Cruising

WARNING: This blog was done while watching the "notorious" gay serial killer flick "Cruising" with Al Pacino. You may want to skip this if you're, um, "sensitive" regarding gay S&M matters.

Starts right off with some good old fashioned police oppression. Kinda gross, actually. So much for the cop fantasy.

Wow, the first cruise/pick-up was a hoot. "Cool. I never made it with a Martian before."

OMFG the first kill was VERY bloody/graphic. The killer has a creepy, almost unreal voice.

Wow, Al Pacino looks really young.

Ooooh, goin' undercover: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHjFxJVeCQs

OMG, it's shopkeeper Powers Boothe explaining the hanky code to Al Pacino. Too. Fucking. Weird. (and this performance is from the same year that "Guyana Tragedy" came out--which totally traumatized me)

Okay, I can't wait to see what the "psychological payoff" is going to be for this stupid sounding, "You made me do that" line. (it turns out there wasn't one--or I missed it/didn't get it! anyone?)

Oooh, Ms, Thing getting into it now - shaking her ass at the leather bar, sucking on an ether-soaked rag, snap snap snap. :) Didn't he also play gay in "Dog Day Afternoon"?

Okay, so Al Pacino was just able to call the Columbia University Registrar, not as a cop, and get the street address of a student w/o even providing a reason. Oh, such innocent, blood-drenched, S&M, gay killing days we used to live in. Sigh.

WTF? Pacino is quite the bossy little sex bitch!

I don't know which is weirder--Karen Allen as Al Pacino's wife, or a young James Remar as the pissy gay dancer neighbor (he's done a million things - inlcuding playing Dexter's dad).

Hmmm, I'm guessing the ending is supposed to be ambiguous.

Well, it's no "French Connection" or even "The Exorcist," but it wasn't as awful as I thought it'd be.

Outrageously fun/creepy fact on the movie/director to end with:

In 1972, director William Friedkin - huge after The French Connection (1971) - is shooting his spiritual/psych-horror The Exorcist (1973) in downtown New York. For a scene requiring mock brain-scans of the possessed lead character, Friedkin films a real-life radiologist and his assistant, Paul Bateson. Flash ahead to 1979. Friedkin is planning an adap of Gerald Walker’s novel ‘Cruising’, inspired by a real-life serial killer carving up leather boys in the city's underground gay-bars and dumping their body parts in the Hudson River, wrapped in black plastic bags. When he learns that his Exorcist radiologist assistant Bateson is currently awaiting trial for the post-coital slaying of gay film critic Addison Verrill, Friedkin decides to pay him a visit to do a little research into the psyche of his cruising killer. Bateson is later imprisoned for life - for the Verrill murder - but not before dropping hints while in custody that he was also the body bag killer. The latter cases remain unsolved, but there's every chance that Friedkin had not only inadvertently consulted the actual killer at the heart of Cruising while planning the film, but had also cast him in a film he made years before it.