Breezy, Silly, Outlandish, and Very Vulgar Irish (in London) Black Comedy: "Nine Dead Guys"

Written and directed by Lab Ky Mo, "9 Dead Gay Guys" (2002) is a fairly sophomoric black comedy in which Kenny (Glenn Mulhern) shows up in London from Ireland and crashes with his old buddy Byron (Brendan Mackey). Kenny is shocked an appalled that Byron's only source of income is giving blow jobs to older queens. Byron assures Kenny that it is lucrative and easy. Reluctantly, Kenny starts turning tricks, too. Like many hustlers, Kenny and Byron tell each other that the are straight. Those who employ them don't comment on their claimed heterosexuality. (Neither seems to have any sexual experience with females.)

The first of the titular dead gay guys, Queen (Michael Praed), is widely assumed to have had his very big bed stuffed with money. Byron is determined to get it, as, eventually are the Desperate Dwarf (Raymond Griffiths) and an avaracious lesbian owner of a gay bar (Karen Sharman).

The dialogue is almost all about either sex or money or the linkage of the two. There is no graphic sex shown, and practically no nudity (except the desperate dwarf chasing Kenny in out of the frame briefly--he has a bubble butt, albeit petit; he also keeps telling people he is a dwarf not a midget.).

The Irish film-maker probably intended a satire of gay stereotypes, but seems to me to perpetuate rather than satirize them. I laughed a few times, but rolled my eyes many more.

The speed with which Kenny shifts from horror at what Byron is doing to joining him (and actually doing things Byron refuses to do with clients) is funny to me, but I'd think unbelievable to most viewers, gay or straight.

There's a lot of exposition -- telling rather than showing, including with some intertitles most of which are bad puns. The last four dead gay guys are all dispatched at once (the deaths not shown, only the array of corpses with a "bonus" one--that is one who was not a gay guy).

Either the original film or the transfer is muddy -- or the original is underlit and the transfer is muddy. There are no bonus features.

At the start I had difficulty with the Irish brogue and hoped there was closed captioning, but there wasn't. I either got used to it or it is thicker at the outset.

IMO "Hot Fuzz" is a lot funnier in the post-Monty Python wacky English comedy department. I also prefer "Cowboys & Angels" as a movie about Irish blokes and homosexuality. "Nine Dead Gay Guys" attained some notoriety for walkouts from showing(s) at the Cannes Film Festival. I'm puzzled that the low-brow movie was shown there at all. It won the 2002 "Audience Award for Best Feature Film" at the Dublin Gay and Lesbian film festival.

Though I'm not sure why, this is part of the series of gay freedom reviews I'm posting this month. This one is not connected to the San Francisco Bay Area. I think that Mo is of Chinese descent and grew up in Belfast, but don't know from where I got that information or impression.