Raymond Vates (Noel Palomaria) is a secretly gay, Latino cop who’s recently been promoted to Detective. Vates is happy to keep his work and private life separate until he gets involved with a man he doesn’t realise is the gay serial killer he and his partner are hunting.

Hard has a clever set up and potentially interesting story, and ostensibly, it satisfies all the things that outrate.net was set up to identify. Its gay central character isn’t a poster boy for gay pride, and a gay serial killer plot is always a refreshing antidote to the café latte gay films we seem to be continually assaulted with.

And Hard starts well enough, with a well shot prologue that uses a hitchhiking murder to introduce an interesting killer and set an invigorating post-gay tone. Once we get into the mechanics of the story, however, things start to fall apart, and the film’s apparently ad-hoc shooting schedule, a symptom of the film’s low budget, starts to show itself a little too much. Scenes between Vates and his jaded partner Ellis (Charles Lanyer) seem rushed and the pair’s awkward, unrealistic dialogue exchanges sometimes verge on the surreal. An early scene in a gay bar features a most unlikely exchange between Vates and a bartender, and the subsequent morning after scene, with Vates waking up with a fellow closet cop from San Diego, introduces Hard’s earnest but undercooked sub-essay on homosexuality in the police force.

The relationship between Vates and the serial killer Jack (Malcolm Moorman), which is by far the most potentially compelling thing in Hard and which could have been its masterstroke, is overlaid with too much face-to-face exposition and isn’t exploited for its seething subtextual tensions, though Palomaria and Moorman are both able actors.

On the other hand, what is great about Hard is that - apart from the gay angle - it is virtually indistinguishable from any number of by-the-numbers gumshoe versus slasher films that are rented by the dozen in any video store every weekend. In a way, it’s fabulous to find a gay-themed film that isn’t trying to be transcendent, and that doesn’t seek to be some kind of scintillating masterpiece. Why not a basic slasher/copper film with a gay inflection?

Not everyone wants to sit through a boppy flick about affluent guys going on dates with each other, and foreign films about plugholes aren’t everyone’s cup of tea either. The makers of Hard should be commended for slogging it out to produce a film that fills a market gap and which should find an eager audience.

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