Dante's Cove

I reckon everyone is already more familiar with Dante's Cove than I was. It appears to be broadcast on something called Here!, a gay premium cable channel. We're not heavy cable consumers at the chez nous, and I'm not even sure that Here! (And what's with the name? Are they copying some French cable channel called Voici!?) is a premium option. Anyway, when I saw season one of Dante's Cove offered on DVD, I figured I'd take a chance and order it.

As both a love story and social commentary on the evils of (pagan) religious homophobia, DC is pretty bad. The plot is not so well worked out, and the acting is not quite up to soap opera level standards. As softcore porn goes, however, DC is an absolute success. There is an abundance of smooth, buff, young men with asses to die for. Gregory Michael (as Kevin) in particular has a bottom so pretty that I'd love to stick my tongue so far up it that we'd be French kissing. But, really, there's not a bad ass in the bunch.

If you're the sort of person who reacts badly to the twinkification of porn, then this movie (I believe it was probably broadcast as a series on Here!, but on DVD it's formatted as a long movie stretching across two disks. This is unfortunate because it kept me up -- holy double entendre, Batman -- the whole night before I was to leave on vacation) is not for you. I would submit, however, that any movie about a fictional religion in a fictional location is probably best taken as fantasy, and the boys are the stuff of fantasy. In reality, I wouldn't necessarily choose these guys over guys who are less waxed and who actually possess tan lines. But eye candy is different. And you have to remember that it's fantasy so that you can get past some of the eye rolling silliness. Every boy on the Cove, for example, spends every shirtless moment covered by a perfect, even sheen of perspiration. I guess it's very humid there.

There are times when the attempt to maintain a sensible plot get in the way of having enough sex scenes. It's particularly noteworthy that the frequency of hot man-on-man action drops as the film progresses. I haven't done any research on season 2, but I fear that there will be even more plot and character development and even fewer (perfect) ass shots.

My other complaint about the porn delivery is that there's too much girl-on-girl action. (Also, Tracy Scoggins give me hives. Not that there's any real Scoggins-on-anybody action so far. Thank Cthulhu.) I have nothing whatsoever against lesbians or lesbian porn, but, really is there much overlap in the audiences for gay male and lesbian softcore porn? I know straight guys are supposed to love to see two girls making out or whatever, but when a lesbian sex scene starts during DC, I mostly just start to wonder whether I have to do something with the laundry. I can only imagine that lesbians feel the same way about two boys fucking, so if Here! is trying to reach out to the lesbian part of its audience by including some double-vagina action, it's probably only boring its core audience without expanding into the lesbian segment of the market because the ladies are sure to be unengaged by all that hot male action at the start of disk one.

Anyway, I'm definitely going to buy the second season of Dante's Cove. It looks like they've added more hot boys to the cast, and the cheesy horror movie is probably the genre where bad acting by cute boys is least likely to annoy and most likely to let you and your friends laugh while you're recovering from the last hot sex scene.