I’ve got to give kudos to “Gay By Dawn” for starting their movie with the single most ludicrous and yet still possible premise I can recall hearing. Basically, “Gay By Dawn” is a found movie, much like “The Last Broadcast” or “The Blair Witch Project”. Following a fire at West Texas’ Crystal Lake Drive In in 1978, a storeroom of films was found on the property. Unseen for decades, someone decided to release one of these lost drive-in titles.
And though the setup is unique and interesting, it’s the content of this lost movie that will really get you. Basically, it’s a bunch of Texas boys in all their stereotypical glory (hats and shotguns required) telling ghost stories around a campfire, including the story of a boy who got lost in the woods and still wanders around to this day. And when, much like the audience, one of the Texans asks just what is so scary about this, we discover that the boy is in fact…
…GAY.
Trust me, they’re going to announce this little factoid as breathlessly as I portray it here, and it’s only going to get more ludicrous and more riotously funny from here on out. And though the film is too short to really set up any kind of plot, it gains one critical core advantage–nearly every second of this movie is either setting up a new joke or hitting us with the punchline. If you want to know just how ludicrous, let me put it this way: the end credits include one for a “Boa Master”. As in “feather”.
Yeah.
All in all, “Gay By Dawn” only has one real problem–it’s entirely too short. Considering how uproarious it was, I can only imagine how utterly brilliant a feature-length version would have been.
