Alessandro De Gaetano | Butch Camp / 1996

camp butch

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alessandro De Gaetano (screenwriter and director) Butch Camp / 1996

 

Alessandro De Gaetano’s Butch Camp is an absolute mess of a movie. In the very same year of innovative and adventuresome LGBTQ+ movies such as Nik Sheehan’s Symposium: The Ladder of Love, Stewart Main’s Twilight of the Gods, John Greyson’s Lilies, Deepa Metha’s Fire, Hettie Macdonald’s Beautiful Thing, and the Wachowski’s Bound, Butch Camp employed numerous worn-out stereotypes homosexual and heterosexual, featured an attractive but endlessly whining hero, Matt Grabowski (Paul Denniston), and involved him and others in outrageously unbelievable plot machinations revolving around Matt’s determination to turn from a patsy into a man ready to battle the heterosexual jerks who beat him up—and later beat him off.

     Unbelievable contradictions abound. Although Matt is an over-organized, encyclopedia-spouting businessman, his best friend is a drag queen, Danny (Bill Igraham), whose most profound pieces of bitchy advice involve that Matt stop letting himself be pushed around and that he find a man and settle down. Matt may be a pencil-sharp banker, but he can’t seem to be able to even get the pile of folders of people asking for loans off his desk. And, although he has given up on gay sex since his lover left him three years earlier, has been taken advantage of by a roommate who steals all his furniture and leaves without paying a cent of rent—unless one can describe his letting Matt listen in on all his groaning sexual exploits as a payment of sorts—and himself refuses to even introduce himself to any gay men he finds attractive, Matt somehow “accidentally” fucks an over-sexed female hairdresser Janet Cockswell (Jordan Roberts) in a hot tub. Finally, so we are told, the Martin Short-size cutie has an eight-inch cock. Evidently, no producer bothered to question the director’s basic skills of logic.

     The worst part of the movie concerns Matt’s attempt to get tough through his enrollment in a Butch Camp run by the prison-camp like female dominatrix Samantha Rottweiler (Judy Tenuta), whose sessions are about as interesting as a movie about a high school gay wimp who can’t cope with gym class, Tenuta trying her best to be a sort of LGBTQ+ friendly version of Shirley Stoler in Lina Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties, with a soupçon of Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove tossed in turning her, in the end into a vision of “camp butch.” Her students rarely get to visit the places where they are sent for the macho trials, and the plot is slowed up by meaningless machinations, particularly when events have already changed radically in Matt’s life. No one explains why he continues with his classes after he’s caught his man.

     Indeed, at the other end of that bathtub orgasm is Miss Cockswell’s boyfriend, Rod Cassone (Jason Terisi) who turns out to be a sweet Italian boy who immediately falls in love with Matt. Perhaps if the movie had focused simply on the series of events that lead to Matt and Rod coming to realize that they are the perfect match, and cut out everything else, Butch Camp (under a new name of course) might have been a very sweet, romantic gay movie. Certainly, both males, particularly the constantly clumsy and confused Denniston, are attractive and appealing enough to even lend De Gaetano’s confused film a number of quite charming moments such as when dining a restaurant with what in those days was called a “gypsy violinist,” the two rise and dance, the straight couples joining in. And it might have been nice to truly discover what they find in one another.

      Do we really need the not very funny put-downs of Danny, the Hot Lips Houlihan-like shenanigans of Cockswell, the silly posturing of Rottweiler, and—evidence of how far this film thought it had to go in order to please its audience—the hidden drag tendencies of the head banker Mr. Whittlebottom (Duane Sharpe), who out of drag makes Matt’s life so miserable?

      I agree with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s film critic Leslie Rubinkowsi’s assessment, that the “same shallow story and bad acting that infect mainstream movies have trickled down here,” although I’m not sure I’d characterize an independent gay movie as being located somewhere “down” from the Hollywood tripe of the same year such as Jerry Maguire, Braveheart (winner of the Academy Award for Best Film), Apollo 13, Independence Day, and The Nutty Professor.

 

Los Angeles, August 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).