The Men Next Door (2012) – A gay comedy by Rob Williams – Trailer

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This effort was trying its best to be a gay-only romantic comedy and failing. . . interestingly. The pace was leaden, the plot contrived, the dialog iffy, and the fag-hag friend, who never did spontaneity well, never really seemed to add anything to this movie (funny that it’s the token straight woman who did the least to move this story along. . . ). We’re asked to believe in a threesome, when two of the men are father and son, giving the third man ample time to make up his mind while continuing to date them both. The film never really treated the moment of “ick, you’ve had sex with my father!” that even the most liberal threesome would have experienced. It never really explained why the son character would keep dating the man who was also seeing his dad–THAT’s a degree of devotion we would need to see, more than this film ever shows it, to suspend our disbelief. Once you realize, about half an hour into this film, that real people would never really act this way, you either turn it off or continue to engage with it as farce or light-hearted, not terribly successful comedy.
It deserves some props, though, as a gay effort at film-making. This story just would not translate to the heterosexual milieu (I’m not sure it even works in the gay world). This would only make sense in the male-only world of open relationships and casual sex (a woman couldn’t have the sexual history the main character of this film has, without getting called every insult in the book). This makes a concerted effort to be a unique and original sex comedy, with the sexy scenes and the off-color banter a mainstream romantic comedy would have had. That it doesn’t work, and that many of us keep watching it anyway, despite its obvious flaws, suggests if we keep trying and keep failing just as interestingly, a uniquely gay romantic comedy genre might one-day be at hand.