Sadly, from time to time certain people emerge who are so completely devoid of talent...a metaphorical untalented black-hole if you will, that sucks any/all semblance of talent from anyone and everyone who participates in their endeavors, to the extent that even someone as great as Sir Lawrence Olivier would be unable to withstand the suction. David DeCoteau would epitomize this phenomenon. Watching what amounts to an extended Abercrombie and Fitch ad, it would seem the basic plot here is athletic men undress and shower in slow motion, with an increasing emphasis on camera-zooms to their torsos (but don't worry...even though this is obviously gay-themed, there is absolutely NO nudity of any sort to worry about). The music crescendos during the shower scenes seem to provoke several emotional reactions from the viewer; "Wait! Is he going to use a conditioner? Oh, no! There's no luffa sponge in sight!" Just a mess. Don't bother.

I liked this film, which I guess makes me unusual.The only other DeCoteau film I've liked (not that I've seen even half of them) was The Brotherhood.This one is better. There's only one female character, and she's not on the screen much. The guys are all hot, and the camera lingers lovingly over all of their best parts.While some of the actors have worked only with DeCoteau, the actor playing Travis has also gone on to work with others (TV episodes, The Thaw).The plot is the minimum required for a horror film about a knife-wielding revenge murderer. There are some good moments here, beyond the eye candy. For his second revenge murder, Travis spends minutes running that knife up and down Emery's sleeping body, but the second Emery wakes up, Travis's mood changes from almost sexual fascination with the knife, to blankly noticing the waking Emery, to pleasure going for the kill.I will grant that most scenes are too long, maybe by 3-5 minutes each, and that this movie would have been better around 60 minutes in length. If hot young men aren't your thing (of if you were expecting porn) then you might be too bored.

Beware: Spoilers.I've always enjoyed David DeCoteau's films. They have an appealing formula that turns on a superficial and vaguely supernatural plot usually involving a group of guys, one of whom is innocent and nice and gets seduced (or nearly so) into evil by another guy. (Of course, all the guys are young and ripped.) There's usually a girl or two, and inevitably she gets involved in some kind of elaborate quasi-orgy scene with the innocent guy, the evil guy, and his flunkies. (During this scene the flunkies help the good guy undress and then watch him make out with the girl while they watch and touch themselves.) Sometimes shots are replayed in slow or fast motion. David DeC claims that he makes his films for girls and keeps everything suggestive, even the violence, for a teen audience.This time around, a guy's twin sister has been brutally murdered and he avenges her death. We don't know why she's killed. There's almost no dialogue. The main character works out and rubs a knife on his body. Then he magically finds each of the killers, spends a long time looking at them and sometimes rubbing the knife on them, then kills them. We never really see any stabbing, but we do get to see long, long sequences where he runs the knife over the other guys' bodies. (The one I'm watching now feels like it's been on for 10 minutes.) Did I mention there's hardly any dialogue? The whole film kind of reminds me of Derek Jarman's The Angelic Conversation. Kind of a more commodified version. Worth a look or two.

David Decoteau seems to have earned, rightly so, a reputation as the Roger Corman of gay horror schlock, having produced a dozen such movies in the past four years. He uses an interchangeable cast of nobodies who probably just came off of a modeling shoot or out of the nearest twink bar, and has an Uwe Boll-like proclivity for reusing the same sets and locations over and over, probably because it's cheap to film there. Beastly Boyz takes a slightly different tack from most of his movies, because the script is about as long as the Preamble to the Constitution. Instead of silly things like plot and dialog, we get treated to extended scenes of the main character rubbing a knife up and down the bodies of lithe young men. These sequences literally last for several minutes at a time. The movie is 74 minutes long, but it feels much longer, just because it doesn't ever bother to *do* anything. If you have a fetish for knife play, then this is the movie for you, but I don't think anyone else needs to see this.