It’s a trio of films that feature queer characters and queer storylines, landing them on the homo horror movies page and the does the gay guy die? page.
NO WAY UP (2024)
This is the kind of shark movie I needed after some seriously bad ones I scrounged up to watch with the hubby last summer. Sure the concept demands suspension of disbelief, but it definitely establishes a tense scenario and had me twitching like I was watching 47 Meters Down all over again.
After we first get character-establishing scenes in an airport.
The main girl, her boyfriend, and his douche bag friend board a plane, where the douche bag immediately starts making offensive comments to a gay flight attendant.
And then the plane crashes. Eek! Don’t watch this one if you’re planning to fly any time soon.
From that point on, the claustrophobia sets in. The plane sinks and lands at an angle on the bottom of the ocean, leaving just a pocket of air at the tail end for the survivors to live in for a while—including the gay guy. Yay!
Pretty quickly, hungry sharks show up. It’s the kind of formula we love. They float by the windows, they get in the plane, they demand an aisle eat.
Naturally, we start to care about (most of) the characters as they try to figure a way out of the predicament. Chances are you’ll guess exactly who is going to die and who will make it to the surface, but it’s just so suspenseful and fun the clichés don’t even matter.
BONDED (2023)
The good news is that we get a Black, gay horror flick, which is a rarity. The bad news is that the script is drastically underdeveloped and goes absolutely nowhere. It’s a rare case when instead of cheering that a movie runs only 70 minutes long, I wish it were 90 minutes long to expand on the story.
It begins 20 years ago. We see a woman give birth to a child with two heads. Awesome.
In the present day, a group of friends is going to a cabin in the woods. One is a young surgeon, and his husband is a detective. His boss is his mentor.
There are two early kills—the boss and his wife. Why? Are we to assume maybe he was the doctor from the delivery 20 years ago? Even if that’s true, why would it be his fault if a woman had a deformed child? We never even learn why she had a deformed child.
Next, the friends get to the cabin (like 30 minutes into the movie). There’s some relationship drama, none of which is ever resolved, making its presentation pointless. There’s a hot tube scene, a dance montage, and a sex scene, all tame but sexy.
At a diner, a waitress—the pregnant woman from the beginning—freaks out when she sees the young surgeon. Why? We’ll never know. He was too young to be a doctor 20 years ago. Does she somehow know he has a link to his dead boss, and that the dead boss is indeed the one who delivered her deformed child? No idea. Is she just terrified of all surgeons now?
There’s even a minor “reality show” element included for no discernible reason at all. It adds nothing to the plot or the unfolding of events.
48 minutes in, two of the guys are attacked while screwing in the woods. They run back to the cabin, and a dude with a scar on his face breaks in and attacks them all as we are subjected to a strobe effect. Safe to assume he’s the baby born at the beginning and had one of his heads removed.
It’s also clear he’s the son of the waitress, but the dynamics of their relationship aren’t defined. Was she protecting him from the world? Was she keeping him hidden? Did he resent her for having him and then removing one of his heads? Did losing one head turn him insane? What is the significance of both mother and son being fixated on the main surgeon character? And why don’t we at least get a scene with the removed head in a jar to make this more of a horror movie?
DEATH LINK (2021)
This silly slasher is trying to make a big statement about the harm of social media and how vapid influencers really are—while failing to address the fact that the general public is at fault for making them famous.
If you lived through all the bad slasher knock-offs that were spawned in the late 90s post-Scream era, you should feel right at home with Death Link.
It’s a surprisingly slow movie with uninspired death scenes (there’s even CGI blood), but there are queer and race angles that unfold as the movie progresses.
And that doesn’t even include the one lesbian character who is gone practically as soon as she’s introduced. A shame, because she was quickly turning out to be the only likable character in the cast. We’re talking about a group of kids that includes ego-driven comedian Matt Rife, who seriously strikes me as being very queer. Like remember that period when we were calling pretty straight boys “metrosexual”? Well, people still would have assumed he was totally homo.
The killer wears a black hooded robe and a skeleton mask, but it is never used to full effect to create a killer presence or any classic slasher atmosphere. There are a few twists concerning the killer, there’s a cheesy Saw “care to play a game” moment with hokey, evil laughing, and one of the final scenes is just odd in its effort to set us up for a sequel.
The director of the film shows off his hot bod playing a minor role as a “daddy”, and if you ask me, this film could have been gayer, sexier, and more compelling if he’d walked around shirtless more while having an affair with Matt Rife’s character.
