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I had seen a still from this film with the two hunky dudes tied to a bed on some gay site a few months back and thought this might be fun so I was more than surprised when a DVD copy of PLAYROOM turned up for review courtesy of Films in Review editor Roy Frumkes. It is not unusual when a successful franchasie like the SAW series generates copycat films like this one tries to be. The major, and I mean major, difference is PLAYROOM has not one single moment in its entire running time to recommend it even as the so-bad-it-is-good school of filmmaking.

What is of interest to me is the relentless thread of homophobia that remains a constant throughout this film’s running time. The script is filled with homosexual slurs spoken by five men who cannot keep their hands off each other. The manboys are hugging and kissing each other and at one point even dry humping on a couch just to show that what?.. they are just one of the boys in the band.

The five men are non-actors, with the two buff dudes showing some ability at porno, gay or straight. The first twenty minutes of the mess are spent showing the guys as teenagers partying in their backyards before marriage or college, yet when they turn up in the future they still have not aged, and that includes acting like freshman jocks who long to go down on each other.

The second half of this so-called film takes place in Philadelphia, sometimes referred to as the “city of brothery love “- well at least they got the location right for what their libidos needed to do, in a manly way of course. This boys’ night out takes the fab five out on the town. After an afternoon of coke sniffing and beer busting to beat the band, these boys party like it’s 1999.

The “sex” club they wind up in is a high school musical take on a gay bar, if a gay bar had female strippers who looked like they were on crack. The bartender is a flock of seagull coiffed hustler who eyes the boys like a milkshake. The club is run by an old queen who resembles Mike Myers in “54,” and during his introductory close-up he is copping a feel from one of his muscle boys in leather, all this while taking a moment to lick the face of the hooker who will eventually take our studs to funky town.

The scene moves quickly as the two hookers drug our heroes’ cocktails and drag them down the alley to the title’s location, an isolated “playroom with two beds and loads of hand cuffs, and with closed circuit television on every wall. From this point the script such as it is veers into total twilight zone logic as the old queen enters the playroom now that the studs have banged their individual whores into submission only to be handcuffed by them, with a well placed sheet between their muscular legs. I mean show your junk, dude, or get out of town. Why are American’s so frightened by the penis? The idiots that put this together made a point of showing the vagina of the stripper in the club so what is the deal with hiring these muscle studs and then covering up their privates even when the script called for humiliation and torture. The only people tortured in this flick is the audience.

This clubowner Queen, besides being evil and horny, is also a diva who makes with huge arm gestures to indicate just how out there he is, so in a moment that might have been really transgressive. He mounts one of the studs, screaming for him to spit on him which he does and then he asks the immortal question that has taken 45 minutes of screen time to arrive: “you wanna suck my cock?” This request is met with a cigarette being put out on his face. Needless to say nobody gets what they want in this sorry excuse for a film. If the producers thought that by introducing some studly eye candy into the mix was going to make a difference, then they should have ponied up some sex.

This film is terrified of sex period, except for a three-minute segment of the studs banging the whores when they are first introduced to the playroom, this film goes nowhere in the direction of sex or violence until the last act.

The script has not one original thought or set piece, everything in it has been recycled or done to death, and better, by someone else. The finale is just beyond the pale and it occurred to me by this point that it was no accident that one of the guys is a dead ringer for the over-sexed lead in the American version of QUEER AS FOLK, while the surviving guy is a dead ringer for the actor from the AMERICAN PIE series. This film is a virtual Frankenstein of parts and limbs from every other movie these morons have ever watched.

The end of this film has both hunks about to be fucked in every sense of the word, yet once again nothing happens, at least nothing you want to happen. The Queer as Folk stud is tied to a table and his cock cut off while the other is chained to the wall. The one moment that was so sick it bears mention occurs when the Mike Myers Queen grabs the severed dick and yes, he puts the bloody thing in his mouth. There is a surprise in that the whole thing was put together by the nerd in the group who decided early on if he could not fuck the studs then why not just fuck them over….the two men that wrote and directed this have never really left high school. One can only pity which one of their dads put this mess on his Visa so the boys could play movie people.

The director and the screenwriter of this abomination should have everything that happens to the cast in the last ten minutes of this film happen to them, and on camera.

A warning to the wise: avoid this like it was, well…1999.