Unsolved Suburbia

With this film, my Thanksgiving Day gay movie marathon started out poorly, but it is by no means the worst way to spend 64 minutes.

But I'm going to do something unusual: I'm going to cut this film some slack. Why? How many allegedly comedic, multi-million dollar productions from big Hollywood studios tank at the box office? A lot - and this is because comedy is hard.

Obviously made on a shoestring, "Unsolved Suburbia" doesn't have the talent in front of or behind the camera to make a truly great comedy. The problems with this film are legion: the sound mix was horrible, the cinematography barely adequate and the direction somnambulistic. But it seems to me everyone involved tried hard to make a good movie... and it made my friends and I laugh.

Sure, when it comes to gay comedy, I'd rather watch Gregg Araki's "Nowhere" or "Kaboom," but "Unsolved Suburbia" isn't without its charms.

Not sure why my review for this item has been deleted 3 separate times (maybe the editors are friends with one of the producers?) but here goes: 1. There is a disproportionate amount of gratuitous nudity. If that's your thing, then read on. 2. The acting is BAD...as in "hey, ever been in a movie? Well, would you WANT to be?" kind of bad. 3. The plot was just ridiculous...assuming there really was one, because this just seemed like they were making things up as they go.

It's less than optimal, as we know from the low rating on imdb. Some bad performances, poor sound quality, and lots of fast talking. For the first half of the film, the plot is just confusing. The best thing going for this is the number of good looking guys and girls. The film opens with one of the characters telling how the film ends...and suddenly, we're in flashback, starting at the beginning. Things we know: one of the guys is bisexual, and seems to have a girlfriend and a boyfriend. Someone is hiding out, somewhere... for some reason. There's frontal nudity, male and female. Someone may or may not be dead. And... that's about all we really know. Lots of talk about coming out. Or not. Keeping secrets from your family. Mistakes in the opening and closing credits ? Even the author slash director seems to have changed his name since the film was released. And why does "anybodys" wear the hat in bed? I'm guessing it's because her hair had changed and would have been a continuity problem. It's not good, but probably not as bad as it is rated on imdb. Written and directed by cheetah gonzalez, who now seems to go by steven vasquez. More confusion. Looks like many of his films are rated pretty low.

The idea of this movie was surely great: a crime happens and some people try to solve the mystery.

However the result is something in between everything. It has his funny moments, but they are rare. What are not rare are the moments that (almost) naked guys are visible. Nothing wrong with that as long as it fits in the story. Or you want to make a (soft) porn movie.

And then there is a voice over explaining everything, because it was too difficult to let the movie do so. The acting to another difficult part. A lot of the actors need some training if they every want to play a real part. But I doubt if that is their goal. Looks like they all had some fun in the few days this movie was made and didn't care about the result.

I gave the movie a 5/10 because of the idea and to stimulate other independent producers to get a lot of new stuff out, even if no or little budget is available.

This "film" (and that is being very generous) literally comes off as a bunch of twinkish 20-somethings who do webcam-sex as their "day job" deciding to get together and do a feature-length project using the "acting styles" of anyone from "Pink Flamingos" (or any early John Waters movie). With plenty of inappropriate/gratuitous full frontal nudity and a very meandering plot line, and a lead who had a major acne flair-up during the shoot, which completely damaged the continuity between scenes...but hey, it's not like this were the worst thing this film had going for it...