This weekend Total Recall makes a return trip to the big screen, banking on the classic "Is he or isn't he ... a superspy that goes to MARS?!?!" formula for the foundation of its thrills.
Colin Farrell's hetero head-tripping got us thinking about which freaked-out flicks have fallen on the more fabulous end of the rainbow. Here's our list of the 10 gayest movie mindf*cks.
The Crying Game
Not the first, but probably the best "She's a He!" shocker, Neil Jordan's gritty crime drama/romance pulled the carpet out from under pretty much everyone when the film opened in 1992 with a promotional campaign urging viewers to protect the movie's central twist. The film was slyly groundbreaking for its ho-hum handling of the film's two central gay storylines, but I still think that giving the film's legendary pickle shot to a character named "Dil" is one of the best bad jokes in cinematic history.
Terror Train
Alpha Scream Queen Jamie Lee Curtis starred alongside David Copperfield (?!) and humpadelic Hart Bochner in this claustrophobic train-set slasher that featured one of the most unexpected "mystery killers" in the genre's history: It turns out that the boy who Jamie and her popular friends humiliated years ago (by tricking him into making out with a corpse, ugh) is hiding amongst the New Year's Eve revelers on the train, but he's hiding in plain sight ... as a woman. Gives the term "scream queen" a whole new angle, don't it?
Psycho
Okay, so I promise that not all of these entries are about cross-dressing, but it would be criminal not to include the film that wrote the book on gender bait-and-switches in this list. Plus, there's the fact that while Norman Bates was assuredly hetero, the actor who played him was not - and his queerness was undoubtedly one of the reasons that Hitchcock picked him for the role. For better or for worse, Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates paved the way for generations of mama's boy murderers to come.
The Skin I Live In
Okay, if you haven't seen queer auteur Pedro Almodovar's latest twisted romance, you should stop reading this entry and go see it now. Seriously, you owe it to yourself. But if you're really sure you want to know why this film makes this list without experiencing its brilliance for yourself, read on: In Skin, Antonio Banderas' brilliant plastic surgeon takes revenge on the boy who he believes raped his daughter and caused her to lose her mind (and her life) by abducting him and slowly turning him into a woman that he then keeps locked up as a sex slave. Of course, being Almodovar, it's much sexier than it sounds - and by making the film's central relationship a gay one without letting the audience in on it, Almodovar has made the intersection of obsession and love as messy as ever.
Fight Club
Gay author Chuck Palahniuk's nihilistic romp is basically a gay feverdream come to life: The Narrator's invention of the Fight Club and all that comes with it is pure wish-fulfillment about the power of male sexuality window-dressed with the ripped torsos of dozens of barechested fratboys. IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME SHIRTLESS.
Cruising
This one's a mindf*ck for all the wrong reasons - but if you're like me and find Cruising far too hilarious to take offense to, you might enjoy revisiting Friedkin's ridiculously misguided gay underworld cautionary tale. Does hanging out in gay bars turn Al Pacino into a queer-killer? More importantly, is that really Bruno Kirby in that fisting scene?!
The Tenant
Wait, did I say that I was done with cross-dressing? I LIED. Beleaguered director Roman Polanski put himself in his own crosshairs for this wonderfully wicked psychological thriller that finds his character becoming obsessed with the suicidal former tenant of his apartment - to the point that he dresses in her clothes and recreates her tumble out the window. As the posters claimed, "No one does it to you like Polanski." If they were referring to eyeshadow, they were certainly on to something.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Please. Two hot dudes (three, if you count HAL) locked in a delightfully appointed midcentury modern space station that single-handedly bring about the next phase of non-reproductive human evolution? It doesn't get any gayer than that. Plus: That disco Victorian bedroom is TO GO EXTINCT FOR.
Black Swan
Gotta give some due to the ladies - and Darren Aronofsky's twisty psycho thriller about a wound-up ballerina whose idea of cutting loose is to have sex with and then murder her best galpal (but did that really happen?) is among the best in its class. Barbara Hershey may have keened "Where's my sweet girl??" but we say who cares - we like the crazy, Winona Ryder-stabbing one better.
High Tension
On the other end of the killer lesbian spectrum is this gruesome and shocking - and overall patently offensive - bait-and-switch horror flick from France that found itself quite clever for making the film's heroine (a plucky lesbian who witnesses the slaughter of her best friend's family) and villain (a coveralled man with a box cutter) the same person. She killed them all because she was crazy in love with her bestie, see? No. And we also don't see how she could be driving two cars at the same time, either. I like a good parlor trick as much as the next guy, but not when it stoops to such lows for a gag.
BONUS!: Naked Lunch
One word: buttholes. That's pretty much the only thing I understood about David Cronenberg's engaging but impenetrable adaptation of William S. Burroughs' book, which features talking anuses, a graphic gay sex murder, and the line "homosexuality is all around the best cover story an agent ever had." Again, NO EFFING CLUE.
