Gayracula

Director: Roger Earl
Writers: Laurei I. Lee & Dorothee Psaw
Release Year: 1983

And people say Twilight is gay…

Count Gaylord (Tim Kramer) and his servant Boris (Rand Remington) head to Los Angeles after one of the Count’s converts, the Marquis de Suede (Steve Collins) appears there. There’s a hell of a lot more gay sex than plot, which makes it a lot harder … tougher to discuss this one than usual. Not because there’s anything wrong with gayness, but when a film is 93% scenes of sexual activity, there’s painfully little plot left….

(Spoilers follow…)

This is not the first pornographic vampire story I’ve seen, there seem to be enough of them to create a weekend-long festival of naked people covered in blood. This is not the first gay pornographic film I’ve seen either, as part of my minor in human sexuality I became well-acquainted with the mechanics of men having sex with men. For all of you who keep thinking ‘ewwwww’ grow the hell up, once you do you’ll realize that it’s, essentially, boring to watch. It does give you guys – and most of the people thinking ‘ewwwww’ are guys – a chance to understand why most women get fed up with films featuring topless women. However, despite all that silliness, this is the first gay pornographic vampire film I’ve seen. I’m not in any hurry to see another.

The high point of this film is, without a doubt, the scene in the nightclub. Are you aware of that sex-show trick involving a woman using a certain muscle group to launch ping-pong balls into the air? One of the male performers – who’s wearing a single steel ring as a costume – does a similar trick with stainless-steel balls of about the same size, which would make them quite heavy. How he manages to fit so many where he’s decided to keep them is a bit of a mystery, one that I would rather not contemplate too … deeply.

This film could be looked at as the last gasp of an era. After AIDS began to claim many gay men in the 1980s, most gay pornographers began requiring condom use. This is in marked contrast to heterosexual porn in which condoms are a relatively recent phenomenon and are still not even close to a standard in the industry. More than simply representing a real division between pre and post mandatory condom use eras of porn, this film can be seen as a sort of allegory for the period. Count Gaylord destroys anyone he finds attractive because of his illness. If this wasn’t simply meant to be an escapist fantasy, which I suspect it was, it instead becomes a painfully poignant example of someone using film as their own wish-fulfillment.

I don’t feel right giving this a rating as I’m not the intended audience and, thus, found it boring.