I finally saw Curse of the Queerwolf. In a nutshell: Larry Smallbut is happily involved with a woman, but his best friend Richard Cheese wants him to come aalong with him every night in search of tawdry one-night-stands. It’s during one of these encounters that Larry is bitten by a ‘dickanthrope’ – a man who turns into a gay transvestite at the full moon. Larry must deal with this life-changing disease, and keep it from his girlfriend – and avoid being killed by the torch-wielding mob. (Okay, it’s a very small mob. But they have a silver dildo!)
Mark Pirro made A Polish Vampire In Burbank in the early-'80s for a paltry $2,500. He shot it on super-8, and IIRC developed the film at Thrifty Drug Store. It is in APVIB that we first meet a queerwolf. When audiences responded well to the character, he decided to make a feature-lenght queerwolf film.
Queerwolf follows the Universal werewolf film of the '30s quite closely. And why not? A send-up should follow the original. It also contains '80s pop-references. Off the top of my head, I immediately think of a line lifted from Poltergeist: ‘They’re queeeeeeer!’ says a little blonde girl.
Now, you might think such a film is offensive. I’m not gay, so I can’t personally say if it is. But Hollywood’s gay community seems to like it, if the documentary on the DVD is to be believed. With the popularity of Too Wong Foo, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and such, I think it’s reasonable that many in the Gay community like it.
Queerwolf is a much better production than APVIB. The camera work is better, the lighting is better, the acting is better, and they had more than twice the budget. Not that that’s saying a lot! It’s still a campy movie. One thing I like is that it, like APVIB, was shot on super-8. It’s not as clean as the larger formats, but 16mm and even some 35mm from the '70s doesn’t look all that great. The video transfer could be confused as being from an older 16mm print. Super-8 is actually a decent format for video.
Curse of the Queerwolf isn’t a great film, but it’s a lot of fun and I can certainly understand how it has such a cult following.