“Kill the Monsters”: a trio of three gay men conquer America in another fast-moving satire (in black and white)
Ryan Lonergran’s presto-tempo satire “Kill the Monsters” (77 minutes) seems to make fun of how history can drive people into ridiculous motives and encounters. This one is in black-and-white Cinemascope, so the viewer keeps his distance and watches and feels warned. The film bears a subtitle, “An American Allegory”.
Patrick (Lonergran) and Sutton (Garret McKechie), as a male couple, take care of a houseboy Frankie (Jack Ball), almost in line with some softcore short gay porn about threesomes on YouTube (I’m thinking of one in particular, a two-minute job about an “ordeal”). All three are athletic-looking cis males with muscle and body hair, so there is no delving into fluidity or non-binary issues. But Frankie has suddenly taken sick with intermittent vomiting. Yes, this in a comedy. But there is never a hint of diagnosis, no mention of HIV and PrEP or protease inhibitors.
Doctors in NYC suggest changes of scenery, and the trio goes on a road trip and moves to Los Angeles to help Frankie get well. At times, it seems like he is doing super, and is pretty much a cute boy freeloader. Somehow, I recalled a similar sequence of episodes of “I Love Lucy” back in the 1950s.
The film has eight parts with markers of significant years in American history, ranging from 1776 to 2001. Generally, there’s not a lot of obvious parallels to the happenings on the screen. Once the men get to LA, they mysteriously have the means to buy a condo and get on the board of the building. Here is where the movie gets going. Three lesbians invite them to a dinner party in their unit, in an episode called 1945. There follows a poker game, that plays on the allegorical meaning of the cards (the line about 3 Queens made me think of pawn promotion in chess, but poker usually works better in the movies for game scenes). Games like these depend on mathematics and statistics and will work the same anywhere in the Universe. How comforting.
Although the script seems at times to focus on Frankie’s “health”, Sutton has his issues. He lives off an inherited trust fund but his mother or an older female relative is still executor. She can deny him living expenses (as a playboy) if he doesn’t give up drugs (I guess he has to pass drug tests; an interesting thing to ponder with estate planning and even whether society should police people who benefit from inheritances more than it does now, as an equity idea); however the film also shows him getting bong hits). There is also a curious line about whether Sutton would “sell his blog”. I the script referring to Blogtyrant (which sold its business)? The film dates from 2018, about the time that happened, and when the future of blogging (as I’ve noted) has come into more trouble because of pressure on platforms from political polarization in the country.
Returning to the time-marks, in 2001, the couple, as landlords, evict three women from Iraq for allowing a bathroom leak to flood the units before. That’s scary. I “caused” a leak in my own building in early 2019, but I was on the hook for “only” $350 of repairs below. This is hardly 9-11.
The music score is entirely taken from Sibelius: the Karelia Suite (that’s the territory Finland ceded back to Russia after WWII), Finlandia’s opening, and Lemminkainen.
The film played at Frameline mid 2019, and will be available on DVD from Breaking Glass Pictures Feb. 18, 2020. I reviewed a complimentary screening on Vimeo (private).
The idea of mapping the story to eight dates in American history corresponds to the setup of my screenplay “Epiphany”, where the abducted characters live in four different communities in an O’Neill Cylinder separated by time gates (33 AD, 1780, 1900, 1961, and 2001) with a central city in current day.
Name: “Kill the Monsters”
Director, writer: Ryan Lonergran
Released: 2019 Frameline, DVD available 2020/2/18
Format: 2.35:1 black and white
When and how viewed: complimentary Vimeo link, 2020/1/30
Length: 77
Rating: (R)
Companies: Breaking Glass Pictures
Link: adult trailer, MediaPlay
Stars: ***__
(Posted: Thursday, January 30, 2020 at 2 PM EST