Director Carter Smith’s new film is a nightmarish, nerve-shredding, queer love story/body horror film. Two best friends are spending a final night on the town together in Maine. Long-haired, tattooed Dom (Jose Colon) is straight and his handsome buddy Benjamin (Cooper Koch) is gay and heading to L.A. to start a career in gay porn. The two men have a real unspoken love for each and Dom is heartbroken that Benjamin is leaving. After a few drinks at a bar Dom announces he has to make a quick, money-making, pit stop along the way.
They drive to a remote gas station where they meet surly, foul-mouthed Alice (Jena Malone), who is there to convince Dom to participate in an across-the-Canadian-border drug mule scheme. But, when he balks at having to swallow several condom-filled baggies, she pulls out a gun on him and orders: “down the hatch,” and Dom reluctantly swallows most of them. Benjamin is forced at gunpoint to swallow one baggie also.
Later down the road, at a rest stop in Canada, a harrowing encounter with a redneck changes everything for the worse and Alice has to show up to accompany the two men to a desolate cabin deep in the woods where they can void these baggies. But it is not drugs they have swallowed, but live, squirming, hallucinogenic bugs.
When the gun-wielding gay drug lord shows up things take an even deadlier turn. He is played by A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge star Mark Patton, who oozes such sleaze and malevolence you think you’ve suddenly been transported into a David Lynch film. Benjamin has to resort to using his sexuality in a desperate bid to keep them alive. The tension and stomach-turning twists the films takes in the last half of the film are infinitely shocking but will come as no surprise for those of us who loved Smith’s 2006 short film- Bugcrush.
Bugcrush was a 36-minute gay/horror short by Carter Smith (who began his career as a fashion photographer and directed commercials for Lancome and Tommy Hilfiger). This macabre mini-masterpiece was based on a short story by Scott Treleaven and it’s dark and disturbing and just brilliant. Ben (Josh Barclay Caras) is a shy, loner, in high school who becomes intrigued with the new kid in class- dark, lanky, brooding, Grant (Donald Eric Cumming). Ben goes out of his way to befriend the new kid even though his friends fear the guy’s not gay/ is probably a druggie/ and will eventually beat him up. But Grant invites Ben to come over to his house one night after school. He lives way out in the country in a secluded house and Ben goes along for the ride accompanied by two weird friends of Grant, not knowing the creepy horror that awaits him. This is sexy and scary, something like what a collaboration between David Cronenberg and Gregg Araki might look like.
Director Carter Smith’s main-stream feature was the flesh-crawling adaptation of Scott Smith’s creepy novel The Ruins, about a bunch of American kids on vacation in Mexico who unwisely head to a remote Mayan ruin. When they get there, they are confronted with some angry natives and are only allowed to continue upwards to the precipice of the ruins where terror awaits them in the form of carnivorous vines. The book was a beautiful tour-de-force. A bloodcurdling page turner. The movie also has a nightmarish intensity to it. And with some memorably unnerving icky sequences.
Swallowed is the disturbing, deeply transgressive film we knew Carter Smith could make. There’s a sexually-charged, skin-crawling, bad-dream logic to it. A sinister, deeply unsettling Valentine’s Day treat for the unhinged entomologist buried deep in all of us.
(Swallowed will be released on Digital and On Demand Feb. 14th)
