Trash Time!

On a good day the $10 Radio Shack antenna on my roof picks up four local stations - and for the most part the reception is fuzzier than a recently licked lollipop in a pile of cat fur. Even though I've caught up with The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Carnivale, Weeds, The L Word and other shows on DVD, modern cable TV programming remains a complete mystery to me. As a hot-blooded gay man I sometimes wish I had access to the queer networks Logo and here!, but as a film critic for a gay and lesbian magazine I figure I get to see most noteworthy American and international queer filmmaking anyway.

While browsing the DVD selection at Amazon the other day I came across a majorly slutty looking here! production called Dante's Cove. As you can tell from the photo I've posted, this is a show where clothing is optional, and all the actors look like they've been sprayed to death with PAM cooking spray so that their bodies glisten, and so they can perform Slip & Slide daredevil acts when they're humping. Needless to say my Prurience Meter redlined, and I headed straight to the video store to pick up season one.

Five words sum up my reaction. OH MY DEAR SWEET LORD. This show is a major train wreck filled with craptastic acting, totally cliched dialogue and oodles of soft porn scenes that - despite the hotness of the men and women involved - are quite boring because the characters are so lame that they fail to allure with their six-pack abdomens and perfectly sculpted ass checks.

What saves Dante's Cove from being completely unwatchable is its outrageous and playful supernatural premise. The show's prologue gives a glimpse of the island's lurid history. It's 1840, and an insanely jealous witch named Grace sentences her fiance Ambrosius to eternity in a torture chamber when she discovers him in flagrante delicto with another dude. She can't help but feel for him a little bit, so she throws in a provision that he will be released and restored to his youthful studliness if he's ever discovered and kissed by another man.

Flash forward to the present, where our dipshit hero, Kevin, flees his oppressive parents to go live with his boyfriend, Toby, on Dante's Cove. Kevin meets all of Toby's oversexed friends, including some lesbians, a guy who seems to be closeted and a straight couple who loves to get it on beneath white mosquito netting while gay guys check out their pioneering bumping and grinding techniques.

At the end of the first episode - and this is as far as I've gotten and perhaps as far as I'll ever get - Kevin goes to the basement of the Hotel Dante (where they all live and where all the crazy voodoo witchcraft shit happened in the past) to get some beer. A voice calls his name from beneath a padlocked trapdoor. He manages to open it (it helps that the padlock isn't actually locked) and find the old and decrepit Ambrosius, who forces a lip lock on Kevin, thus bringing back all the youthful Goth vigor that makes his 1840 lifestyle so fiendishly singular. Some bloodletting and mayhem ensues, but I won't give away all the details in case you want to experience this masterwork of shallow and "sexy" queer horror on your own.

Knowing me and my love for Showgirls, I'll be completely hooked after a few more episodes.