Review of Fluffer, The

Introduction

Cashing in on the success, this Boogie Nights clone lacks the emotion and spectacle of its Hollywood big boy, excuse the pun!

With a mixture of teen angst, some large doses of camp comedy, drugs and sex, which is mainly simulated gay male sex, this movie seems to alienate its audience from the start. I can`t imagine any heterosexual male being comfortable with this pictures main theme, let alone having any real connection with the main characters.

The movie has our hero, Sean, renting a copy of his favourite movie, Citizen Kane. How he actually manages to get the worst titled gay porn movie, Citizen Cum, is beyond me.
He, strangely decides to watch said porn flick and becomes, again, strangely intrigued by its star Johnny Rebel. Sean decides to head off for the production company with a hope of meeting the star. He soon finds out that Mr Rebel is straight and is only in the gay porn industry for the pay. Johnny is also a bit of a bastard and gets what he wants by playing everyone off against each other.

What follows is Sean`s obsession with this bigoted and big headed muscle bound idiot that just feels plain idiotic too. We get murder, comedy and sex all rolled into one big movie that hasn`t got the style or universal appeal of Boogie Nights on which everyone seems to compare it.

Video

The picture on this 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen edition is grainy. It still retains a good range of tonal quality with solid blacks and brilliant whites but that grain is always evident. This is probably a film stock issue as most low budget movies use film with a low shutter speed which help with low light environments and eliminated the need for high cost light rigs. Its downside is a washed out rough grain image. This doesn`t detract and kind of adds to the seedy nature of the film.

Audio

This Dolby digital 5.1 mix is effective but is very muted and offers very little in bang for you buck, another pun? The surrounds are barely used and when they do spark up it`s for little more than ambience of music. The dedicated bass channel seemed to be lacking too. On my amp a small graphic equaliser type display shows the active bass level, on this movie it hardly moved. Movie like this do benefit from decent base. It adds depth of field to quiet tracks and great enveloping ambience to music. More care is needed on these issues.

Features

Trailers and production notes for cast and director, not very inspiring.

Conclusion

This film fails to deliver something for everybody and is, and I regret to say it, probably a film for gay men. The disc is simple and average in production and offers very little in terms of sound and vision quality. Watch out for this one in the buy 3 for £10 section.