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Blackmail Boys

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Duration: 7 days

£2.53

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Synopsis

Hot off the success of Wrecked the Shumanski’s return with an even sexier follow-up.

After moving to Chicago for art school, Sam (Nathan Adloff) begins turning tricks to help pay the bills. His longtime, long-distance boyfriend Aaron (Taylor Reed) can't stand to be apart and joins him, determined to find enough work so that Sam can give up having sex for money.

When the two decide to tie the knot and move to a state where they can marry, their financial worries intensify... until Aaron spies on Sam with a prominent client (played by acclaimed indie filmmaker Joe Swanberg), and everything takes a wicked turn.

3 Reasons To buy this film

Surprisingly sexually explicit for an American indie.
Are both Shumanski brothers gay? Or is one just bi-curious?
A boldly original plot that touches on sex, politics, love and more.

Review

Newcomers Nathan Adloff and Taylor Reed play Sam and Aaron, two boys in love who are enduring the frustration of a long-distance relationship. They met in Tennessee, but have been apart since Sam left for art school in Chicago. Unfulfilled by mutual masturbation sessions via webcam, Aaron decides to join Sam in the Windy City.

After a passionate reunion, tensions arise due to the fact that Sam has been earning extra cash by indulging the unusual fetishes of strange men who are willing to pay. Determined to find money so that Sam can quit turning tricks and the pair can get married, Aaron concocts a devious plan.

It turns out that one of Sam’s clients is none other than Andrew K. Tucker (played by acclaimed mumblecore auteur Joe Swanberg), a notorious Christian activist who uses social networking sites to spread his anti-gay message to teens. The pair decides to blackmail the right-wing evangelist, secretly filming him in the middle of an aggressive sexual encounter with Sam. Andrew, however, is not one to take threats to his livelihood lying down, and Sam and Aaron soon realize that they are traveling down a dangerous path.

Filmed in a cinéma vérité style, Blackmail Boys features refreshingly natural performances – with some seemingly improvised scenes that lend the story a rewarding authenticity – and a truly liberated attitude toward nudity and sexuality. Adloff, Reed and Swanberg leave nothing to the imagination, laying bare their bodies as well as their emotions, and creating believable, sympathetic characters that stand apart from those you might expect to find in a pulpy, sexually-charged thriller.

-- Robert O'Neill

Customer Reviews

Ok... but not much more

Marty wrote on 09/12/2011:

I had a hard time with the plot. We've all seen relationships between one pretty boy and a plainer partner. But when the plain guy is supporting the pair by hustling? I don't see it.

From Romance to Extortion

Amos Lassen wrote on 05/22/2011:

Directors Richard Shumanski and Bernard Shumanski (“Wrecked”) give us a film that starts as a very sweet and sexually explicit love story between Aaron (Taylor Reed) and Sam (Nathan Adloff) and how they decide to blackmail a religious figure. Sam is in art school in Chicago and he begins hustling in order to pay bills, Aaron his boyfriend that was not with him cannot be apart and he comes to Chicago to be with him, find work and convince Sam to give up the sex for pay. Sam and Aaron move to a place where they can legally be married but finances are not good. Aaron catches Sam with a very prominent client, Andrew (Joe Swanberg) and he realizes that their days of being poor are almost over. The client just happens to be an influential Christian evangelical closeted man who is also not a very nice person.
Love and extortion hold hands here in this very gritty film which also has some wonderful humor and a certain sweetness that mixes with the darker aspects. Andrew is a rough man with a mean spirit and he is determined that he will stop gay teens from acting on their sexuality. He is also hypocritical in that he likes to have sex with men.
The boys’ plan of extortion does not work as they hoped and things go awry. But extortion is not the only thing in the movie. It looks at a man living a double life and it looks at how one reacts when one cannot accept himself foe what he is and the violence that comes because of it.
There is a lot of flesh and the film moves from sexual coupling to sexual coupling. The cinematography is excellent even when the full frontal nudity is on the screen. Unfortunately too much nudity takes away from the story. The film focuses on issues facing gays today—marriage, equality and religious hypocrisy and at times seems to forget what the film is really about but that does not affect the overall effect for long. We see the boys as non-stereotypical gays who do not spend hours at the gym, go out with fag hags and manscape. They are free spirits who are young and have only to worry about money.