Dom and Benjamin to swallow the bag of drugs and extract them at a rest stop, only for an encounter with a homophobic redneck to complicate an already messy situation. Needless to say, Alice wasn't best pleased with said complication.
The complication being that the drug in question are actually a larvae that has a venom with certain side effects. Those effect included both an unwanted erection and paralysis and sadly for Dom, not only does he suffer from both of them when the larvae actually breaks out of it's cocoon inside but there's also the problem of Alice's actual boss as well, who made his presence known towards the second half of the movie.
The boss being Rich (Mark Patton) - a rather trigger happy, easily slighted and paranoid gay man who also wasted little time in taking Alice out of the equation, showing false sympathy upon Dom dying while also getting a little too letchy with Benjamin for his own good. Of course Benjamin was also savvy enough to use Rich's fixation on him to his advantage.
Let's just say, there's a great scene of cat and mouse between Benjamin and Rich and while the latter isn't remotely intimidating as a villain, there's a certain camp-ish to Rich nonetheless. Not to mention a rather satisfying ruthlessness to Benjamin as he managed to avenge his friend's death, give Rich his just desserts, offer some peace to Dom and fulfilled his goals during a post credit scene that kept cutting throughout the credits themselves.
- The credits saw Benjamin being interviewed by Thee Suburbia at the Squirty Awards for the movie Backwoods Boy Bangs.
- This is the second LGBT movie that Cooper Koch has been in with a similar wooded setting. The other one being They/Them, which I will get round to at some point.
- Queer horror fans will largely know Mark Patton from A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge.
- Chronology: I'm gonna assume 2022 as in the year of it's release.
Swallowed certainly had it's gross moments with it's premise and while some of the acting was a little hammy in parts, I found this movie to be a lot of fun. Overall, Cooper Koch has the potential to be a queer horror final boy and I hope there's more of him in this genre to come.
Rating: 7 out of 10
No comments:
Post a Comment