Entertainment :: Movies
Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat by Frank Paiva
EDGE ContributorSaturday Nov 14, 2009 Who cares if the buffet is all you can eat when they aren’t serving anything appetizing? The third film in this increasingly tired gay sex farce series needs more substance. Not substance in the serious dramatic content sense of the word, but substance as in believable situations, genuine characters, and/or organic jokes. Cardboard cutout characters just can’t be funny, no matter how many pop culture references you give them.
The first Eating Out was a refreshing change from the overly straightforward coming out films that plagued the tail end of the indie film movement in the late 90s and early 2000s. Unapologetically gay and full of camp characters, goofy sex, and attractive men, it was a guilty pleasure good time. The 2006 sequel was more of the same, but without the new varnish of the original. This latest entry is stuck in a rut. Not only does it bring nothing new to the table, it just repeats what happened in the first two films over again. It’s like the naked male version of Saw.
Call it a victim of an expanded marketplace, if you like. With cable networks like here! and Logo around, plus the rent anything world of Netflix, a cavalcade of ultra-low-budget gay sex comedies inundate the public every year. While eye candy is nice, a gay man can only take so many films featuring charming models that can’t really act. This writer has hit his limit.
The plot follows Casey (Daniel Skelton), an insecure twink who hopes to lure his hunky co-worker Zack (Chris Salvatore) by creating a fake online profile using photos of his friend’s smoking hot straight ex-boyfriend Ryan (Michael Walker). Before you can say bad version of Cyrano, everything goes wrong. Ah the poorly guided methods for obtaining love in our new century.
Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat does score points for casting six out gay actors in its lead roles. (One of which, John C. Stallings, was a contestant on The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency for the so inclined.) But the boys aren’t given much to do other than take their shirts off.
The script doesn’t have any great ideas for Mink Stole or Leslie Jordan either. Saddled to stock character parts of the supportive aunt and the wise old LGBT Center organizer, neither actor can even chew the scenery. There’s simply nothing there.
Should this series get a fourth chapter, its creators will need to push the envelope on humor. There are some good early signs here, including a terrific joke about how everything at the LGBT Center is named for Matthew Shepard. A character refers to babies as walking abortions, and another character calls a particularly bad sexual situation 69/11. There’s a market for drag queen one-liners coming out of the mouths of male models in their early 20s. The rest of the movie just can’t be a bland slog to sit through.
Frank Paiva is a playwright and actor whose freelance writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Not for Tourists guide, the Seattle Weekly, and on MSN.com. He lives in Brooklyn.
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