Apr 11, 2010

[Movies] Eating Out: All You Can Eat (2009)

Eating Out: All You Can Eat (2009)As much as I have complained in the past that the lines between independent films and LGBT films has blurred so much recent years, it's ridiculous, it's also only a matter of time before even these supposedly strong, daring films trying to carve out a niche for themselves in the entertainment world break the mold. And I don't mean this as a compliment - the mold they're breaking is that of the noble, thought-provoking LGBT movie. And thus they don't break new ground anymore and instead they end up following the older patterns and thus committing the same mistakes of the rest of the movie-making world.

Yeah, some of you might refer to this as "selling out" or something along those lines.

The best sign of selling out is nothing other than that most evil of movie phenomenons - the dreaded sequel. As if the first sequel isn't bad enough, trying to turn a lackluster franchise into a trilogy is even worse.

This movie did not need to be made.

Eating Out: All You Can Eat is the third movie in the Eating Out series of movies. These movies follow a certain core pattern and then play around with things. In the first movie, a straight guy pretended to be gay in order to seduce a girl. In the second movie, a gay guy pretends to be straight in order to seduce a guy. In this third movie, a gay guy pretends to be another guy (who happens to be straight) in order to seduce another gay guy. How this follows the original "pattern" is a bit beyond me but that's what they decided to go with.

So the gay guy is Casey (Daniel Skelton) and he is still assisted by the franchise fag hag Tiffani (Rebekah Kochan) to seduce the attractive, sensitive yet freshly heart-broken Zack (Chris Salvatore). In order to do this, Tiffani recommends that Casey should create a fake profile online using photos of her ex-boyfriend Ryan (Michael E.R. Walker). Just as Casey and Zack start to hit it off online, Ryan comes back to town and naturally Zack believes this is the amazing person he connected with over chat. So the rest of the movie is spent trying to sort all this out while Zack's ex-boyfriend does what he can to disrupt the budding romance and force Zack to come back to him.

Over the years, I've felt that the Eating Out movies have become (1) cornier, (2) a lot less funny and (3) featuring less and less attractive guys. I mean come on, having Ryan Carnes in the first movie really worked and Scott Lunsford wasn't bad at all but now we get the slightly creepy Daniel Skelton? I know they were trying to become a bit less superficial, but then you still need some token drop-dead gorgeous guy in the movie.

Actress Rebekah Kochan at premiere Eating Out 3.Image via Wikipedia

I almost forgot - item (4) should be the fact that the acting has gotten worse over the years as well and I found it extremely difficult to (a) stay focused and (b) relate to the characters at all. Things just felt so shallow, silly and hollow that it just didn't feel all that worthwhile to me in the least. I think this is best personified by the performance of Rebekah Kochan, who has been in all 3 Eating Out movies thus far. How a person that we've gotten to see over and over again in this same role over the years managed to get worse at it is a feat in itself. You'll understand should you find yourself watching this movie for some reason.

Whether the break-down in storytelling was because of the poor writing, the bad acting or perhaps confused direction is beyond me. The movie was just a horrible experience and one of those instances when I regretted seeing it and wished that I could get that part of my life back. Darn you bastards for making this movie.

Eating Out: All You Can Eat wasn't all the fulfilling buffet we hoped it would be and only gets 1 stereotypical old queen character out of 5.

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