A crocodile kills its prey with a so-called "death roll". After clamping its snout down around its hapless victim at 3000 psi - compared to the puny Great White Shark, who exerts only 650 psi with its infamous jaws - the croc submerges deep underwater, where it rolls and rolls and rolls until its prey's lungs are flooded with water and it drowns. The crocodile will often stuff its catch into an underwater log where it can come back and eat it later. Like their dinosaur-era cousins the goannas, crocodiles have such powerful antibiotic bacteria in their systems that they are resistant to virtually any form of disease or infection and so are able to munch on carrion, and this is why the hitherto disparate worlds of crocodiles and HIV came together in 2005, as immunologists rushed to explore the potential of adapting crocodile enzymes for human benefit.

Anyway, you'll feel like you're in a death roll for the first seven or so minutes of the hopeless Crocodile Tears and the experience of sitting through the rest of the movie is akin to, I imagine, decomposing slowly from the inside of a rotten log deep beneath the surface of a Northern Territory billabong.

Simon (the aptly named Ted Sod) is a woeful performing artist who does occasional classes at a public school. On one particularly bad day in his life, he's summarily fired after ramming too much fag propaganda down the students' throats, and then gets a dreaded HIV-positive diagnosis after his friend Carl (Dan Savage) encouraged him earlier in the week to take The Test. Naturally, Simon then does a deal with the devil (an Angel Heart style character played by Wade Madsen) where he will return to HIV-negativity if he becomes a homophobic stand-up comic.

We're not exactly in Citizen Kane territory here, in fact, we're not even approaching the level of Crocodile Dundee 2. Production values are home-vid quality and dialogue goes round and round on a loop about the usual dried up (crocodile skin) topics such as homophobia, urban alienation blah blah blah this movie is so fucking stupid. This film is so dopey it doesn't even realize that the characters who are supposed to be bad and dumb are actually far more on-the-money and perceptive than the hero is.

For example, when Simon demands a female student justify her squeamish attitude towards gays, she says "because it's gross" to which he indignantly hisses "why is it gross when two people of the same sex love each other?" She rolls her eyes, and so did I, as she's not grossed out about the love and emotions, dumbo, she's talking about the felching, the arse eating, shit on the sheets and so on. As Alan Sinfield has pointed out, no amount of desexualization makes a difference, as, in his words, "there is nothing extraordinary in the way lesbians and gay men do [day to day activites]. But then, few people say there is. What disconcerts ... is the way we do sex, and any analysis that doesn't include that is not going to reach the parts that count."

The student continues: "All fags have AIDS. Everyone knows that's how [AIDS] got started" and Simon is at it again with "That's not how it got started - they don't know how it got started!". Simon, indeed they do, and again, your student's right about the last part. The historical record is clear that the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Western World first first emerged in and as a result of the formation of homosexual communities in large cities and everyone from Luc Montaigner, the co-discover of HIV to Jean Baudrillard, Randy Shilts, Camille Paglia and, now, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, have acknowledged that the establishment of condensed, sexually festive gay male ghetto communities in the late 1970s created the perfect environment for all kinds of sexually transmitted diseases to spread unchecked. Sentimental nostalgia and shrill indignance aren't some forms of Victorian Black Art that make the elephant disappear. Simon's student might be a gum-chewing little brat-slut, but she isn't incorrect.

Of course, it doesn't take Simon longer than a scene to confirm his student's "homophobic" assertions and make a complete hypocrite out of himself when he complains that he doesn't "deserve" to be seropositive as he didn't play around in the backrooms and be a total slut like all his HIV positive acquaintances are. Simon is furious at his student and her conservative headmaster in the preceding scene because he worries "we're creating a generation of ignoramuses". Indeed we are, but not in the way you think, Simon.

A series of scenes follow where Simon performs stand up in fishnets and a corset. Death roll, please.

Related Reading
24th Day
Jeffrey
Anonymous