Two disappointing movies. All the wrong reasons.

The movies:
Eating Out
The Amityville Horror

The reasons:
Hot. Shirtless. Men.

Matt and Brandon and I wasted spent two precious evenings (well, Brandon wasted spent only one) together this weekend sitting through two of the dumbest movies ever. Since we went solely for the beefcake, we knew the movies would be disappointing—so we have no one to blame but ourselves. But we didn’t realize HOW disappointing they’d be, so I’m still going to find a way to pin this on the Republicans.

Eating Out is a predictable, intellectually insulting Harlequin Romance/gay fable with some of the worst writing, most wooden acting and most ham-handed editing I’ve seen since Clint Eastwood’s last overhyped, overcelebrated cinematic fart. To make matters worse, the Eating Out technical budget was so low (seven dollars and change, I’d guess) that all the dialogue sounds like it was recorded in a Dumpster, and fully half of the footage is so dark I still can’t believe the director didn’t demand his money back from the development lab at Wal-Mart.

The plot in a nutshell: Impossibly hot boy likes wacky girl. Girl throws herself only at gay boys. Impossibly hot boy has cute-ish gay roommate who likes girl’s smokin’ hot gay roommate, who won’t give him the time of day. Impossibly hot boy pretends to be gay and goes on date with smokin’ hot roommate to gain access to girl and maybe steer smokin’ hot roommate in the direction of cute-ish gay roommate. Somehow, impossibly hot boy gets “outed” to his impossibly supportive parents (who want to march right out and join “PFLOG”). Faggot stereotypes are trotted before the camera. Sausages are served for dinner. Hilarity ensues.

On the plus side, there’s a lengthy soft-core porn moment between impossibly hot boy and smokin’ hot roommate. It gave me a total euphemism. And there is plenty of footage (some of it even with adequate lighting) of both boys in tight shirts … or no shirts at all. One look at the movie poster shows just how pretty their nipples are, and that alone makes the $9.50 admission a whole lot less painful:

But the movie is nothing more than porn without the fucking. Aside from a few funny moments and enough plot holes to blow the tires on a fleet of Hummers (Get it? Plot holes? Hummers? HA!), Eating Out is just something to fast-forward through until you get to the nipples and abs. And even then, your enjoyment is undermined by a painful reality that can be summed up in four simple words: Porn has real fucking.

The Amityville Horror is a whole different kind of bad. Maybe I’m just not a horror movie fan. Maybe it takes more than gore and ghostly faces in the mirror to scare me. Maybe I’m just too distracted by implausibilities like when the comically named George Lutz, a professional contractor, uses nails to install drywall or when a girl killed at close range with a shotgun ends up with a single bullet wound in her forehead or when the protagonists are soaked in torrential rain in the movie’s last act but (SPOILER ALERT!) the moment they escape the sun is out and the birds are chirping and Charo appears on the hillside with a chorus of hippies to sing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” in six-part harmony.

Granted, the technical aspects of The Amityville Horror are miles of severed limbs above those of Eating Out. And the acting is way closer to Hollywood standards than to those of the Tri-County Dinner Theater. (Get it? Eating Out? Dinner theater? HA!) And the implausibilities are far more palatable—even when they’re dripping with the blood of the innocents. And I’m a total sucker for stories involving (SPOILER ALERT!) ancient horrors bubbling to the surface to destroy the lives of modern characters, so I did enjoyed that part of the movie.

I also enjoyed the reason I dragged Matt there in the first place: Ryan Reynolds in his droopy, low-riding pajama bottoms. The man is built like a brick shithouse and RIPPED like a dress on prom night. In fact, his rippling, bare torso undermines the horror quotient of every scene it occupies—simply because you can’t get scared when his thick, manly abs are staring you right in the crotch eyes, telling you it’s OK and everything’s gonna be all right and why don’t you come here and give me a long, shirtless kiss, you big stud.

Let’s take a moment to contemplate the beauty of Ryan in his PJs:

WHEW! And now let's take a moment to imagine how much manly musclebutt is showing over that low-riding waistband—and how, if Ryan would just lift his left arm a bit and then turn to look over his right shoulder, maybe we could get a peek for ourselves.

And then let’s take a moment to go find our clippers and chop that ridiculous-looking privet hedge off his face even though it will end up buried in the pillow anyway.

And finally, let’s take a moment to pinkie-swear that we will NEVER pay another $9.50 for a bad movie just to get a fleeting glimpse of a hunky man with his shirt off. We’ll at least have the self-respect to wait until the movie comes out on video.