journal features

movie review - Killer Condom

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Vancouver, 2001.08.17

This is a low-budget German flick about a hard-boiled, homosexual detective's fight against a carnivorous condom. It is every bit as good as that sound, I assure you. Right from the opening scene - where a University professor on the make is attempting to 'pass' a student at a sh*tty hotel, only to have his penis bitten off by a complementary condom - you know that this is entertainment.

With an obnoxious leading man (played by Samel, whose chain smoking throughout the film surely sliced ten years off of his life) who is short, unkempt, overweight, and brutally direct, and a young street hustler for a love interest, it's a gay version of all those 80's low-budget thriller/drama/sci-fi flicks where the hooker with the heart of gold saves the seemingly irredeamable hero. It just happens - without giving away too much - in a hotel called "The Quickie" while a killer is biting of everything in sight.

I suspect this is in part about the AIDS epidemic, given some of the fallout when a Presidential candidate gets emasculated by one of the condoms ("You mean you knew about this killer condom?" asks one sr. cop. "Yeah, but it was only hookers and fags!"), but as with everything else in the flick, it is handled in a throw-away, flip fashion. I enjoyed this. Great cheesy flick.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)