San Francisco, 1985

Though technically well done and visually adept, even stunning at times, Test adds nothing new to the genre of mid 80s HIV cinema. Test is a step up from Chris Mason's 2008 film, The New Twenty, but suffers from the same lack of original story.

The trailer led me to believe I was going to see a movie that was as much or more about dance as it was about HIV. This was not the case. What dancing there was was the highlight of the film.

Scott Marlowe plays the lead role, Frankie, superbly. It is unfortunate that he was not given a more interesting story to tell.

In the end Test plays like a safe-sex public service announcement done with edgy flair.

Like so many in 1985 who were caught up in the AIDS crisis in New York and San Francisco, so many of us awaited the results of the crucial HIV test to determine whether we had the incurable and fatal virus. As do the members of this San Francisco based ballet company some of whom seemingly asymptomatic but still testing positive.

I was part of that also. I had a case of pneumonia which lingered on and gave me asthmatic symptoms. I had the test just as shown here and of course was relieved to be found negative.

Some are not so lucky in Test. The critical decision they have to make is what to do with their lives with a medical death sentence hanging over them.

The film is anchored in the fall of 1985 when we see references to the illness of Rock Hudson. That put a public face on the disease and spurred a bit government action on a federal level.

I am guessing that with me seeing a lack of other film credits or only a few with most of the cast their backgrounds are as dancers not actors. There are some beautiful ballet sequences here. And that lends a nice ring of authenticity to the performances.

This one is a real sleeper, se it by all means.

This film has minimal dialog and a lot of boring dancing of a repetitive routine. The acting is terrible and the dialog, made up and improvised on the fly. The editing jumps scenes , leaving gaps in continuity. There is insufficient context to make anything comprehensible. It's a fairly childish and superficial look at gay life and the early days of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. The audio track is terrible as in so many of these low budget, Indie films, but to the point where one has to turn on the subtitles. Sadly, at that point one then has to read the childish dialog from the badly written script. Movies like this should be tossed in the nearest dumpster!

I was hoping for a lot more from this. For starters, being old enough to remember this era, "Test" captures absolutely none of the feel of that time. If you want a genuine reflection of what things were really like, watch any of the gay films that were actually made then: "Longtime Companion", "An Early Frost" or others. Throwing in a couple of Bronski Beat songs and having your characters talk about their new Sony Walkmans is a pretty pitiful way to have to make people believe it's set in 1985.

Slow pacing, weak writing and mediocre acting don't help. This film had no emotional depth at all, which is sad considering the seriousness of the subject matter. In sum, this movie sadly adds nothing to the genre and you're probably better off watching something else.

TEST is director/writer Chris Mason Johnson's second feature, sets in San Francisco, 1985, in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, Frankie (Marlowe) is a young dancer in a dancer company, currently a stand-in for a modern dance project called AFTER DARK. The film surprisingly chooses a rather poised attitude to narrate Frankie's day-to-day life, minutely records his sexual desire, the terror towards the unknown virus and the indecision regarding a new clinic test which could be a death knell for gay men, like his fellow dancer Todd (Risch) says - we come out to our family with death. Johnson never play up the platitudinous romance which is a common trait in the genre, although from their first scene together, audience can perceive a certain spark between Frankie and Todd, but it is not until near the end, they finally strike up a tentative physical contact, again no sparks fly ecstasy, but in an all-too-casual manner and without any implication for melodramatic commitment issues. It is a telling bond between two gay men who may or may not be each other's chosen one.

Artistically, the film also feels a shade different from its peers, first of all, the original choreography fashioned by Sidra Bell is nothing if not a ravishing stunt, at the same time the camera generates its own motion by gyrating fluidly around the dancers' movements. Moreover, Johnson implants Ceiri Torjussen's constantly muffled score to reflect Frankie's sensitive mental activities and deploys his Walkman and the vintage soundtrack as a reminder of the ethos of the era. An unpretentious script encapsulates a viable life trajectory of a common figure and occasionally is effervescent with amusement, such as the jest when they try to have sex with a condom for the first time and how it could end sex- activity forever, or when AIDS has been pointedly referred as an agent to instigate the wave of monogamy. Scott Marlowe firmly projects a sensitive persona on Frankie, who resembles a more lifelike character loathing promiscuity but not a total prude too, when temptation turns up, he can also egg it on if he likes it. The film is nominated for John Cassavetes Award in INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AWARDS 2015, which is definitely a tremendous spur for Johnson to proceed with his next project, and auspiciously, TEST shares a similar texture and sincerity of Andrew Haigh's WEEKEND (2011), another genre-defining contemporary LGBT indie.