The Idol

If you're ever stranded on a desert island with a VCR (!), be sure you have The Idol with you. This is one of the most intelligent, erotic videos I have ever seen. And trust me, I have seen gazillions of gay porn videos. Most of them are just EXPLICIT depictions of sex. This is a series of intense, EROTIC stories that are incredibly sexually exciting. The episodes alone are a gay man's fantasy: the shower room scene, the poolside, the Coach, Gods! I could go on forever. To my knowledge, The Idol's star (Kevin Redding) never made another porn film. However, some of the other "performers" such as Derek Stanton and Nick Rodgers, went on to become gay porn icons. Everything about this film is sexy: the scenarios, the men, the imagination, you name it! It's HOT!!!!

I saw Tom DeSimone's mainstream B-movies several decades ago and more recently have caught several of his earlier Gay features. His work is wildly uneven, but with "The Idol" we get a sincerity that gives the modest film staying power.

Subject matter is a combination of hero worship and affection as the protagonist attending a funeral recalls in many flashbacks his crush and romance with the late college track star. It's disconcerting that the mustachioed title figure bears a close resemblance to character actor of the '50s and '60s L.Q. Jones, who frequently teamed up with the late Strother Martin in many a Peckinpah Western (and even was an unsung but talented indie filmmaker, most successful with "A Boy and His Dog" and "The Brotherhood of Satan").

Unfortunately Kevin Redding in that central role of Gary is a wooden actor, and apparently a one-shot. The handsome young hero played by Mark Bitler is far more empathetic, yet he too never achieved a career. DeSimone wisely broadens the canvas to include Darla Lee Barnett as Gary's hapless girl friend who is stuck in a relationship with a guy who learns that he's really yearning for male company instead.

DeSimone, whose mainstream work was often campy as in the all-star "Prison Girls" 3-D clunker or his most famous "Hell Night" and "Concrete Jungle", is not above stooping low on occasion here too, as in playing a Barry White song for sex at one point. But you have to give him credit for delivering a sports-themed homosexual romance that is far more effective than Robert Towne's oft-cited lesbian treatment of the subject matter "Personal Best".

Nearly four decades later it stands as a tribute to an abandoned cinema genre pioneered by its distributor Hand in Hand Films.