THE LIVING END

THE LIVING END (Directed by Greg Araki. Starring Craig Gilmore, Kikey Dytri, Darcy Marta)

'FUCK the world' announces the graffiti in the opening of Greg Araki's deliberately nihilistic, gay reworking of the have gun will travel genre.

Luke (Mike Dytri), a HIV positive, socially negative drifter has a gun in his pocket but he is glad to see you. Surviving a murder attempt by a couple of lesbians (this example of New Queer Cinema may attempt to put the boot on the other foot for homosexual men but it is too rampantly misogynistic to include women, even gay women), an attack by a gang of queer bashers and a shoot out with an offended wife who has caught him in bed with her hubby (who she kills, apparently for not realising bisexuality is no longer fashionable), he hooks up with the newly diagnosed Jon (Craig Gilmore) and they head off on an almost suicidally violent rampage to L.A.

As a piece of film-making, The Living End has a rattly, low-budget energy, borrowing liberally from early Godard but throwing in pieces of every gun happy road movie you can remember. But while its cartoonish mix of sex and violence occasionally delivers an adrenaline rush, its lack of psychological development or political conviction makes it almost entirely unengaging, coming across not so much as an Extremely Butch Cassidy as Thelma and Louise with dick for brains.

As a piece of polemic it is purposeless, Akari apparently detecting no irony in dedicating his film to "the hundreds of thousands who will die because of a big White House full of Republican fuckheads" and evoking a world in which life is shit and then you die so you might as well take a few innocent bystanders with you. His homosexual anti-heroes are presented as so far outside of society that they have simply got no stake in it, yet one cannot shake the suspicion of insincerity in this pose. Neither man can act to save his life and presumably won the parts because they look like they might have stepped off a Calvin Klein underwear poster. With barely a cough to betray their medical condition, this is HIV as a fashion statement, investing them with a kind of James Dean death-wish cool.

The Living End wears its nihilism on the short sleeves of its punky t-shirts. For all it has to say about AIDS, it might as well be spitting in the wind.