The Little Twink That Could
Thursday, April 21, 2016 at 3:23PM Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on King Cobra.
Film festivals make for weird bedfellows, and so it was settling in to see King Cobra - the new true crime flick detailing the rise of gay porn star Brent Corrigan and his sordid side-wind through murder - at 9am on a Sunday morning. I literally passed people dressed up for church as I went to the movie theater. Now I could make the case that I was also set for a different sort of worship, getting on one's knees and what not, but that'd be cheap, and we wouldn't want to be cheap. (No, never.)
Certainly not while talking about a film so hilariously devoted to luxurious cheapness. Think back on the film and I bet your mind will be less flooded with memories of oiled pecs than it will be by leather couches abandoned across stretches of beige suburban carpets, shades drawn, piles of video games seemingly stacked in every corner.
Anyway I'm as shocked and surprised as any of you that King Cobra is killer. Funny, sexy, and bottomlessly absurd, a wall-fly's view of the ass-smacks of the perfectly self-involved, with solid to straight great performances all around. Garrett Clayton is the lube that sticks the film together and he slides it straight into third, juggling every ball(s) the movie can throw at him. And Christian Slater is especially lovely as the lonely and aged-out home-bound pornographer inviting the world's twinks into his living-room and falling in love with every last one - his romantic weariness in a lesser film would read only as lecherous, but Cobra wants to walk the line, and it magically manages to.
Indeed the best thing about the film is its refusal to demonize sex - I was worried as it plowed further along into its darker places it would go where all these stories inevitably exhaustingly go, getting preachy and conservative and making us feel bad for the desires that half an hour earlier it was gleefully exploiting. I mean yes its a story about young people slipping into the sex industry and yadda yadda first-degree murder, but its characters also find strength and self-actualization and even love through their bruised but beautiful sexuality. You can take this one to the spank bank - it's ribbed for all of our pleasures.
Grade: B+
