I honestly think this might be the first time I’ve actually enjoyed a proper horror BL. I’ve checked out a few others in the past, but they usually felt a bit unpolished or amateurish—I can’t even remember their names, to be honest. This one is definitely a slow-burn rather than a fast-paced romance, tucked away inside a world of supernatural mysteries and fantastic secrets. You can tell the production is high-quality and well-researched; it feels like the creators really pushed themselves to give the audience something fresh. If you’re into BLs mixed with suspense and ghost stories, this is right up your alley. Just a heads-up: it’s a massive time investment. There are 12 episodes, each over 75 minutes, and the finale is basically a two-hour movie. The story follows Khem, a young guy in his twenties whose life is getting harder by the second because of a heavy family curse that lets him see ghosts. There’s this terrifying rule in his family where the boys don’t live past age 20, so hi...
This film is both comedy and also shows dysfunctional characters in Icelandic areas. This is an identical plot to the German movie Guys and Balls but where the Guys and Balls was funny and very interesting, the same cannot be said about this film. Eleven Men Out is a very depressing, serious, and awkward movie where the acting is barely passable. And I did not like that the main character's son gets caught in the middle of his father coming out and his mother being a slut and a drunk. Ottar, a famous local football player playing for the first and most popular team in Iceland announces in the beginning of the movie that he is gay just to get a story and a picture in the local magazine. Life is not the same then. He is forced to quit the team. Being a rebel, he joins a local third rate local gay team to show everyone that he can still be gay but a great footballer. The rest of the movie is the tribulations of him adjusting to his new life and team. His father is a psychiatrist and a member of the board of his former team. At first his former team chastises him but toward the end this team tries to get him back. His ex-girlfriend was a beauty queen with a son now. The worse part is when neither of them cares too much about their son, where father is having random sex with men and mother is being a drunkard slut. There is a game at the end of the movie between the gay team and this straight team. The gay team fails miserably.
This film is joyless and ugly, often chauvinistic, sexist, biggoted and, well, all confusingly so. All the female characters are saps, whores, or drug-addled. The men are cruel or pathetic, or 'lost'. This film fails, mostly, because of a flaw in the story. You never get the chance to know or like Ottar beyond the plain facts that he is an attractive, spoiled, self-centered egotistic dummy who does whatever he wants without really thinking his actions or their consequences through. The cover of the film is seductive. How we wished, the film had half the potential.
Watch 'Guys and Ball's instead. That one is much better. (4/10)
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