“The Hole” represents one of the most imaginative concepts and least imaginative executions scored in a comedy film. The film’s set-up is a rich parody of the Japanese “Ringu” series: guys watch a mysterious videotape and then receive a phone call telling them they will turn gay in seven days. Sure enough, a series of self-proclaimed heterosexuals are exposed to the strange video, receive the strange phone call, and then find themselves a week later engaged in rather heated mano-a-mano action.
And that’s where the film goes fatally wrong. What might have been a hilarious satire on gay stereotyping within a testosterone-driven environment becomes little more than endless sequences of hunky guys pretending to have sex (and the emphasis is on “pretending” – any idiot can see the actors are not really “into” their roles). What’s worse, the sequences are utterly boring thanks to an inept cast which has serious problems feigning arousal (they also have problems reciting dialogue, but that’s another matter). This is among the least erotic adult films ever made.
“The Hole” has elements where genuine comedy could’ve been oomphed up into something original, most notably a queer pop ditty one of the newly-gay sings (“I should have known something was up / The day I trimmed my public hair, / The day I started lifting weights / In my designer underwear”). But the fun flattens out when the movie turns into a flaccid-softcore piece of voyeurism. And that’s where “The Hole” becomes “The Ho-Hum.”
