Frisk

This is another of those art films that goes nowhere but gets there in style. This film is gritty and fascinating in a sick, can't help but look at the car wreck on the highway sort of way. It's not bad enough to turn off so you keep watching hoping that sanity will be restored. It won't be but you watch nonetheless.

This film is about a gay man who has had fantasies about killing other men since teenage.

Honestly, I see little point in the existence of "Frisk". It is a poorly made B movie with poor acting and poor production. The plot is not well explained or particularly engaging. Apart from the main character Dennis, there is no character development. So most people in the film seem like random people, making the plot more confusing to follow.

I am very disturbed by these perverted and sick minds portrayed in the movie. It is not a film for me.

I make it a general rule to dismiss any comment by someone using "trangressive" somewhere in the review.

Folks I braced myself for a horrible, bloody, unredeeming movie and came away underwhelmed. Frankly, there is no gore and there is less blood in the entire movie than one sees in the first 3 minutes of any slasher film.

The only reason to rate this movie low is because it is a B-movie with cheap production values and some wooden acting. Other than that, it managed to keep my interest throughout the entire film.

I cannot believe people would boo this film. That is absurd. If the characters were straight, no one would have a problem. But the main characters are gay and all of a sudden, we now have "social commentary" instead of just mindless entertainment.

Except for some male frontal nudity, this movie could be shown on network TV, although late-night.

For those that believe all gay movies should be affirming, this movie is not for you. For those that are looking for yet another gay romantic comedy with lots of eye candy and bad acting, well there is some eye candy and bad acting, but not much romance or humor.

It's not the greatest movie, it has flaws, but I didn't come away feeling as if I totally wasted my time watching it.

Ignore the prudes. See the movie. Make up your own mind. You will be shocked at how mild this movie is given the strange plot and subject matter.

Perhaps it's not entirely fair for me to review this movie since I walked out in disgust about halfway through and came back only for the last ten minutes. But I agree with Dennis Cooper: The literal interpretation of his book makes the film an entirely predictable exploitation flick - in terms of narrative and in the amateurish way it's all presented - instead of a compelling and artful auto-interrogation of f*cked-up desire. The most damage done is by director Todd Verow's inability to transpose the colloquial first-person of the book into something that makes sense for a movie. At this point in his career, he doesn't have the skills to pull it off, which results in a decision to make the serial killing explicitly real. I suppose Verow thinks that makes his movie more transgressive than Cooper's book which only tells me he didn't understand the book in the first place. Verow can be a creative and entertaining filmmaker - his Once and Future Queen is a scream; and Anonymous showed promise - but Frisk is dull and obvious, and only a half-star away from being complete garbage.

Pretty awful. Even though I had read and loved the book, I couldn't make heads or tails of the movie. Although one thing needs to be pointed out, in the films brief conventional narrative moment, Craig Chester is brilliant as the semi-comatose whore. When his trick for the evening is trying to drag his lifeless body out of his house, Chester wakes up to ask if there was anything he could have done better for them. It's hard to explain, but in a way, that one moment almost gives this terrible, rootless film a sense of humanity that leaves an impression. I would watch the first 30 minutes again for that scene alone.