So this time around I was stuck watching a movie called The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror. And terror abounded as I prepared to watch the movie. You see, it was up against some stellar competition, including a Steven Segal vampire flick as well as the Stephen Baldwin picture Sharks in Venice. Not only that, but my friends and I have been burned before. There was a “movie” “about” a zombie rabbit we tried to watch and simply couldn’t. I use quotes since it was only a movie in the sense that any motion picture is a move-ie and I hesitate to use the term “about” since it wasn’t really about anything. I don’t even think I posted a review of it since we got through about 20 minutes and then had to turn it off or risk seizures. I feared this may be the same quality, come to kill me.
And in that context I feel safe saying I was pleasantly surprised by The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror. It wasn’t good but it actually pulled off campy moderately well. The premise is that a group of gay couples all end up at this bed and breakfast run by a psychotic right wing Christian mother and her sexually repressed daughter. It’s done on video tape but the quality is relatively good. The couples show up one after another and each one is a pre-made stereotype. You have the young guy with his older sugar-daddy, there’re the two artsy lesbians, the two lipstick lesbians, a butch leather couple, a resident fag-hag. They’re here to be killed, not to break stereotypes.
And break stereotypes the do not. There’s some nearly anonymous cheating, illicit rendezvous in the pool house and then the killing begins. And it’s actually kind of funny. It’s so over the top bad, with over the top crappy props and over the top bad acting that it actually is campy. A lot of movies fail at camp because they try to be a funny movie on no budget. This succeeds because the parts you aren’t laughing with, you’re laughing at.
By the end there are a couple of what would be called twists in a normal movie but in this are really just the logical evolution of “what can we do to make this a little sicker”. Think Ed Wood raised on John Waters and this is pretty much that bastard child.
On a scale of -5 to +5 The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror gets a +2 for entertainment. If it were trying to be a real movie it would be a -2 but that is surely not the case here.
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