Psycho Cop (Wallace Potts, 1989)

Let me tell you, I’m a very humble person, believe it or not. But one thing I know I’m good at is how to use the famous Gaydar, this weird, strange feeling we gay people have to understand who else is gay. It might be hard for straights to understand, but imagine you’re living in a world where you’re in a minority and you need to guess who you can flirt with… no wonder we developed the Gaydar, which I’m very sure works in real life, not as a joke or supernatural gimmick. It just works.

The awesome Kelly, over at Twitter, asked me if I ever seen Psycho Cop – and I hadn’t, so I directly ordered the first one from Australia where it has an easy accessible DVD release. It arrived very fast and I sat down one night to watch it, with my boyfriend beside me working with his computer. He rarely watches the same movies as I do. After a while, after absorbing the atmosphere, I felt I needed to share my view on the movie so far with him: “I’m 100 % sure more or less every man involved in this movie was gay”.

And of course, I was right.

Well, I can’t prove every man involved was/is gay, but after some research I found out that director and writer Wallace Potts was a former adult film director, gay porn of course, and also the former boyfriend to dancer Rudolf Nureyev – he was also the research archivist for the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation and collected most of Nureyev’s work in two places, the New York Public Library and at the Centre Nationale de la Danse in Paris.

While the story is very simple: six (or something) young people goes on some trip and gets killed one by one by a wisecracking cop. It’s obvious that Potts, who was the man behind the movie, casted the most handsome and gayest men he could round up during the audition and somehow created a movie that could have been a movie-within-a-John-Waters-movie. There’s much camp and bitchy dialogue and fashion that only could be applied on bourgeois gay men at the end of the eighties.

AND I LOVE IT! Yes I do. This is way better than intentional campy movies, because this is the real deal. This is what a movie inside the John Waters universe should have looked like - with less sex and graphic violence. I’m afraid it’s a dry movie in every funpartment, but the cheap-looking, TV-style atmosphere with tons of bright blue and pink colors and those magical haircuts you only saw on posters at the hairdresser in the eighties, early nineties, worn by wonderfully femme male actors and confused-looking women.

For being a gay man I might sound a bit homophobic now, but Psycho Cop actually makes every prejudice regarding gay men come true – with trying to be as straight as possible. Sometime, when I’m really really bored, I will make a supercut of all the gayest things in Psycho Cop. I hope sometime this year. As a horror – or slasher – movie it works crap. It’s no tension, the one-liners from psycho cop himself are extremely weak, but the character is fun and cheesy and hard to dislike. He’s actually killing a man by putting some kind of electric baton inside the man’s mouth, which in all honest, seems like very gay. Anyway,  I can understand there was a sequel four years later, Psycho Cop Returns (directed under alias by Adam Rifkin). I hope to see it someday! 

Comments

[Megatron]

"It might be hard for straights to understand, but imagine you’re living in a world where you’re in a minority and you need to guess who you can flirt with… no wonder we developed the Gaydar, which I’m very sure works in real life, not as a joke or supernatural gimmick. It just works."

I thought gaydar was an urban myth......

"Well, I can’t prove every man involved was/is gay, but after some research I found out that director and writer Wallace Potts was a former adult film director, gay porn of course, and also the former boyfriend to dancer Rudolf Nureyev – he was also the research archivist for the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation and collected most of Nureyev’s work in two places, the New York Public Library and at the Centre Nationale de la Danse in Paris."

Ah, I see.

"This is what a movie inside the John Waters universe should have looked like - with less sex and graphic violence. I’m afraid it’s a dry movie in every funpartment, but the cheap-looking, TV-style atmosphere with tons of bright blue and pink colors and those magical haircuts you only saw on posters at the hairdresser in the eighties, early nineties, worn by wonderfully femme male actors and confused-looking women."

hahahahhahahha....I remember those posters, they were awesome....or well, maybe not awesome but sometimes trendy producers in Hollywood would make sure that everyone looked like that.

"It’s no tension, the one-liners from psycho cop himself are extremely weak, but the character is fun and cheesy and hard to dislike. He’s actually killing a man by putting some kind of electric baton inside the man’s mouth, which in all honest, seems like very gay."

Fellatio with baton?

I get it....

"Anyway, I can understand there was a sequel four years later, Psycho Cop Returns (directed under alias by Adam Rifkin). I hope to see it someday!"

Lookng forward to that review, good review and thanks Fred.