David Boreanaz

It’s not easy out there for a reviewer of gay-themed movies. Oh sure, a film might have a gay plotline, star a gay actor or be about a gay character. Maybe there’s the obligatory gay best friend for the female lead, or a gay director, or at the very least, a camp sensibility.

And then sometimes the whole gay grab bag gets opened up and spilled out in all its glorious profusion, and you have Suffering Man’s Charity, the new film from out actor-director Alan Cumming. It premiered last month at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, and co-stars David Boreanaz (Bones), with cameos by Anne Heche, Karen Black, Carrie Fisher and out actor Jane Lynch.

Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir described the film as an "outrageous horror-comedy carefully designed to offend the entire population of the planet," adding that it’s "either a total disaster or a midnight movie cult hit in the making." It’s definitely not a total disaster - it’s just too funny to be written off like that - but if you walk into Charity expecting a straightforward horror movie, you’ll be confused. In fact, if you walk in with any sort of firm expectation at all, you’ll be disappointed.

Unless, that is, you’re expecting your typical, everyday gay horror/comedy/romance/psychodrama/homage to classic films/splatter movie/thriller with David Boreanaz in a bra and panties, tied to a chair with Christmas tree lights while being tortured to death by his repressed gay landlord who’s in love with him. And that’s just the first half. After that, it gets weird.

Cumming’s Johnathan Vandermark starts out as a somewhat pathetic but almost noble figure, part Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and part faded gay music teacher in small-town, pre-Stonewall America. Until, that is, he has a quite spectacular psychotic break and all hell breaks lose - pretty much literally.

Johnathan has taken in a struggling writer/hustler with the unlikely name of Sebastian St. Germain who, in the tradition of hunky rent boys everywhere, proceeds to take advantage of his lovelorn benefactor as long and as fully as he can, while apparently putting out nothing in return except his infrequent presence in the house - a crumbling, old family mansion with so much presence it’s virtually another character in the film.

When Johnathan discovers Sebastian St. Germain is planning on moving out of his house and taking up with Karen Black’s character, he snaps. He calls her a crack whore (Black herself describes her character as a "drugged nymphomaniac") and sends her hightailing it into the rainy night in panties, fishnets and high heels. Not completely unreasonable under the circumstances, although his histrionics aren’t exactly within the bounds of normal psychology.

And then he knocks Sebastian out, dresses him in a bra and panties, ties him to a chair with Christmas tree lights and lashes him bloody with a cello bow in a truly twisted game of 20 questions.

The scene is long, intense, violent and so over the top it left some reviewers shaking their heads and accusing the film of not knowing its own identity. But the film’s constant genre-switching is one of its greatest charms - if a splatter movie can have charm, which somewhat inexplicably, this one does.

That certainly doesn’t mean Cumming pulled it off completely. The ending in particular veers off target, with a somewhat different pace and tone than the rest of the film. And there’s definitely no happy ending to tie it all up when it’s over. In fact, it’s hard to fully understand where we’re left at the end at all.

Cumming is brilliantly uninhibited in his portrayal of Johnathan. He queens out, rationalizes and pines for Sebastian without holding anything back. It’s exhilarating, even though whatever sympathy we might have felt for him is used up long before the movie’s over - right around the time, in fact, when he decides that, having accidentally killed Sebastian, he might as well claim the dead man’s novel as his own.

David Boreanaz’s Sebastian has the brooding thing down, and you have to applaud any actor willing to let himself be tortured to death wearing lingerie and colored lights, with snot and blood running all over his face. Without that scene, he’d be forgettable in the role. With it? Good luck ever getting it out of your mind. His final moment of defiance, covered in blood, gasping for air, shifts Sebastian from opportunistic parasite to human being in an instant, engendering not so much sympathy as empathy in the audience - just in time to see him die.

Henry Thomas (ET’s Elliott) is pitch-perfect as Johnathan’s old friend (and presumably, ex-lover) Eric, a celebrated concert pianist. His gentle attempts to take care of the wildly dysfunctional Johnathan without getting sucked into his insanity give the film some much-needed heart. His final scene, where he makes a brief appearance at a glittering literary gathering to congratulate Johnathan on his success as a novelist, is one moment of pure sadness in a scene otherwise dripping with hypocrisy and ennui.

Charity’s women don’t get a lot of screen time, but Anne Heche and Karen Black don’t need a lot of time to make a big impact. Carrie Fisher is wasted in a short cameo as a reporter.

In one of the best scenes in the film’s second half, Jane Lynch turns up at Johnathan’s home while he’s in the middle of a long, involved conversation with Sebastian’s blood-smeared ghost. She’s been sent by the New York publishing house to photograph Johnathan for the book jacket, and she is understated and perfect as the only truly normal character in the whole movie.

So, is Charity headed for mainstream success? Hell no. It’s just, frankly, too weird. Since the unofficial slogan of Austin ’s downtown business area is "Keep Austin Weird," South by Southwest was the perfect place to premiere the film, and it will be interesting to see how it’s received elsewhere. It’s showing next at the Philadelphia Film Festival, and then hitting the LGBT film festival circuit, including Provincetown, Mass., and San Francisco in June. Fans of classic films, black comedies, Cumming, Boreanaz, horror flicks and movies with lots of blood in them should love it. Everyone else (if there’s anyone left), not so much.