Curse of the Queerwolf

Mark Pirro knows how to do this bullshit, over-the-top humor about one idea. Seeing it alone at home, however, can't compare to the experience of seeing it in a full cinema. (31.10.2023)

A typical Pirromount product or one-man-band production by Mark Pirro, who – like many other bumblers of the late 1980s and early ’90s – found an outlet for his naïve nonsense on the perpetually insatiable video market. We can see Pirro and his fellow travellers as predecessors of the supposedly millennial mockbuster trend. Or rather, they show us that the trend of ridiculing and parasitising the mainstream is not unique to today’s audience, springing from memes and parodies on social networks, but that it also thrived on the curiosity of movie fans as far back as the VHS era (whereas in earlier decades the trend was fed by parodic porn productions and softcore dreck for grindhouse cinemas). But instead of bullshit CGI, they were armed only with desperate humour and superficial allusions. Curse of the Queerwolf is an illustrative and, to a certain extent, the best example of Pirro’s creative style. Its foundation is the oddball premise indicated in the film’s title, which in itself offers the promise of absurd entertainment at the expense of familiar formulas. A handful of scenes that perfectly paraphrase well-known, thematically related classics (here specifically Deliverance, The Exorcist and, naturally, all kinds of werewolf movies, particularly An American Werewolf in London) are derived from that premise. But in practice, they’re not enough to cover a feature-length runtime. Pirro thus fills out the rest of the film with random insipid jokes, which share with the film’s main storyline only an identically varying level of stupidity ranging from embarrassing to imaginative. Where the titular queer motif is concerned, Pirro doesn’t address any issues of correctness, but simply uses whatever jokes that happen to come to mind. Thanks to that, it remains up to the audience whether they want to see Curse of the Queerwolf as a progressive mockery of conservatives and gender stereotypes or as a bunch of homophobic clichés, or just as an insipid farce. (19.11.2023)