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REVFF26: Body Blow

Synopsis

Consider the erotic thriller, which reached its apex around the late 1980s–mid 1990s before the internet shifted how people consumed adult content and cinema became more globalised. Now out of fashion, it's been mostly relegated to the straight-to-cable and streaming world. But if Australian writer/director Dean Francis has anything to say about it, the genre is back and on the big screen where it belongs! And it's gayer and kinkier than ever, chock full of cock cages, puddles of sweat, and enough neon to power Tokyo.

Meet Aiden (Tim Pocock), a musclebound and "totally hetero" cop struggling with a self-diagnosed sex addiction. His latest assignment? Go undercover and infiltrate Sydney's gay district to investigate criminal malfeasance. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. But when he meets the alluring twink fatale Cody (Tom Rodgers), a bartender-cum-sex worker who works under the thumb of a feared drag queen crime lord, both set course along a path of destruction that will make audiences feel something down under while Down Under.

Body Blow takes everything that made the genre sing and refracts it through an unapologetically queer lens. Here, clear influences of Lyne, Ferrara, De Palma, Verhoeven, and Friedkin slam hams with Araki, Schumacher, and Mitchell, then does a bump of Cannon Pictures' exploitation output, turning hard-boiled neo-noir tropes into high camp. It's excessive, bloody, and bloody brilliant, pulsatingly sleazy and devastatingly romantic in equal measure.