The Power of the Strike
Directed & Written by Dima Barch
Starring Robert Milan Knorr, Grego Belau, Nathan William Stearns, & Alex Lee.

Horror

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Respectability politics will be the death of us all, so, as a queer person, it’s refreshing to see a slice of queer horror like Dima Barch’s The Power of the Strike, a short film that refuses to pull any punches and refuses to divide us queers into good v. bad, instead relishing in a chance to let a queer male character just be a little naughty for a change. The story involves a young man named Alex (Robert Milan Knorr) waking up with a chain locked around his neck that occasionally sends an electric current through him if he doesn’t cooperate. A voice over an intercom taunts Alex, calling him a “funny faggot” and claiming he just has to “believe in Jesus.” Then the voice presents Alex with a gun, along with a half naked man strapped to a chair—a moment I’m claiming is a Scream throwback to Drew Barrymore’s Casey seeing her jock boyfriend revealed tied up outside by Ghostface—and tells him to get on with the killing. Will Alex do as he’s told? Will he fight back? Or, perhaps, both?

So much horror, particularly since the Golden Age of Slashers in the 1980s and Ronald Reagan, has, often inadvertently, aligned itself with conservative values, forcing us to think about who ‘deserves’ to die or which characters are the ‘good’ ones marked for survival, but Barch refuses that simplified horror film logic. There are bits and pieces of the past peppered through The Power of the Strike, yet it’s never about making Alex into the perfect victim, or anything of the sort. In Barch’s short, the queer character at its centre is allowed to be imperfect, to be nasty, to be unapologetically gay without needing any kind of caveat. The Power of the Strike is a refreshingly ugly serving of queer horror that takes no prisoners, in the most literal sense.

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Bath Bomb
Directed by Colin G. Cooper
Screenplay by Michael Clifton
Starring Daniel Henkel & Anders Yates

Horror

★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

Like Barch’s The Power of the Strike, Colin G. Cooper’s Bath Bomb, written by Michael Clifton, is another tale of queer revenge, but this one takes on the traditional cheating spouse tale by using decidedly gay tactics that strike at the heart of infidelity, right in the dick. The short begins with a gay couple ready to kick back for the evening after a long day. One of them is a chemist of sorts and he’s prepared his partner a lovely, unique bath bomb to help him relax in the tub. As his partner steps into the bath and places the bath bomb inside, he starts to reveal that he’s discovered his partner’s been cheating with a hot intern at work. Of course the partner does his best to talk his way out of it, but it’s far too late for any of that now.

“It’s what the doctor ordered. You deserve it.”

It’s always fun when a horror film subverts a traditional image into something nasty, exactly what Cooper and Clifton do with the comfort of the bath bomb, turning it into an instrument of revenge and torture. The real nastiness comes when the bath bomb opens up to reveal the extent of the scorned lover’s anger, further compounded by a second act of revenge against his partner. We’re so often shown cheating partners in film but it’s rarely ever a gay or lesbian couple because filmmakers, even the queer ones, are sometimes squeamish about portraying queer couples as dysfunctional, partly because of the history of how queers have been portrayed in film. Bath Bomb, like The Power of the Strike, eschews any of those anxieties and presents a devilish little story of gay lovers torn apart and thrown into a bloody drama in the most ruthless of ways.