Gay porn has its camp elements. Vampire movies also have their camp moments. Therefore, one would think that SONS OF SATAN would be a high velocity campfest. Unfortunately, gay porn pioneer Tom DeSimone (using the alias Lancer Brooks) has combined these two promising genres, and come up with a 67-minute snoozefest.
The runaway success of DEEP THROAT made storylines de rigueur in porno flicks. And sometimes, the results could be very clever or, at least, interesting. And that's what makes watching SONS OF SATAN so frustrating: the "coulda-been" factor.
A young man goes in search of his missing brother who, unbeknownst to him, has willingly joined a faction of gay satanist vampires. About half of the movies deals with the brother's indoctrination with the cult; the second half with the discovery of the older brother snooping's in the house, and what happens to him by the end of the movie.
As bland as that short synopsis sounds, the movie is even duller. The majority of the film's short running time is devoted to scenes of gay copulation in various forms, and these go on and on to the point of abject boredom (not unusual in pornographic films). And most of these scenes are statically shot, and from a distance, which doesn't exactly heighten the arousal factor much. And things really go south when the cast is asked to handle the sparse dialogue. The entire cast is so wooden, it's like staring at a lumberyard. Despite the potential campy possibilities inherent here, the cast doesn't seem to be having any fun with it, and therefore, neither does the audience.
But the movie's biggest disappointment has to be the handling of the supernatural elements of its so-called plot. Apparently, in this instance, having gay sex turns young men into vampires (the pre-story sexual orientation of brothers Jonathan and Chase is never mentioned, so we don't know whether they were gay at the outset or not). But since the vampire element is barely even touched upon, it begs the question: why introduce it at all if you're not going do much of anything with it? It just becomes an extemporaneous factor here. And the whole "having gay sex even once will turn a person gay" cliché that seeps through, while it was still a fairly common misconception at the time of the film's initial release, is still pretty sad, especially coming from an openly gay director.
1992's LOVE BITES, for all its faults, at least tried to do something with combining gay sex and the old vampire chestnut. SONS OF SATAN, on the other hand, may go down in cinema history as the first combination gay porn/horror movie. But that's really all that can be said in its favor.
The runaway success of DEEP THROAT made storylines de rigueur in porno flicks. And sometimes, the results could be very clever or, at least, interesting. And that's what makes watching SONS OF SATAN so frustrating: the "coulda-been" factor.
A young man goes in search of his missing brother who, unbeknownst to him, has willingly joined a faction of gay satanist vampires. About half of the movies deals with the brother's indoctrination with the cult; the second half with the discovery of the older brother snooping's in the house, and what happens to him by the end of the movie.
As bland as that short synopsis sounds, the movie is even duller. The majority of the film's short running time is devoted to scenes of gay copulation in various forms, and these go on and on to the point of abject boredom (not unusual in pornographic films). And most of these scenes are statically shot, and from a distance, which doesn't exactly heighten the arousal factor much. And things really go south when the cast is asked to handle the sparse dialogue. The entire cast is so wooden, it's like staring at a lumberyard. Despite the potential campy possibilities inherent here, the cast doesn't seem to be having any fun with it, and therefore, neither does the audience.
But the movie's biggest disappointment has to be the handling of the supernatural elements of its so-called plot. Apparently, in this instance, having gay sex turns young men into vampires (the pre-story sexual orientation of brothers Jonathan and Chase is never mentioned, so we don't know whether they were gay at the outset or not). But since the vampire element is barely even touched upon, it begs the question: why introduce it at all if you're not going do much of anything with it? It just becomes an extemporaneous factor here. And the whole "having gay sex even once will turn a person gay" cliché that seeps through, while it was still a fairly common misconception at the time of the film's initial release, is still pretty sad, especially coming from an openly gay director.
1992's LOVE BITES, for all its faults, at least tried to do something with combining gay sex and the old vampire chestnut. SONS OF SATAN, on the other hand, may go down in cinema history as the first combination gay porn/horror movie. But that's really all that can be said in its favor.