Brock Cravy | Innocent Boy / 2020

waiting to die

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brock Cravy (screenwriter and director) Innocent Boy / 2020 [14 minutes]

 

This short movie is the kind you wish you hadn’t seen but once you have you can’t get its images out of your head. As a Letterboxd commentator “Sarah” summarized the movie: “Innocent Boy is a sharp mixture of filth and neon with compelling performances that let the themes rise to the surface without a pointed plot. The messy narrative will confuse most viewers but those interested in queer, Southern, grindhouse horror aesthetics won't be disappointed.”

     There is no real story. A mad Texas Cowboy (Kamy D. Bruder), having evidently just finished off (as in murdering) another human being, is hurrying on his way to the off-the-road Texas bordello unlike any others.

      Controlled by Momma (Michael Vicent Berry), this little horror house, garbage lining the path to its door, doesn’t even invite its guests in. As Cooter (Ian Michaels) explains, there are no longer any women left. They don’t even take cash anymore. Maybe some “mints,” (jewelry) or diesel? The cowboy orders him in the back to the pickup truck and proceeds to brutally fuck him.

      Meanwhile, the young “innocent boy” of the title, Penny (Unique Jenkins), a young black trans boy in the midst of drug withdrawal wants to pleasure the cowboy badly, Cooter beating him, in both senses of that word, to the cowboy’s cock.

      The bearded drag queen mamma, simultaneously, is offering up some of her special milk to her completely drugged-out favorite boy, Gabriel (Saul Vasquez).

      Penny sneaks into the kitchen where Gabe lies half-way upon a counter top and the stove, trying to help him escape the attentions of Momma; but he quickly realizes that the milk she has provided him was no cum but a potent mix of drugs, and the beautiful Gabriel has passed out, pissing his jockey shorts.

      Penny knocks out Momma with a metal iron, slurps some of the precious “milk” from the floor, and attempts to get Gabe to wake up, but quickly realizes he’s gone, perhaps even dead.

     Finished fucking Cooter, the Cowboy slits his slut’s throat, only to come face to face with the escaped Penny. The cowboy stabs Penny in the leg and is about to take back his knife when Momma, having recovered, suddenly reappears, with a pitchfork she places into the torso of the Cowboy, declaring “Momma loves all her babies!”

      Having removed the knife from his leg, Penny shoves it into Momma’s heart, slurping up the blood that comes pouring out of it.

     If that sounds like a plot, I’d argue that its purpose is not narrative, but is focused instead upon presenting a series of remarkable and unforgettable images. The order of any of these events could easily be rearranged, and the significance of the events are purposeless, used only for their representation of gore and mayhem.      

     The film’s primarily LGBTQ characters, appearing in a work that would have been unthinkable a few decades before, nonetheless take us back to the darkest days of queer cinema, in which all gay, bisexual, transsexual, and transgender figures were inherently evil and of necessity were killed off before the end of the movie. One might possibly describe this work as a kind of camp version of that terrible past reality, except that none of the characters, except perhaps for Momma, are given enough dialogue to help transform the horrific images into camp, maintaining instead a kind of Southern gothic horror that reminds one of Sade, the long tradition of the Grand Guignol theater, and the later Dario Argento-like “splatter films.”

 

Los Angeles, October 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).