"Hey, how far are you
going?"
"All the way."
"That's just what I like to
hear, man. Get in. Throw your stuff in the back."
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A film that derives it title from Milton's
Paradise Lost promises a bumpy ride. John Huckert's debut feature Hard
begins when Kevin, a red haired dewy eyed little lamb of a boy-man from Ohio,
climbs into the shotgun seat of an SUV driven by a guy who calls himself
"Jack." We learn that the vehicle was stolen, the identity
appropriated from its possibly dismembered owner. Jack is a cool operator with
the hard scrabbled country good looks of The Marlboro Man, the inner demons of
Robert Mitchum's vengeful preacher in Night of the Hunter, and the
audacious seductive charm of Robert Walker's cool psychopathic stalker in Strangers
On A Train. Jack (Malcolm Moorman) is the devil in denim, a perfect storm
of manly good looks who sweet talks his victims out of their clothes, their
flesh and perhaps even their souls. Jack is, in short, the gay screen villain
we all knew would show up some day. He's no stereotype. Ninety-eight percent of
us would probably jump as eagerly as young Kevin into Jack's front seat.
Just as Hannibal Lecter needed
Clarice Starling, Jack needs rookie LA police detective Raymond Vates (Noel Palomaria)
to provide the psychological incentive to take his deadly game to a higher
level. Freshly divorced and painfully closeted, Raymond has just been called
off street patrol and given his detective's shield and a crusty old partner
with the nickname Lucky, bestowed on him because he's never had to use his gun.
As played by veteran character actor Charles Lanyer, Lucky is an avuncular
grouch from the Karl Malden school, who at one point wonders aloud, "Why
the fuck can't we get any good moral people in this job?"
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Raymond moonlights in a fake
leather jacket at dimly lit queer bars with names like The Hideaway. Picking up
studs who he practically frisks on the dance floor, checking on whether they're
trustworthy tricks, Raymond one night has the good fortune to go home with a
cop from another Southern California city, who warns him to not come out until
he's proven himself on the job, "otherwise they'll never see anything
else."
Raymond and Lucky are tested in
action when young street hustlers turn up naked, bloody and dead in the muddy
back roads of Silverlake. Director/writer (with John Matkowsky) Huckert mixes
the squishy creepy crawly horror of films like Seven with the
in-your-face black humor about the facts of death of HBO's Six Feet Under.
The murders, depicted with both psychological accuracy and an almost
pornographic specificity, cause the viewer to be both repelled and complicit,
tracing the very thin line that can separate legitimate erotic pleasure from
the most horrific crime.
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Hard becomes a deadly duel of
wits and bodily combat between killer and cop. Huckert isn't as fancy as
William Friedkin attempted to be in Cruising, where the director wanted
to show his protagonists as deadly doppelgangers whose lusts, fears and
possibly whose capacity for erotic violence might merge, but Huckert's
unflinching courage in revealing the many twisted motives behind homophobic
violence ultimately trumps the cards Friedkin was willing to play. Hard
is the film that Cruising should have been had both Friedkin and Al Pacino
not lost their nerve.
Recalling the phony Viagra ads that
warn about erections lasting more than four hours, Hard has been coming
for an agonizingly long time. Shown, thanks to the programming sagacity of Frameline's
Michael Lumpkin, an unprecedented three times at the Castro a few years ago, Hard
subsequently fell off the film map as its makers struggled to strike the deal
that resulted in this excellent DVD edition.
The new 35 mm digital transfer
captures the remarkable low budget look of a film that is a mixed genre treat
of later day noir, modern horror and real drama mixed with hard core sexual sensations.
The look neatly represents a film whose makers were constantly shooting without
permits on real Southern California locations.
Hard's special features
include Q&A sessions between the filmmakers and festival audiences, in
which the film's gay cop technical advisors detail their own painful
experiences trying to be out on the job in such virulently homophobic
departments as the LAPD. Hard should be taken up as a campaign document
to be used in questioning LA Mayor Hahn during his reelection effort, in
particular regarding a long outstanding lawsuit filed on behalf of actual and
potential LA queer police officers.
The Q&A's and director and cast
commentaries reveal amusing tidbits including the fact that an actor, disguised
as a murder victim, was temporarily placed in a real morgue body cooler which
contained an actual corpse on a shelf below. The bargain basement filmmaking
also caused there to be only one patrol car at the crime locations and only one
police badge available for the entire shoot. This fact becomes the basis for a
very dark bit of humor when the badge is stolen by the killer and left in an
especially incriminating place for the cops to find.
Finally, no other DVD in release is
likely to contain dialogue as racy as these lines overheard in the film's
police locker room.
"Hey, Sullivan, your new wife
(partner) is here." "We're not married yet."
"No woman I've ever known is
capable of giving me a proper blow job the way a queer can."