Price: 75 centzYear: 2001
Runtime: 85 minutes
Director: Morris G. Sim
Cast: Mickey Blaine, Hunter Garner, Dylan Cooper, George Mitchell, Stephen Martines
Apathy has seized upon me like a derelict grabbing at the ass of another more attractive and seemingly passed out derelict. And I have not updated this blog in a hot minute as a result of this apathy. The oddness is that my dollar video hoarding and consumption has spiked insanely in the last couple months since I decided to be all lazy about this page. I can't stop buying dollar videos at a precipitous rate and trying to blow them out the other end in due time like a fart through Delta Burke (check the timely irony). But in glancing over what I've been watching lately, it's obvious stuff surrounded by bacon. I've been working mostly common standard everyone has already seen that shit fare as of late, albeit in larger quanitities than usual. But one film stood the fuck out on my list of recent plowings and that is the hopelessly obscure and fundamentally brilliant BOY WONDERZ.
Now to put this in perspective, this film was originally called THIS IS THE DISK-O-BOYZ, which is a more accurate title as the film is about a boy band called The DISK-O-BOYZ and not some fan fic about cloning and burt ward. Let's get to what is important: a member by member breakdown of the DISK-O-BOYZ.
DISCLAIMER: Although this movie is completely unutterably magikal, I barely remember whole sections of it and I don't have my copy handy, so forgive me if I lack what the feds like to call "truth" here.
First, we have the gay one. Squint at the box and he's in the upper left corner almost completely obscured by the hunkiness of all the other members. Perhaps he is being discriminated by the box for being gay, but actually, I think it is because he is balding and looks 40 when everyone else is supposed to be 17. Either way, he splits off from the group for a solo career because he keeps making out with dudes on camera and the tabloids report it and it totally kills their mall tour in the dirty south. At the end of the movie, he comes back to the group and makes out with the dude in the band who was totally gaybashing him earlier in the movie because you know like latent homosexual, duh. I think he was called Dylan-Tee (the balding one, not the beefy guy).
Oh yeah, and then there's the beefy guy, fuck it, what was he called? Uh, was he Kenny? You see Kenny's hook was that there was no hook. Everyone else got a stupid two-times name a la Dylan-Tee, but Kenny was too dumb to come up with something that worked well with Kenny. He really liked Kenny G because it sounded gangsta, but then he found out about that spirited mop of curls and his fantastical flute (ed: sax), so he just kept it real and kept it Kenny. He's the one in the middle of the box, with his head slightly below Dylan-Tee looking all pouty and fab. He's the reformed bigot and maybe also the half-brother of the dude on the right, but that part of the movie is too fuzzy to recall.
Then there's the other two bozos that aren't the huge dude on the right extending his arm to us in a gesture of friendship. They are Sammy-Hay and Ozzie-Bay. One of these guys is actually the half brother by adoption of the huge guy, so I guess it wasn't Kenny after all. I don't really remember much about these dudes except that they are kinda mushy headed and vaguely snarky and perhaps also fun-loving(?). Their noses resemble penis's and this resemblance carries over to their personalities. I did not like either of these cowards and was quite pleased with their lack of screentime.
Then we get to the star of this vehicle, the very large man with the inviting Blue Oyster Cult Album Cover gesture. He is Indy-Lee. He is the main character for all intents and purposes. The main plot often centers on him. Particularly in the maudlin second half, where his search for his real parents drives him mad (hint: it's actually his adopted parents! happy ending!). He is also the only actor from this movie to have any non THIS IS THE DISKO BOYZ credits on the imdb, having put in work on PORT CHARLES and GUIDING LIGHT and something called MONARCH COVE. He also used a fake name for this role calling himself Coltin Scott instead of his nom de soap Stephen Martines. He is dynamic and he is fierce. He is also boring.
Dylan-Tee and Kenny are the best characters. They are creepy, monomaniacal, and erotic. This flitter across the screen with the delicacy of a firefly flittering across a screen. It is delicate and it is fierce.
I miss boy bands and I'm not alone in this if the excessive number of AJ Maclean fan fiction hunting g00gl3rs are any indication. This movie takes us back to those wunnerful times, with shoddier production values, explicit gay sex, and a lurking sense of unease. It is a post-modern pastiche of genre and intention. It subverts what it cannot make it's own, and what it makes it's own, it masticates and spits back out in the form of an elaborate ruse. The movie has more in common with the minimalist plays of Harold Pinter (THE DUMB WAITER in particular) than it does the slavish populist pifflepoof of Lou Perlman. May god have vengence upon his soul. ESXCELSISO!
