`Hustler White': A Raw Turkey For The Holidays?

----------------------------------------------------------------- Movie review

X "Hustler White," with Tony Ward, Bruce LaBruce, Kevin P. Scott, Ivar Johnson. Directed by LaBruce and Rick Castro. Varsity, today through Tuesday. No rating; includes explicit sex scenes. -----------------------------------------------------------------

"Well, here I am, face down in a jacuzzi," announces a Los Angeles hustler named Montgomery Ward, in a voiceover that giddily rips off the opening of "Sunset Boulevard."

It's a feeble homage, like the "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" reference that ends "Hustler White." Yet these are almost the only signs of creative juice in this deadly "romantic comedy" from underground filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, whose "Super 8 1/2: A Cautionary Bio-Pic" had a midnight-movie run here last year.

Supposedly the narrator is dead when the film begins, like William Holden's hustling writer in Billy Wilder's 1950 classic, and his name is apparently more than just a reference to a department store. Wilder originally wanted Montgomery Clift for the role.

A model and music-video veteran named Tony Ward plays the lead role here. The character describes himself as "no one important, just a two-bit hustler with a couple of porno credits under his belt."

In flashbacks, LaBruce himself plays an impatient German writer, Jurgen Anger, who is new to Hollywood and quickly falls for the unimpressed Montgomery. Several gay porn stars appear in half a dozen cheerless sex scenes that would easily earn the movie an NC-17 rating if it were to be submitted to the ratings board.

It's not all skin. The movie tries for John Waters-style grossness, especially in its treatment of cigarette burns, skin-carving, razor mutilations and traffic amputations. But none of this conveys the tacky charm of Waters' "Desperate Living" or "Female Trouble."

It also lacks the amusing messiness of "Super 8 1/2," in which LaBruce played a washed-up actor/director, "an existentialist trapped in a porn star's body." That movie wasn't much, but it looks like competent filmmaking when compared to this turkey.

LaBruce threatens more of the same. He describes this as the first in a trilogy. As an homage to the late Krzysztof Kieslowski, there will soon be a "Hustler Red" and a "Hustler Blue."

"Hustler White" was first shown here as the closing-night event at last month's Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Good thing it didn't open it.