Excellent but underrated film

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

If you want image and attitude this can be fun. If depth of vision, on the other hand, it will seem small.I'll have you imagine this as a guy with a bunch of comic-books and magazines on his floor, he cuts up strips and glues them together, now something about sex and college relationships, then a strip off Scooby- Do, another resembles Lynch, a third is about life on campus, then back to sex, more sex and obsession. He is from that 90s crop of makers (Tarantino, Smith) who thought that life had no business being seen as deeper than the way stuff just hang together, the fun in having so much stuff to pick from: movies, comic- books, TV. He briefly tried something more coherent in Mysterious Skin, here he's back to a collage.Two main thrusts here. One is the college journey of discovery, here he tries to paint a picture of sexual life, the confusion and reluctance - Nowhere was angsty, this is more relaxed in its skin, there's a sweetness around discovery. The second thrust is about mysterious happenings around campus, there are figures in animal masks who come out at night, a witch, a girl found dead. This is the more endearing part, all about how confusion in his mind around sexual identity manifests around campus as some inscrutable power of rearrange. It's all in the opening scene, a recurring dream where he walks down a corridor lined with girls and comes up against a mysterious door marked 18, his age: sex, dreams, locked mystery.It's fun for a while to see him do it, the fun all in the imaginative jumps from one strip to the next, in that it all loosely hangs together around a dream. But then it's as if he gets bored or can't see any point to it so he just keeps throwing stuff. A cult, the end of the world, a discovery about the father, more trysts, a car chase. None of it sticks, too much paper weight so it all just tumbles down in a heap of scraps. This is its own insight then on craft, if the patching doesn't begin to rise up into shape that guides the eye from forms to the possible thing they give rise to, it remains artless patchwork.Lynch also takes a lot of care in picking out cinematic wallpaper so it's seductive when you enter, but that's after he has mulled long and hard about where the walls are going to be and what kind of space they will define.

The Good: The style and direction is executed quite well. It's pretty impressive for an independent film and especially one of such R-rated material such as this.The acting is pretty good. Smith (Thomas Dekker) was pretty good as your average sexually confused teenager and the rest of the characters were all superb in their own ways.So strange it's engaging. This is definitely one of the strangest films I've ever seen. It's on Salvador Dali levels of surreality. But the strange turns the film takes are so strange they're engaging. It's like Tommy Wiseau's The Room, which is so bad it's fascinating. In this case however, it's the strangeness and sexual taboos that are so attractive about the film.The Bad: The ending was too rushed and was brought down to basic sci-fi ending levels and denominates the story to an unnecessary them or us stance. If the film had a more stranger ending and had explored a more intellectual stance on the world as we know it, then it would have been better.Some of the characters I thought were unnecessary. In fact all the characters other than Smith, Stella and London and the characters they have sexual contact with are unimportant and could've been removed.Final Score: 8/10 Great. If you're a fan of really surreal and coming of age films then this is for you. I actually think back on it and I find that I really enjoyed it. So strange it's awesome.

The actors were not terrible and the production values were not the worst, but the film was still mediocre at best. This is primarily due to it's ridiculous premise. Also, why was this film labeled a comedy? There was nothing funny about it apart from the fact that the whole movie was simply stoopid. It falls just a step or two above those lousy "adult" films that Cinemax airs in the wee hours. Sure the guys are hot (though I prefer pretty little Thomas Dekker clean shaven). However, if I just want to see some gay twinky-sex why waste my time with a lame film like this one? It might have been more worthwhile if Araki had at least graced us with a shot of Dekker's cute little ass.

I am SICK of guys who look like Thomas Dekker: pale, androgynous, black-haired pretty boys with stubble and stringy hair hanging in front of their eyes. There must be a factory somewhere that cranks them out like Edsels. This might have been an interesting movie if Araki had made him shave and wash his hair.Certainly the idea of an Araki horror movie is intriguing, and maybe he'll try again in a few years after the tiresome stubble/messy hair craze has died (Isn't it dead YET?!). I did manage to get through the movie, but it was not as good as it could have been with a different star, or with the same star after a shampoo and shave. His acting is fine; it's his look that seems about ten years out of date and is so tiresome it's distracting.