Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Fresh and Exciting

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

"Hot Guys With Guns" is a must see movie. From the title I didn't really know what to expect. The first 5 minutes of watching this film you will get hooked. I've never seen a film that made me laugh one minute, and then had me at the edge of my seat trying to solve the mystery. Not only was I at the edge of my seat, but my wife was too. She was even talking to the screen as she was unsuccessfully trying to figure out the mystery. I have to say Doug Spearman did a wonderful job directing and writing this film. Mr. Spearman captured the true essence of Los Angeles with a twist. If you're looking for a great date night movie look no further. Oh!!! Did I forget to mention how beautiful the cast was? Especially Marc Anthony Samuel. I loved his character Danny.

I saw this at the Palm Springs Gay Film Festival (aka Cinema Diverse) and I'm giving this an 8 because it was a refreshing departure from the usual paint-by-the-numbers gay film. Better still, it doesn't try to be a gay police procedural, as the lead characters are not cops, detectives or PIs. Marc Anthony Samuel as Danny Lohman carries most of the film as an action hero actor wannabe who's taking a night course in how to be a PI. It's impossible to understand what he sees in his smarmy boyfriend Pip Armstrong (played woodenly by Brian McArdle). Jimmy Peppicelli is the ex-PI teaching the class, brilliantly played by Alan Blumenfeld. It's a decent whodunit, although I figured it out too early. Like so many of these low budget, first time films, it gets bogged down with too many characters and pointless detours from the main story. For example, too much time is wasted on Armstrong's unfunny mother and Lohman's day job as a waiter. A its best, it's a light, frothy gay date film to enjoy with a big bowl of popcorn. But if you want to see a much better made gay detective thriller, check out one of the Donald Strachey films starring Chad Allen.

Last night Charles and I attended the FilmOut San Diego screening of Hot Guys with Guns, a special event at the Birch North Park Theatre advertised as an action movie for the Gay male audience, a sort of spoof of the James Bond mythos that judging from the advance publicity was going to be a film about a super-spy attempting to foil some horrendous international crime scheme and – this being aimed at a Gay male audience – in the process bedding an assortment of "Bond boys" instead of "Bond girls." Actually the film turned out to be considerably better than that, owing quite a bit less to James Bond and more to the 1960's TV series I Spy, particularly in the pairing of a white and a Black character as the leads and the rather diffident relationship between the two – the white guy more impulsive and daring, the Black guy more reasoned and "cool."After a marvelous credits sequence using Warren's song under a set of visuals cribbed from the 1960's Bond movies, the original I Spy credits and just about every other 1960's film in the genre, the opening scene turned out to be a decent-looking but decidedly not hot middle-aged man awakening from a drugged stupor with a lot of younger and hotter but similarly indisposed bodies draped across his bed. It turns out his stupor wasn't his idea; he threw a sex party but it was crashed by two interlopers, one dressed in a black hoodie and a death's-head mask and the other more or less au naturel, who entered it and set off an aerosol bomb containing a mixture of party drugs and anesthetics to put the entire crowd under so they could rob them. The principals turn out to be Danny Lohman (Marc Anthony Samuel), a Black Gay actor who's taking a course on how to be a private detective – not because he wants to do that for a living but because he's up for a part as a P.I. in a TV series called Crime and Punishment; and his ex-partner Patrick "Pip" Armstrong (Brian McArdle, whose other main credit on IMDb.com is a voice-over narration for a documentary called It Is No Dream about Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism), a spoiled rich white kid who lives with his mother Patricia (a wonderful bitch-goddess performance by Joan Ryan) and dumped Danny for another aspiring actor, Robin (Trey McCurley), who's hot-looking but is enough of an airhead we in the audience definitely get the impression he's trading down. When Pip is a guest at the next sex party that gets hit by the mystery bandits with their drug bomb, and his Rolex watch (important to him because it's the only legacy left to him by his father, who abandoned the family for reasons we're never told) and his car are stolen (and the car is recovered, stripped and covered with anti-Gay graffiti), Danny decides they should use the skills he's learning in detective class and solve the crime themselves.Despite saddling it with the silly title that makes it sound like a hard-core porn film, Spearman manages to pull off something that's eluded a lot of more prestigious and better-known directors: he manages to fuse comedy and drama so the mystery and the satire reinforce each other instead of clashing. There's also a marvelously funny sequence in which, staking out the home of one of the victims, Danny starts delivering a voice-over narration in the persona of the P.I. character he's auditioning to play on TV – and the dialogue is a perfectly turned parody of Raymond Chandler's prose, particularly his penchant for blender-mixed metaphors. "Hot Guys with Guns" is a quite capably produced and written mystery, well acted by a strong ensemble cast, though Marc Anthony Samuel in the lead stands out. With Denzel Washington already having aged out of the Black juvenile category and Will Smith rapidly following suit, Samuel, playing a part Spearman wrote for himself but at the last minute realized he was too old for, looks like a good candidate to take over these parts.

Another typical gay movie, drawing an audience only because as gays, we hope it might be good and we should see it. To get the 8/10 posted here, those associated with the film must pushed every person they knew to make a favorable review. Seriously, we saw this as part of the LGBT film fest at Lincoln Center in NY and couldn't believe it was selected for viewing. Its just Noah's Ark with guns and a bad crime plot. And in response to their superficial lure of "Hot Guys," well, no, not really. There must be SOOO many other films more worthy of selection. Major disappointment!On the upside, other films in this fest have been very good.