But what would I know? Like so many of its peers, Eating Out was a smash with gay audiences. It won the Audience Awards at the Dallas, Phoenix and San Diego queer film festivals, and judges at the San Francisco International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival awarded it Best First Feature. As has been noted elsewhere on this website, it's horrifying to watch gay culture continue its retrograde slide into oblivion - didn't straight audiences get over this kind of Porky's frat-house blow job humour twenty years ago? American Pie continued the tradition, but it was well acted and actually funny. Van Wilder, too, was very weak, but at least it showed evidence of having undergone at least one script redraft. All kinds of people go to all kinds of bad movies, and there's a place for trash and tack, but it's alarming to see one particular population lower its standards and coagulate around such hopeless endeavours and celebrate them as a genre-of-choice.
For the record, Caleb (Scott Lunsford) is an undergrad who likes pushy girls. He gets the hots for Gwen (Emily Stiles) but she only seems to go for gay guys. Gwen lives with Marc (Ryan Carnes) a colgate-clean hunky pianist who is the aloof apple of Caleb's roommate Kyle's ("American Idol" contestant Jim Verraros) eye. Kyle cooks up the plan: Caleb can pretend to be gay, thus winning the affections of Gwen and spilling a primed Marc into Kyle's waiting lap.
The bulk of the film centers around Caleb and Marc's date, which starts in surreal fashion with ramrod-straight Caleb passionately tongue kissing Marc at Gwen's request, becomes more surreal as the boys go to a party of dorky pianists who have a keyboard duel using Caleb as a page turner, and then - via a video store interlude where Caleb unwittingly deploys the hanky code to parade as a scat lover - an extended blow job/phone sex scene which is actually rather sexy. Lunsford especially is a very attractive guy. The film's opening scene, where he role plays as the phone fix-it guy for his horny girlfriend, is barely a notch or two below real (and high quality) porn. Playing the dim bulb who blindly follows his cock, Lunsford lets his pecs and pits do the talking for most of the film, and they speak beautifully.
But don't be distracted! The guys might be cute, but with all the great porn that's out there at the moment, do you need to go to a regular cinema to a madcap date movie and tent your pants during a soft core head scene? A gasping hottie does not a masterpiece make. This movie sucks.
