And so it was that Champ and I attended the Inside Out Festival screening of Dead Boyz Don’t Scream tonight.

(insert “Brokebrain Mountain” joke here)

Our expectations were adjusted appropriately (downward) by perusing the film’s website beforehand. And it’s always fun to go to Inside Out screenings, to run into pals-we-haven’t-seen-for-some-time and congregate in a dark room with Toronto’s very hottest, coolest gay men.

It’s hard to criticize the film for being chock-full of plucked, primped, hairless, muscled, undertalented, unsexy, fake-tanned, Kinsey-5 dimbulbs playing straight, since that’s the whole point, as are the slasher-genre tropes of phony blood and wonky editing, not to mention nonexistent continuity. But it’s easy to criticize it for being nothing more than that.

Following the half-dozen or so who fled before us, we got up half-way through and left, knowing that Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was just a few minutes walk away.