House Of Boys

This one left me kind of torn by the end. The AIDS crisis has been covered on screen so many times already, dramatic weight and all, that a movie really needs to bring something fresh to the table to stand out. I get that this is an older production, but honestly it doesn't add much that feels new. The writing swings into pretty heavy melodrama once act two kicks in, and the shift is so jarring compared to act one that it almost feels like a different movie took over halfway through.

The story kicks off in 1984 with Frank, a teenage kid who's openly gay, confident, and constantly chasing sex. His dad tells him to peel the gay stickers off his car, and that's all it takes for Frank to pack up and head to Amsterdam with a couple of friends. Those friends ditch him almost immediately, leaving him broke and homeless, until he stumbles onto a place called House of Boys, a club where the performers actually live on site. His looks and swagger get him a spot there, he starts performing, and for the first time in his life he actually feels settled somewhere. He's drawn to pretty much every guy in the house, but it's his roommate Jake who really gets under his skin, even though Jake keeps insisting he's straight and has a girlfriend back home. Frank keeps performing and keeps circling Jake, and things shift when Jake's girlfriend cleans out his money and leaves him crushed. Frank steps in to comfort him, and slowly Jake starts opening up to him too, and before long the two of them are a couple. Then everything turns on a dime, Jake gets into an accident, ends up in the hospital, and comes out of it with an AIDS diagnosis. The club asks him to leave, so he and Frank move in together, and the back half of the movie is basically watching Frank care for a rapidly declining Jake, with a devoted doctor and nurse standing by them the whole way. Their whole circle of friends eventually rallies around the couple too, showing up for Jake and backing Frank. It all wraps with Frank traveling to Morocco, a place Jake always wanted to see, to scatter his ashes into the sea as the sun goes down.

Here's the thing about this movie, it's not that either half is bad on its own. It's that they feel so disconnected tonally that you start to feel like you're watching two separate short films glued together instead of one story. What really carries the whole thing is the guy playing Frank. He's got energy, he's got charisma, he's fun to watch and sexy and just radiates presence on screen. Jake, on the other hand, did nothing for me, and I genuinely struggled to understand what Frank saw in him. Both his character and the performance were just fine, nothing more. I also can't figure out why they set this in Amsterdam at all, since literally everyone speaks flawless English and this story could've played out anywhere in the US without changing a thing. The real problem is the screenplay itself, stuffed with the same one note gay stereotypes we've all seen a thousand times, and every beat gets underlined and spelled out through clunky dialogue. For a story like this to land, you need to actually feel something for these people, so that when the death at the end hits, it actually hits. That connection just never showed up for me. By the end it plays like a passion project made for TV, plenty of ambition and heart behind it, but not enough skill or budget to pull it off. (5/10)