HARD REVIEWS, ARTICLES & INTERVIEWS

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Cultcuts.com
by Scott W. Davis

"What's harder for you, keeping the cops from finding your you're gay or keeping the gays from finding out you're a cop?" - "It's all hard."

Times have changed, thank God. Looking back at the last fifteen years, it is impossible not to concede that the acknowledgement and tolerance of homosexuality has made some amazing strides, particularly in mass media. As recently as the mid-1980s it was expected of most gay and bisexual professionals to remain in the closet for the benefit of their careers, their families and their standing in the community. Gay characters were rarely shown on television, and when they were, it was mostly as sniveling supporting characters, trashy comic relief or the rare brave soul dying from a side effect of their own lifestyle. Now, most popular forms of entertainment have conceded that gays are – gasp! – just like everyone else. The acceptance has grown considerably from the time when even the word “gay” was said in hushed scandalous tones or, worse yet, as the ultimate insult of machismo. But while we pat ourselves on the back, we must remember that mass media is not the world. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Tolerance is not what we have made it out to be. As our recent elections have proven, there is still a majority of voters who would prefer that gay and lesbian couples did not share the same rights as their straight peers. Make any kind of excuse you want, if you voted against gay rights, you voted against equality and reminded the world just how much ignorance and hatred are still present. You won't get any kid gloves from me. Times have changed, thank God, but they have not changed enough.

If this sounds like a soapbox, it is a necessary soapbox to understand what is going on in John Huckert's film HARD . It is impossible to separate the film's politics from its natural progression, because like life, both play into each other. This is a work that sparks debate about prejudice and discrimination. It may be a thriller, but the perceived stigma of homosexuality is right up front. The film is very confrontational and graphic. A good portion of the people who will chuckle at the silly antics on QUEER EYE FOR THE STRAIGHT GUY are unfortunately ill-prepared for a project like HARD .

I say "unfortunately" because the film is quite good. We meet Jack (Malcolm Moorman), a serial killer who rapes young men before torturing and killing them. Control is a big issue for Jack. He lures men, chatting them up. He seduces them and in the cases where the victim is willing at the outset, Jack soon degrades and tortures them to the point where they beg for a mercy that will never come. Jack is very methodical and he depends on the anti-gay sentiment to continue his killing spree. He finds the boys, the younger the better, who society has given up on – the hitchhikers, the street hustlers, and the most wallflower-like men in the gay bars. The standard view seems to be that they will likely kill themselves soon enough anyway, so why waste more than a cursory glance at the crimes? It is this ignorant and cold attitude that has kept Jack moving on a wave of murder that spans over fifty victims.

On the other side of the coin is Detective Raymond Vates (Noel Palomaria, who also co-produced), a young kid recently transferred to a homicide precinct full of older and more conservative cops. He is paired up with Tom Ellis, a straight arrow veteran of the force who has no time for bullshit. He has been nicknamed "Lucky" since he has never been shot at and never had to draw his gun. Of course, we know that will change. But if Vates seems distant from his co-workers, it's because all of his attempts to fit in are half-hearted. He is guarding himself from the onslaught that will befall him if his secret gets out. Vates is gay, and he is unwilling to have his homosexuality destroy his career like it destroyed his marriage. For companionship, he cruises the gay bars at night. He never tells his partners that he's a cop, and even gives the name "Ramon." The irony is that Ramon is Raymond's real name. His more respectable name is the guise in which Vates protects and serves as a cop, but his true identity is as an emotionally guarded gay man. While investigating the serial killings, Vates questions Jack as a witness, but Jack calls him back later and confronts him with the notion that he does not conceal his homosexuality well. They meet for casual sex but in the morning, Jack lets him know exactly who he is. Through his actions, he puts Vates in a difficult position. Vates can come out of the closet and expose himself to the prejudice of the police force, or he can remain in the closet and be treated as a murder suspect himself, possibly causing more deaths in the process. It would seem like an open and shut case to most of us, but in truth, each option has deadly consequences.

HARD is more graphic than many films of its type. While most gay-themed films discretely close the bedroom door before we see anything, HARD is just as explicit in its depictions of sex as many "R" and "NC-17" rated films. It’s not so much that the sex is gritty and honest but that part of the sex is also purposely disturbing. Raymond may be our virtuous hero, but Jack certainly isn't. His treatment of his sexual partners and victims is pretty much the same, hence the film tends to be just as violent as it is sexual. It’s this engaging honesty that keeps HARD moving. The fact is we don't see much of this. We're tempted to call the sex and violence in the film "gritty," but I wonder if we would say the same thing if it were a straight-themed film. HARD is the type of film that exposes the ugly and most benevolent sides in all of us, whether we’re conservative or liberal.
Congratulate Huckert and John Matkowsky for writing a smart, thrilling and emotional movie that easily captivates the viewer. The film may be a great political statement, but let's not forget it's also a pretty good thriller. HARD is suspenseful and harrowing. The threat presented in Jack is very real. He is a rapist, a murderer, and even a pedophile. Some of his more subtle comments suggest that he was subjected to sexual abuse in his past, which would cause a continuing cycle of pain for any similar surviving victim. He acts as if his actions have no consequences for him and perhaps they don't. His methodical and straight-forward approach make him more of a menace than say the exaggerated antics of a standard mass murderer like in THE LAST HORROR MOVIE.

The acting is fantastic across the board. Moorman will get the most attention for his creepy and all-too-convincing portrayal as Jack. But also worth noting is Palomaria, whose Vates is a very conflicted human being. This is a man who is forced not only to prove himself as a police officer and bring down a monster, but also to confront his greatest and most guarded fears. Perhaps the biggest revelation is Charles Lanyer in the supporting role as Vates' partner and eventual friend. In your standard thriller, the partner by definition would be an under-developed character. Lanyer, on the other hand, makes this one of the most intriguing good cops I've seen. His delivery is 100 percent convincing and when you think you know where his character is headed, he will surprise you by revealing another side to his personality. This is not only great writing, but it's great acting as well.
Strange that the climax of the film should come as such a letdown. Right up to this point, we have had top-notch writing, acting and direction. Then somehow, in the important climax of the film, everything slips in quality. The dialogue, which has been insightful and chilling in just the right doses, becomes a bit melodramatic. At one point, Vates even yells, "You're not God!" bringing to mind a hundred serial killer cliches. The acting seems a bit more forced. The twists and turns of the plot no longer surprise and can be seen a mile away. Had Huckert only retooled a ten-minute portion in his third act, he may have had a four-star winner here.

HARD has been given the full Special Edition treatment. It's packaged in an unrated director's cut, which I imagine is more graphic than it is brief theatrical run from the mid-90s. The way the film is shot naturally leads to scenes in which certain colors seem washed out and the image seems a bit soft. With that in mind, the picture quality holds up pretty well throughout, although there is a lot of grain. There are two commentary tracks. The actors commentary features Moorman, Palomaria, Lanyer and Michael Waite. A technical commentary involves Huckert, Matkowsky and in a nice switch, two technical advisers from the LAPD, Sgt. Dennis R. Herrera and Sgt. Mitchell Grobeson. Extras are packed too. We get to see Mitchell Moorman's auditions for the part of Jack. There are a series of Q&A segments totaling 28 minutes, featuring Huckert and other crew and technical advisers. The extras are rounded off with trailers and – get this – a whopping 47 minutes of deleted and extended scenes. Yikes!

Even taking into account the so-called climax, HARD is still a very good film. It’s a creepy and suspenseful serial killer thriller. But also, it raises important questions most thrillers won't touch in a manner that would put most viewers off. Sometimes, viewers need to be challenged, both intellectually and emotionally. In that regard, HARD is a success. <top>

Bare Nerve Magazine

**** out of four stars
You always here stories about independent films going through hell trying to be made. HARD is no exception. It seems almost imaginable what the makers of this film had to go through to get made. Most of the trouble came during post-production. On the DVD, it is explained in one of the extras that many editing studio’s refused to work on the film. There main concern wasn’t the violent images in the film but rather a gay kiss that was shot. Luckily for us, the filmmakers managed to have the film edited without changing the story.

This film stays true to its title. This is a hard movie to sit through. Not because it is bad filmmaking but because it was so honest and brutal. This is not a horror film by the general sense of the genre. But I was horrified by this movie, none the less. Not only because of the sick violent images we are shown but because of the lead character is treated by the people he works with simply because he is gay. It’s hard to imagine that gay cops were really treated like this and still are treated like this.

The film opens with a very intense opening and never lets up from there. From young men being raped, penis’s being bitten off and people being pissed on, HARD is a very controversial and disturbing picture that never lets you sit back and relax. It’s a twisted joy ride through the darkest pits of the human mind… but I loved every minute of it.

Noel Palomaria (Det. Raymond Vates) plays the part of wounded and harassed closeted gay cop very well. He hit most of his emotions perfectly and made me feel sympathy for him. I look forward to seeing more from him. Malcolm Moorman (Jack) played the part of sick serial killer with an edgy ease. He came across very menacing and as a very disturbed individual. Charles Lanyer (Det. Tom Ellis) shifted from hard ass to nice guy smoothly. I wasn’t really attached to his character but he still played the role nicely.

HARD has become one of my favorite movies… ever. It’s very well made and has the right elements to make this a cult classic. Some will be disturbed by the film but anyone who wants an interesting, challenging movie… this is for you. <top>

ClaudesPlace.com
by David Lamble

"Hey, how far are you going?"
"All the way."
"That's just what I like to hear, man. Get in. Throw your stuff in the back."

A film that derives it title from Milton's Paradise Lost promises a bumpy ride. John Huckert's debut feature Hard begins when Kevin, a red haired dewy eyed little lamb of a boy-man from Ohio, climbs into the shotgun seat of an SUV driven by a guy who calls himself "Jack." We learn that the vehicle was stolen, the identity appropriated from its possibly dismembered owner. Jack is a cool operator with the hard scrabbled country good looks of The Marlboro Man, the inner demons of Robert Mitchum's vengeful preacher in Night of the Hunter , and the audacious seductive charm of Robert Walker's cool psychopathic stalker in Strangers On A Train . Jack (Malcolm Moorman) is the devil in denim, a perfect storm of manly good looks who sweet talks his victims out of their clothes, their flesh and perhaps even their souls. Jack is, in short, the gay screen villain we all knew would show up some day. He's no stereotype. Ninety-eight percent of us would probably jump as eagerly as young Kevin into Jack's front seat.

Just as Hannibal Lecter needed Clarice Starling, Jack needs rookie LA police detective Raymond Vates (Noel Palomaria) to provide the psychological incentive to take his deadly game to a higher level. Freshly divorced and painfully closeted, Raymond has just been called off street patrol and given his detective's shield and a crusty old partner with the nickname Lucky, bestowed on him because he's never had to use his gun. As played by veteran character actor Charles Lanyer, Lucky is an avuncular grouch from the Karl Malden school, who at one point wonders aloud, "Why the fuck can't we get any good moral people in this job?"

Raymond moonlights in a fake leather jacket at dimly lit queer bars with names like The Hideaway. Picking up studs who he practically frisks on the dance floor, checking on whether they're trustworthy tricks, Raymond one night has the good fortune to go home with a cop from another Southern California city, who warns him to not come out until he's proven himself on the job, "otherwise they'll never see anything else."
Raymond and Lucky are tested in action when young street hustlers turn up naked, bloody and dead in the muddy back roads of Silverlake. Director/writer (with John Matkowsky) Huckert mixes the squishy creepy crawly horror of films like Seven with the in-your-face black humor about the facts of death of HBO's Six Feet Under . The murders, depicted with both psychological accuracy and an almost pornographic specificity, cause the viewer to be both repelled and complicit, tracing the very thin line that can separate legitimate erotic pleasure from the most horrific crime.

Hard becomes a deadly duel of wits and bodily combat between killer and cop. Huckert isn't as fancy as William Friedkin attempted to be in Cruising , where the director wanted to show his protagonists as deadly doppelgangers whose lusts, fears and possibly whose capacity for erotic violence might merge, but Huckert's unflinching courage in revealing the many twisted motives behind homophobic violence ultimately trumps the cards Friedkin was willing to play. Hard is the film that Cruising should have been had both Friedkin and Al Pacino not lost their nerve.

Recalling the phony Viagra ads that warn about erections lasting more than four hours, Hard has been coming for an agonizingly long time. Shown, thanks to the programming sagacity of Frameline's Michael Lumpkin, an unprecedented three times at the Castro a few years ago, Hard subsequently fell off the film map as its makers struggled to strike the deal that resulted in this excellent DVD edition.

The new 35 mm digital transfer captures the remarkable low budget look of a film that is a mixed genre treat of later day noir, modern horror and real drama mixed with hard core sexual sensations. The look neatly represents a film whose makers were constantly shooting without permits on real Southern California locations.
Hard 's special features include Q&A sessions between the filmmakers and festival audiences, in which the film's gay cop technical advisors detail their own painful experiences trying to be out on the job in such virulently homophobic departments as the LAPD. Hard should be taken up as a campaign document to be used in questioning LA Mayor Hahn during his reelection effort, in particular regarding a long outstanding lawsuit filed on behalf of actual and potential LA queer police officers.

The Q&A's and director and cast commentaries reveal amusing tidbits including the fact that an actor, disguised as a murder victim, was temporarily placed in a real morgue body cooler which contained an actual corpse on a shelf below. The bargain basement filmmaking also caused there to be only one patrol car at the crime locations and only one police badge available for the entire shoot. This fact becomes the basis for a very dark bit of humor when the badge is stolen by the killer and left in an especially incriminating place for the cops to find.
Finally, no other DVD in release is likely to contain dialogue as racy as these lines overheard in the film's police locker room. "Hey, Sullivan, your new wife (partner) is here." "We're not married yet."
"No woman I've ever known is capable of giving me a proper blow job the way a queer can." <top>

Frontiers Newsmagazine
The ‘Hard’ Road -- How Two Filmmakers Found Themselves Fighting to Release Their Movie on DVD
By Chris Phillips


“Hard” may be the most appropriately titled film of the last decade. The story of a gay serial killer and the closeted cop who engages him in a game of cat-and-mouse, “Hard” was difficult for writer John Matkowsky and co-writer-director John Huckert to make, and, most difficult of all, to get released on DVD.

It’s also, for the audience, a tough movie to watch, full of explicit sex and violence. It even led Chastity Bono, who was then a spokesperson for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, to tell the filmmakers she found the movie “unredeemable” upon its initial release in 1999. Such charges were also leveled at the movie by supposedly objective tech labs, including sound mixers and master developers, many of whom refused to work on the film’s DVD edition due to its content. Combine this with the video chains that rejected the uncut version, including Blockbuster and Netflix—which, curiously, both carry the unedited versions of French filmmaker Noé Gaspar’s even more stomach-churning “Irréversible”—and you get an idea of the task Matkowsky and Huckert faced as they attempted to reach a wider audience. When I met with the two at French Market Place in West Hollywood, I was expecting a couple of defensive, rough-looking guys, but was surprised by their unassuming, easygoing natures. Whether you love or hate “Hard,” the double standard Huckert and Matkowsky witnessed provides a cautionary tale for any would-be filmmaker outside the mainstream.

Chris Phillips: Why make a movie this violent in the first place?

John Matkowsky: In every cop or detective story, you have violence, you have sex. Someone once told me, “If [the serial killer in the movie] were killing women, you guys would make a million dollars off this movie.” But because it’s man-on-man stuff, people are afraid of it. But we have to show that stuff; we can’t shy away from it. Everyone told us, “If you want to do an independent film, you have to do something edgy.” All of the studios said, “edgy, edgy.” And all of a sudden they saw it and said, “This is way too edgy.”

John Huckert: The whole theme of the movie is homophobia: the homophobia of the police department and the homophobia of society in general. We thought we would make the bad guy so horrible, but make the homophobia even worse. I honestly didn’t think we’d run into the issues that we ran into, and still run into. It blows me away. We’re mild compared to horror films. Apparently, it was the combination of the gay stuff and the thriller stuff.

J.M.: We started out researching film noir; we wanted to do a detective thing, and we wanted to do something different that hasn’t been seen. And we started researching serial killers, and we thought, “What if there’s a gay cop chasing a serial killer?” And we went from there. We didn’t intentionally make a “gay film.” These characters just happened to be gay. We had no idea [of the problems we’d face] until the labs wouldn’t print it; they said it was pornography.

J.H.: When I talked to [one lab], the guy asked me, “Are there any names in this? Is this a studio picture?” He wanted to find out if it was legit. If it had had any [name actors] in it, or someone known had directed it, it would’ve dropped right there.

Chris Phillips: You mean, if it hadn’t been independent?

J.H.: Yeah! Suddenly, we’re pornographic. [The lab that ultimately mastered the film] said, “We’ll do it, but you’re not allowed to talk to the press about it.”
Netflix and Blockbuster agreed to carry the film, but only a version with an R rating.

Chris Phillips: How long did it take to get an R-rated cut?

J.H.: About two and a half months. The thing that was so surprising to me about the MPAA [is that] I called about two hours after they saw the film, and [the MPAA representative] said, “You made the perfect NC-17 film.” I said, “We need an R.” He said, “That’s impossible.” I said, “Well, where do we start?” And he described to me in excruciating detail this really horrific shot that was never scripted, never shot—it just does not exist. In his mind, he saw this shot. When I resubmitted the film, his first comment was, “I’m so glad you lost that shot.” I didn’t change a frame of that [particular] part. We submitted the same scene. People’s perspective is way off as far as what’s upsetting to them. What really should be upsetting is that this [policeman] is more afraid of his own police department than he is of the killer.

Chris Phillips: It’s tough to make a drama about gay people without politicizing yourself or the characters.

J.H.: Yeah.

J.M.: You love [“Hard”] or you hate it. There’s no in between.
<top>

Unspeakable Magazine

HARD is quite frankly one of the best damn movies I’ve ever seen. Ballsy and without prejudice, HARD follows a series of brutal killings of young male hustlers in the streets of LA. As a double homicide awakens the police to the threat of a serial killer, rookie detective Raymond Vates and his partner, detective Tom Ellis, must battle an intolerant police department that is indifferent to what it calls “misdemeanor killings.” In a world where homosexuality is shunned and looked at as a disease Detective Vates, who he himself is gay, must keep a low profile, as to not disassociate himself with his partners. Jack is the killing machine--a drifter who has come to town on the way to somewhere else--stalking the nighttime streets of L.A. seeking out the runaways and other lost souls who gather around the hot glow of Hollywood’s neon underworld--leaving a wake of bodies behind him. Now as it seems Raymond’s lifestyle is in jeopardy as he is assigned to the case.
It seems the killer has his eyes on a bigger prize, then just those lost souls he’s butchering. Continuing on with his lifestyle Det. Vates frequents the gay themed clubs, for a little R&R as well as questioning, and on a careless whim, sets himself up as the new target of the serial killer’s wrath. When his stolen badge implicates him in one of the murders, Vates is suspended from the police force and must admit to a dark secret and reveal his curious relationship with the killer. Vates, now forsaken and isolated by all, must venture out to clear his name.

HARD tells the age old story of good versus evil, in this extreme and at most times completely terrifying flick.. A cross between Seven and Silence of the Lambs, HARD is a gruesome, suspenseful, and totally absorbing hell fest. There isn’t one time in this flick that gives you time to sit back in your chair and relax. From penises being bitten off to people being pissed on HARD just simply takes serial killer movies to its own level. HARDs’ portrayal of gay men as weaklings and so called pansies has been thrown out the window as Jack was as brutal as any monstrosity to ever walk to earth killing for pleasure. As previously stated the closet thing to compare HARD to would be Silence, but even that would be an under statement. HARD has been one of the only movies to give me chills and scare the shit out of me. I was completely caught off guard and had no clue as to what would happen next, and for that I commend Huckert and company. It’s been some time since I was completely mesmerized and afraid as much as I was while watching this flick. Shot on 35mm Hard posses a beauty that is generally absent from most indies.

Generally most indie filmmakers know it’s going to be a long and “HARD” road till post production, but no one would ever dream of enduring the hell that John Huckert and crew has trying to complete their film HARD. So after close to five years of shuffling from editor to editor, each refusing to finish the job they were paid to do, due to HARD being too extreme, this bad boy has finally seen the light of day. A must see.
<top>

The Rumour Machine
Tom Williams

The premise of this film is the cops chasing a gay serial killer Jack (Malcolm Moorman ) who rapes, mutilates and murders young gay hustlers. We are treated to a series of brutal murders of young gay men, often in prostitution carried out by an assassin who is unknown to the police force. Although loathed to classify the killer as a serial killer, the body count soon mounts and this thought has to be re-evaluated. In charge of the investigation is a closeted gay cop, Det. Raymond Vates (Noel Palomaria), who the killer takes a sexual morbid fantasy in, ideally seeing him as his perfect killing partner. Moving at a fast pace the film escalates into an orgasm of bloodshed and abuse until the final confrontation between cops and killer in a disused factory.
The killer has made home with a local guy - Andy (Michael Waite) - he has pulled (and his unaware family) and manipulates them in the same way he does the police, seemingly having no morality or cares. Jack is emotionally dysfunctional, unable to kiss or caress his lover and only using him for hard aggressive sex, but his partner seems to accept this. It is only when he manipulates it so that his lovers wife catches them fucking that he only realises he is having an affair with a psychopath and tries to escape.

I guess that Lee gave me this film to review knowing that I am an openly gay man, and may therefore be more objective about the difficult content of the film. Well, I have to agree that I can understand why certain comments have been made that the film is to a degree homophobic, due to ignorance, but this is not always a bad sentiment, especially when it is taken in context of the media being presented. I also do not agree with this sentiment. In my opinion better a film shows gay people in a realistic setting.

The gay cop Raymond, (a stunningly realistic performance) has trouble coming to terms with his sexuality and is loath to let his colleagues know. He gets his sex through picking men up at clubs and cannot hold a steady gay relationship. In my experience, this situation is too true to life (unfortunately) therefore how can it be considered overtly homophobic. He is forced to reevaluate his situation when circumstances force him to come out at work. This outing leads to a vicious beating form his colleagues, and the lead questioning his own commitment to his work; the only support coming from his colleague, someone who we assume will never forgive him. Although the acting and story in this respect are fantastic, I do get annoyed that yet again we are shown gay relationships and life from a negative perspective although is likely that homophobia is rife in the police force so is this a true sentiment?

The director (who is genuinely gifted in his photography skills) has chosen an extremely difficult subject and given us a very moving and skilled interpretation of his script. His photography is fantastic; the murders (all off screen) leave much to the imagination (much in the same way as the brilliant SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and SEVEN and also Argento’s recent masterpiece IL CARTAIO) and he has shown his obvious skill by not choosing to show hyper violence and gore at every opportunity. The way he has shown the relationship between the lead and his superior/s is also very good. Compassion and disgust are well portrayed at the same time from 2 different colleagues. He has also well represented that the most homophobic colleague is indeed likely queer himself a situation that is all too often true.

The script is also very strong (although the limited budget occasionally gives the piece a TV movie feel) and is well acted by an outstanding and open minded cast. Nudity and gay sex are all dealt with in a realistic and also occasionally emotional way and no judgment is passed on the gay characters by the script writer, that is I do not believe the audience are supposed to see homosexuality as a negative trait. The cast has been very brave, especially as I guess some of the characters participating in the gay sex scenes are straight. The film also shows that not all gay men are camp, effeminate or bitter. This can only be a good thing!

I could hardly say that the film is enjoyable but it is certainly shocking, entertaining and breathtaking. It moves along quickly with very little in the way of filler scenes and holds the attention at all points and I would strongly recommend anyone who gets the chance to see this does. My only objection is the rather predictable twist at the end, watch the film cutting out the last scene and it comes over as much better and more positive. This is a minor classic and if finally getting the positive attention it surely deserves. It just a shame that this film isn’t European as then it would be heralded as a great as the truly average BAISE MOI was. <top>

Outrate.net
Cops and Rubbers
by Mark Adnum

Raymond Vates (Noel Palomaria) is a secretly gay, Latino cop who’s recently been promoted to Detective. Vates is happy to keep his work and private life separate until he gets involved with a man he doesn’t realise is the gay serial killer he and his partner are hunting.

Hard has a clever set up and potentially interesting story, and ostensibly, it satisfies all the things that outrate.net was set up to identify. It’s gay central character isn’t a poster boy for gay pride, is reluctant to trumpet his homosexuality to all and sundry, and a gay serial killer plot is always a refreshing antidote to the café latte gay films we seem to be continually assaulted with.

And Hard starts well enough, with a well shot prologue that uses a hitchhiking murder to introduce an interesting killer and set an invigorating post-gay tone. Once we get into the mechanics of the story, however, things start to fall apart, and the film’s apparently ad-hoc shooting schedule, a symptom of the film’s low budget, starts to show itself a little too much. Scenes between Vates and his jaded partner Ellis (Charles Lanyer) seem rushed and the pair’s awkward, unrealistic dialogue exchanges sometimes verge on the surreal. An early scene in a gay bar features a most unlikely exchange between Vates and a bartender, and the subsequent morning after scene, with Vates waking up with a fellow closet cop from San Diego, introduces Hard ’s earnest but undercooked sub-essay on homosexuality in the police force.

The relationship between Vates and the serial killer Jack (Malcolm Moorman), which is by far the most potentially compelling thing in Hard and which could have been its masterstroke, is overlaid with too much face-to-face exposition and isn’t exploited for its seething subtextual tensions, though Palomaria and Moorman are both able actors.

On the other hand, what is great about Hard is that - apart from the gay angle - it is virtually indistinguishable from any number of by-the-numbers gumshoe versus slasher films that are rented by the dozen in any video store every weekend. In a way, it’s fabulous to find a gay-themed film that isn’t trying to be transcendent, and that doesn’t seek to be some kind of scintillating masterpiece. Why not a basic slasher/copper film with a gay inflection?

Not everyone wants to sit through a boppy flick about affluent guys going on dates with each other, and foreign films about plugholes aren’t everyone’s cup of tea either. The makers of Hard should be commended for slogging it out to produce a film that fills a market gap and which should find an eager audience. <top>

Queerhorror.com

This bleak and gritty thriller portrays a relationship between a serial killer and a closetted detective. This movie really has something important to say and says it in a very powerful way. While this movie is very graphic, both in terms of the violent subject matter, and in the gay male sexuality, the real focus of the movie is on the homophobia in society. We see it in many ways, for example, the police force's lack of concern about 'gay murders', their open hostility and violence of a gay cop. Warning though, this movie is not for the squeamish or the homophobic.

Hard even alludes to how internalized homophobia can lead to the creation of murderers. Parts of the movie reference both fictional queer murders - such as Silence of the Lambs and real murderers. In one seen, we see a scene inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer's exploits, where the cops are confronted with an obvious crime, but leave the victim with the murderer. The movie makes it clear that a combination of internalized homophobia and hyper-masculinity is a deadly combination. Another inspired part of the film involves a cameo by Mitchell Grobeson, the first cop to come out in LA. During this cameo, he shows how true-to-life this movie could be as he outlines the problems he had coming out as a cop in the LAPD.

This movie is a great addition to the queer thriller genre and is recommended for those that want a well made gay psychological thriller.
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The Gayly Oklahoman Website

I have been chomping at the bit for this very controversial movie to hit DVD in its unrated Director's cut for a very long time. I brought this film to the first year of OUTART way back in 1998 and it was the number one film in our festival. I had bodybuilders saying they weren't even going to the clubs after they left the screening because they were so disturbed. Director and co-writer John Huckert and I would talk on the phone about how people would scream at him that his subject matter was wrong. Those question and answer sessions from Hell that were held after each screening lead to the film being re-edited over and over again as he was going from one festival to the next. The version I showed was the final edit for the theaters and it still pushed the envelope really far in my book, and some of the re-edits actually improved the message he was trying to get across as far as I am concerned.

HARD tells the very gruesome story of a vicious serial killer murdering young hustlers in Los Angeles. Detective Raymond Vates (Noel Palomaria) not only has to take on his first major murder investigation but has to deal with the possibility that his homosexuality could be revealed. Our murderer Jack (Malcolm Moorman) uses this to his advantage as the police close in on him.

This movie was done on a very minuscule budget, and with many of the scenes done in one take. It is one of the most impressive Indies I have seen in the last six years. Of course I crave controversial material to the point where I gorge on it like a crazed wild animal. If it can piss people off I want to see it. HARD, with its graphic rapes, nudity and generally violent content had me at the get go but of course that is not what held my interest alone. The script, acting, editing and score are all above average for this low budget little surprise.
The most impressive of all is the acting by newcomer Malcolm Moorman as the instigator of the plot. He really does not hold back when he is torturing and killing his victims, and I could picture Jeffrey Dahmer when I first watched this in the theater with all of my disturbed audience members. There is one scene in particular that even gave me chills up my spine when one of his victims almost manages to be rescued. I just can’t say enough about his performance.

I love all kinds of movies but the ones that push the envelope, where disgusting and turned on come to a head, really make my blood race. I am one sick puppy for liking this movie so much but I am willing to admit it. Now you need to just order this movie and skip the rental because I really want you to be pissed off at me for spending hard earned money on something that will not only gross you out, but make you put it back in the DVD player with a shaky hand anyway. Plus this is unrated on DVD with six hours of extras including scenes that were even too disturbing for the director's cut. So order, it I dare you. Double dog dare you.

Available unrated on DVD with lots of graphic violence, nudity, sex and strong language but I have mentioned that already. I ordered my copy directly from the filmmaker but you can also get it from TLA video.
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Henry F. Fradella, J.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Law and Justice
The College of New Jersey


"Hard" is a classic tale of cat and mouse between a serial killer and the police, but with some new twists never before seen in American cinema. It is a deeply disturbing film that successfully explores the mind of the true psychopathic killer. Director John Huckert weaves this tale suspensefully and with an eye towards two realties often overlooked in the suspense-thriller genre. First, unlike many movie depictions of police investigations of serial killers, this movie sticks to the basics of homicide investigation and gets it right; there is no "CSI" fiction here. Second, and much more importantly, "Hard" gruesomely and realistically portrays the mind of a sadistic serial rapist–killer better than any movie has ever before.

The film begins with Jack, the killer masterfully played by Malcolm Moorman, picking up a 16 year old boy hitchhiking in the southern California desert. Within this opening sequence, Huckert begins to reveal Jack's sadistic nature, but he still leaves much for the viewer to discover later. A few scenes later, the boy's dead body is discovered. New homicide Det. Raymond Vates (Noel Palomaria) is in charge of the case with his veteran partner, Det. Tom Ellis (Charles Lanyer).

As the homicide investigation progresses, we quickly learn that Vates is a gay, closeted cop determined to hide his sexuality from those on the police force until after he has established himself as a homicide detective. Vates' character is developed against the background of two or three more bodies of teenaged boys who were raped, beaten, and tortured. But his plan to stay closets is shattered when, after interrogating Jack as part of the ongoing homicide investigations, Vates winds up having Jack over to his apartment for an aggressive sexual tryst. When he wakes up, Jack has handcuffed Vates to his own bed. He then confesses to being a killer and leaves the apartment with Vates' police badge.

Vates' badge turns up in the mouth of Jack's next victim when found by the police. This makes Vates a suspect in the very murders he is investigating. To explain how the badge got there, Vates in finally forced to come out and explain how Jack got his badge.

But neither subtlety nor the realities of homophobia are this film's strengths. The depiction of the psychopathic mind is – and it does it better than any other film out there. With each killing, Huckert allows the audience to see that Jack is no ordinary killer; he is a true sadistic rapist who gets enjoyment and pleasure out of seeing his victim's humiliated and suffering. True to the textbook definition of the sadistic rapist, Jack inflicts the three "D"s upon each of his victims: dread, dependency, and degradation. The element of torture is central to the psychological gratification of this breed of killer, and Huckert makes sure that we see exactly how Jack fits the profile of this type of serial killer.

No other movie has ever captured the essence of the psychopathic sadist's mind with the precision of "Hard." Accordingly, there are many scenes in which the graphic depiction of violence is both shocking and disturbing. But this is not just another movie with gratuitous violence. Quite the contrary, the violence – especially the scenes in which victims are both raped and tortured – serves two important purposes simultaneously. For one thing, the sheer gruesome nature of the acts makes the viewer very uncomfortable, adding not only to the suspense, but also to the viewer's ability to sympathize for the killer's victims. But more importantly, Huckert lets the viewer see the killer respond to his own violence with cold pleasure. Jack's measured and methodical capturing, torture, rape, and murder of his victims stands in sharp contrast to the powerful, emotional pleas of his victims who ooze terror. Jack's thrill in seeing this response is what defines him as the most realistic serial killer of modern American movies.

"Hard" clearly references other serial killings, both fictional and real. When something is discovered in the mouth of the victims, someone asks if it's a moth, an obvious reference to "Silence of the Lambs." But unlike the fictional killer in that movie, Jack continually bates the police, challenging them to find him before he kills again. And in a scene eerily reminiscent of the Jeffery Dahlmer case, police stop Jack's truck while he has a victim in the passenger seat who is covered in blood and trying to beg for help in a near-stuporous state. Yet, the police let him go! While somewhat heavy-handed, the stupidity of the police in that scene would seem laughably unrealistic but for the fact that police left a half-naked boy found outside Dahlmer's apartment in Dahlmer's care.
Near the end of the movie, Jack explains his own delusions of grandeur. He has a god-complex. He is "helping" his victims, "saving them from a wasted, empty existence" filled with starvation, prostitution, loneliness, and disease. It is not clear if he is truly delusional or if this explanation is nothing more than a rationalization of Jack's blood lust to a cop. What is clear, though, is that Jack loves what he does and enjoys it the way the true sadistic rapist–killer would.

. No other movie has ever captured the mind of the sadistic serial killer better than "Hard." And for that significant accomplishment alone, it should be distributed and seen by a wide variety of audiences, ranging from fans of the serial killer genre, to students of criminal justice and forensic psychology.
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L.A. WEEKLY
Charles Fleming
NAKED HOLLYWOOD

Hard Luck Story
The independent feature film HARD may not be coming soon to a theatre near you. The gritty contemporary thriller about a serial killer and a cop may not be coming to you at all. That's not because it's a bad movie. It's because the killer and the cop are both gay, and at least two local film labratories have branded the film pornographic and have refused to print it.

The adventure began when John Huckert and John Matkowsky both veteran fringe players on the local independent scene, decided to write a script and make a movie. They wanted to make a splash, "to do something edgy Hollywood would never touch, that would really get us noticed," says Huckert. So they wrote a movie about a gay serial killer and the closeted gay cop who is forced by events to either come out of the closet (and risk losing his job) or let the killer escape justice. Conceived as a low budget, genre movie, different from the typical Gen-X movie," Matkowsky says, Hard was shot in Los Angeles in 33 days during December of 1997 on a budget of under $100,000--money the two men and their lead actor, co-producer Noel Palomaria, 31, raised by maxing out a total of 67 different credit cards.

In postproduction, they edited their footage and assembled a soundtrack. They then took their movie to Deluxe Hollywood to get prints, because it is the country's largest film lab, because that's where Seven --a film they had studied before making Hard--was reproduced, and because the generous Deluxe people offered them a deferred-payment deal. Three days later came the bad news from the lab. A man named Steve Jackson called and told Huckert, "We can no longer work on your film. It is pornographic, and we do not work on pornographic films." The astonished Huckert, who thought Jackson must be joking, asked him to explain. Jackson said, "there are scenes with men kissing. There are guys together. There are women who work here! To your credit, there is at least no genitalia, but we don't do things like this."

HARD, which I viewed myself on videocassette, is not pornography. It is a competent, ernest drama, ably acted, directed and filmed, with levels of sexuallity and violence that are pertinent to the subject matter. But it is not fot ythe squeamish or the homophobic. There are several scenes of men kising. an extended lovemaking session between two men, and many, many naked and bloodied victims. Once, when a condom is being removed, there is a moment of full frontal nudity. But pornography this isn't.

In the conversation that ensued, Huckert asked Jackson, "What if the scenes were with two women?" Huckert says Jackson told him, "That would not be a preoblem." But Deluxe would not continue to work on the film. Neither would Technicolor, the filmmakers second choice, take on the project. After Huckert explained to a Technicolor representative what had happened with Deluxe, the Technicolor employee said, "Forget it. If Deluxe won't do it, we won't do it."

Richard Thomas, Deluxe's senior vice president for sales and marketing--to whom calls regarding HARD were referred--declined comment on Deluxe's policy regarding independent films, gay love scenes or pornography. He said, however, that Deluxe's standard contract--which was signed by the HARD filmmakers--contains a clause that says Deluxe "may refuse to print, dub, transfer or process...any elements deemed unlawful, pornographic or indecent." Said Thomas. "we don't judge anything on whether it is pornography or not. We have men and women working here, and if they are uncomfortable with the subject matter, we won't work on it. It robs us of productivity," Adam Chuck, the Technicolor officer with whom the HARD guys spoke, confirmed his lab's refusal to work on the film--sight unseen. "We never viewed it," Chuck said. "But we told them if Deluxe had a problem with it's content, so would we."

Now the filmmakers sit with a completed film, but no answer print. Another lab. Foto-Kem, has agreed to do the work, but wants $5,000 up-front. And there is no more money. Over a coffee at Silver Lake's Cafe Tropical recently, the three men lamented and looked to the future. The bearded, burly Matkowsky has gotten work since finishing HARD--three days shooting a real pornographic movie. The bearded, slight Huckert has been hunting for labs. The muscular, affable Palomaria has temporarily given up thoughts of returning home to San Diego. They'd like to finish their movie and get it onto the festival circuit and into distibution. But for now that seems like a long shot.

Critics have noted that while audences seem increasingly willing to accept gay stories in in the cinema, they are selective about which ones they'll watch. Rupert Everett was a smash as a gay pal in My Best Friend's Wedding, but in an entirely sexless role. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane made an adorable couple in the hit The Birdcage, but theirs was an entirely sexless relationship. Is America ready for a full-fledged onscreen gay-male relationships? Not, perhaps, at the lab level. <top>

LOS ANGELES TIMES
'Hard' Takes a Provocative Look at a Gay Cop vs. Serial Killer

John Huckert's "Hard," one of the best films from Outfest '98, is an ambitious and successful first effort, a taut, chilling police procedural that plays the plight of a closeted gay cop (Noel Palomaria) against the rampaging of a savage serial killer (Malcolm Moorman). "Hard" represents an imaginative, provocative use of genre that is rightly deeply disturbing in its implications. "Hard" is hard to take in some of its imagery, but it's not irresponsible; it emphasizes the consequences of violence over the acts themselves.

Moorman's Jack is a gay man's nightmare. Rugged and handsome, he's physically a fantasy figure come to life, but he's also possessed of a psychopath's fearlessness. When he comes on to a man in a bar in his insinuating yet forceful way he has little reason to expect much resistance. Jack is an insatiable seducer but is in the grip of such intense internalized homophobia he feels compelled to kill his lovers; in this way he has much in common with Jeffrey Dahmer as an attractive yet lethally self-hating gay man. Hitchhikers and hustlers are especially vulnerable to Jack's deadly instincts.

Arriving in Los Angeles to continue his killing spree, Jack cannot resist observing from a bridge a police investigation of the corpse of one of his victims. His gaze rests upon Palomaria's Raymond, a rookie homicide detective. Later on at a gay bar, when Jack recognizes Raymond as one of the cops at the crime scene, he comes on to the policeman; at the same time he hits upon a particularly diabolical scheme.
Huckert and his co-writer John Matkowsky gradually intensify Raymond's predicament as a gay cop who leaves himself open to all manner of homophobia if he comes out of the closet but who eventually may face even worse consequences if he does not. That homophobia persists in America's police departments is well-documented, manifesting itself not only in the harassment of gay cops but often in indifference to gay murder victims. These concerns emerge implicitly within "Hard" and not in a preachy manner.

Palomaria and Moorman head a list of outstanding actors. Charles Lanyer lends the entire film dimension and maturity as Raymond's veteran partner, a seen-it-all cop who teaches the rookie the ropes and is secure and wise enough to take in stride Raymond's homosexuality when it inevitably surfaces. Michael Waite, who has a Billy Bob Thornton quality, is wonderful as a naive bisexual security guard who gives Jack shelter. Mitchell Grobeson, the Los Angeles Police Department sergeant who filed the first lawsuit in the U.S. by a law enforcement officer to prohibit discrimination based upon sexual discrimination, has an effective cameo.

With a whopping 40 locations and 56 speaking parts, culminating in North Hollywood's El Portal Theater, "Hard" had challenging logistics for a picture that cost only $87,000. With co-writer Matkowsky's resourceful camera work and a suitably ominous score composed by Huckert and Phil Settle, "Hard' proves that imagination and craftsmanship can still count for more than money <top>

"AIN'T-IT-COOL" NEWS
© Harry Jay Knowles

Test Screening of HARD!!
I just got back from a screening of a new "gay serial killer" movie called "HARD" at the Chaplin Theatre at Raleigh Studios. This is a landmark movie. I think it might well be the first ever bona fide gay "genre" film -- if you discount "CRUISING" and "CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC". It's not a movie that only deals with gay social issues -- it's a genuinely scary thriller, sort of like "SEVEN" on 'shrooms. The guy who plays the killer is awesome -- not your standard bug-eyed creep but a charming good-looking Dahmer type who is even more scary because he's so believable and "matter of fact."

The story is excellent -- if I told you the best things about it I'd be "spoiling" some surprises. Suffice it to say, the crowd tonight was mostly straight and, like me, they were a little queasy with the full frontal male nudity and the gory efx. The production values are superb -- starting with the incredibly rich cinematography by John Matkowsky, who also co-wrote and co-produced it. John Huckert directed and co-wrote, co-produced and edited. These guys are a dynamite team.

The film does deal with social issues on a highly intelligent level by featuring many facets of the gay experience through several important characters. The only negative I can foresee is that it is waaaay graphic and very very dark, and I don't mean in some bullshit rock video director "dark" way. Some of the more grisly tableaus reminded me of joel peter witkin's photos (but in color). Horror fans will go apeshit if they've been jonesing for something beyond the recent fare. Also, the cast contains no stars but all of the actors are excellent, and very appealing.

Unfortunately, the combination of gay themes and fairly explicit sex on top of the gore will somewhat limit its commercial appeal, but because it really has something important to say and says it in a very moving way, I think the critics may actually help this movie find an audience (unless they're homophobic). It would actually be a pity if this movie somehow got overlooked because its real brilliance lies in its unique ability to bring these social issues to an audience that normally would not go see a "gay" movie -- those who would love a really good, smart, gritty thriller. I literally could see the emotions playing out on the faces of other audience members who seemed first repulsed by some of the gay stuff but got drawn in by the story and turned around by the slick handling of the social issues. (In fact, this was part of the fun.) I was invited to see it by a friend -- and got a hell of a lot more than i bargained for. i spoke briefly to the director and cinematographer -- after struggling for years this is their first movie. apparently it's the culmination of all those years spent developing their skills -- extremely polished from the script to the final frame of film. <top>

THE POLITICAL FILM SOCIETY, INC.Michael Haas
HARD NOMINATED FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD

William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) startled filmviewers by portraying a serial killer of gay men who enjoy sadomasochistic sexual arousal, with an undercover cop who was straight. Hard, released to the general public in Los Angeles in midsummer 1999, ups the ante on Cruising by focusing on closeted gay homicide detective Raymond Vates (played by Noel Palomaria). Director John Huckert goes beyond Cruising by supplying much more blood on his corpses and far more extreme bondage scenes to produce a film that he expects may become a genre film but not, due to the gore, a commercial success. Similar to Cruising, the film Hard is based in part on a true story—in this case, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer provides many of the ideas for the scenes. Unlike Cruising, the principal theme of Hard is not the investigation of an unknown killer; Jack (played by Malcolm Moorman) is identified at the very beginning of the film as a misanthropic drifter and ex-con. Instead, the film focuses on how a gay cop copes with his homophobic colleagues in the Homicide Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, where the prevailing culture parallels Jack’s view that the death of gays (called "homocide") is some sort of public service.

At first, Vates tries to keep his sexual identity in the closet, but he does not fool Jack, who has seen him investigating at the scene of one of the bodies. When Vates encounters Jack at a gay bar while looking for the killer, Jack seduces him; in the morning after the two sleep together, Vates awakens to find that Jack has handcuffed him to his bed and has stolen his LAPD shield. He then has to come out to his partner Tom Ellis (played by Charles Lanyer), who is accepting because Vates is an excellent detective. When Vates’s police shield shows up in the mouth of the next victim, however, he becomes a suspect, so Internal Affairs learns that he is gay, and the word spreads to his Homicide colleagues, who taunt Vates with homophobic discourse, and then beat him up with impunity after work in the presence of his boss, Captain Foster (played by Bob Hollander), whereupon he believes that he has no recourse but to resign from the force. Indeed, LAPD Sergeant Mitchell Grobson, the first police officer in the United States to sue for discrimination based upon sexual orientation, makes a cameo appearance in the film as Brent. To further underscore the realistic theme of the film, Filipino-American Palomaria has admitted that he went to two police departments to learn how to be an authentic homicide detective, but the first police department cut short his training when he disclosed that he would be playing a gay cop.

Hard is conceived as the first of a trilogy to deal with perhaps the most pressing fear that has terrified gays for millennia—the willingness of non-gays to look the other way while those in authority act as anti-gay vigilantes. Unlike Cruising, where sadomasochism and leather bars alone are presented as sensational elements, Hard also looks into the darkest elements of our society, in which so many heterosexists are hysterical about wanting to deny any authentic recognition to same-sex love relationships. Thus, at the end of the film, Vates asks, albeit disingenuously, "Where does all the hate come from?" In a culture where certain religious and political leaders seem determined to institutionalize homophobia, preferring Condemnianity to Christianity, it is no accident that gays often live with internalized homophobia, as portrayed so eloquently in William Friedkin’s Boys in the Band (1970). In Hard, we should not be surprised that a few gays whose internalized homophobia is most extreme—masculine gays—turn out to be either sadistic or masochistic or both. The Political Film Society has nominated Hard for an award as a 1999 film focusing on human rights--showing how police persecute gays rather than treating them as ordinary citizens with as much rights as everyone else.
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BRIGHT LIGHTS FILM JOURNAL
GARY MORRIS

One of the hardest things about Hard was getting the damn thing made.

The gay community hasn’t always looked kindly on movies about gay mass murderers. The infamous Cruising (1980), for example, became a cause celebre for featuring such a character, triggering huge demonstrations and a pathetic disclaimer by director William Friedkin that the film was not intended to be "representative of the gay community." That was nearly 20 years ago, but the feeling persists that the coupling of queers with murderous behavior is too reminiscent of society’s general demonization of homosexuality to be acceptable — witness the reception of films like Frisk (1996) and Skin and Bone (1999), which played briefly to horrified rep house and film festival audiences and then vanished into the dustier corners of a few video stores.

John Huckert’s Hard has had a similarly hard time. The problems started early. Funding for a low-budget ($100,000) genre piece about a gay serial killer and a closet-case cop who gets involved with him wasn’t exactly forthcoming, and in a time-tested strategy, Huckert, co-producer John Matkowsky, and star Noel Palomaria financed their baby by maxing out 67 credit cards. Their strategy was to "do something edgy Hollywood would never touch, that would really get us noticed," according to Huckert. Hollywood almost didn’t get the chance to notice: several labs refused to print what they called "pornography." The industry’s largest lab, Deluxe, kindly offered Huckert et al. a deferred payment deal, then reneged when they decided the film was indeed obscene. What did they object to? Incredibly, Huckert says, they balked at "scenes with men kissing. There are guys together. There are women who work here!"

Eventually the film found a simpatico lab and premiered at the 1998 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, where much of the buzz was negative. It didn’t help that Variety’s reviewer unequivocally panned it. On the other hand, the L.A. Weekly and some of the New York papers responded positively; apparently their critics weren’t as skittish as the women working in Deluxe’s lab. Still, release has been selective and halting, with a San Francisco playdate expected to be added soon to the New York and Los Angeles runs.

Shot in Los Angeles in 33 days, Hard is creepy from the gate. In the opening scene, a handsome blonde drifter type picks up a young hitchhiker. The conversation turns increasingly strange until the drifter, Jack (Malcolm Mooreman), drives off the road to torture and murder the kid. It’s apparent that this is going to be the first in a string of murders by this charming psycho. The story shifts to detective Raymond Vates (Noel Palomaria), a naïve rookie cop who also happens to be a closet case. He and his partner Tom Ellis (Charles Lanyer) are assigned a new case — a gay serial killer, who happens to be Jack. While canvassing the neighborhood, Raymond goes into a gay bar, meets and is instantly drawn to Jack; they end up in bed together, and Jack ties Raymond to the bed, steals his badge, and dares Raymond to find him. The killings accelerate with deadly results for Raymond. When his badge is found stuffed down the throat of a dead queer, he becomes a prime suspect in the killings. He’s also booted out of the closet, with predictably violent results from his fellow cops, who are arguably almost as unbalanced as Jack.

This gritty story is solid on the police procedures, helped no doubt by the fact that the filmmakers had the cooperation of a homicide detective and an LAPD officer, who were on the set to lend an air of authenticity. Neither does it skimp on the violence or sex, which is certainly defensible given the subject matter. There are a number of disturbing tableaux of runaways being picked up and murdered (offscreen), though most of these scenes depend more on psychological tension than the raw details. Particularly chilling is a scene where Jack is stopped by cops who, in a touch eerily reminiscent of the Jeffrey Dahmer case, don’t take seriously the bruises, blood, and moans of his passenger, whom he portrays as drunk. The film is also refreshingly upfront about the sex, especially in its willingness to show full-frontal nudity and even that rarity in high-, low-, and no-budget movies: an authentic hard-on (Palomaria’s) glimpsed after a steamy encounter between Raymond and another closeted cop.

The acting is mostly earnest, with the handsome, hunky Palomaria credible as the rookie whose education comes too fast and too hard to control. Charles Lanyer nicely sketches in the role of Raymond’s partner, but the real standout is Malcolm Mooreman, who masterfully interprets a role that could easily have become shrill and one-dimensional. While we never learn the details of what made him the monster he is, he does make us believe he could exist. <top>

GENRE MAGAZINE
Robert Ellsworth

Bleak and deeply disturbing, HARD forges the formulaic elements of such films as Cruising, Seven and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (mismatched cops, a brutal serial killer, bleak scenes, a rookie detective with an Achilles heel) into one of the most compelling thrillers to come out of the indie scene in ages. As dark as a cauldron and as subtle as a chainsaw, HARD descends into a world of shocking verisimilitude, yet it never panders to voyeuristic impulses.

Noel Palomaria is the closeted gay cop on the trail of a seductive serial killer (Malcom Moorman) with a penchant for young hustlers. When he himself is seduced by the comely killer, his life careens out of control. HARD never drifts into familiar territory. It's an amazing feat for director John Huckert. He captures the stench of LA's underbelly with the virtuosity of a seasoned director. Considering his budget, the jarring graphics, arresting locations and claustrophobic mood give this film an unabashed and uncompromising treatise of our unsettling times. The film never flinches at showing the sanguinary sights and explicit sexuality of its world. Instead it yanks the viewer into the rot of this milieu, and evinces the festering underbelly of a city without a soul.
An impressive debut, it's the type of movie Hollywood could learn from. <top>

NEW YORK TIMES
Stephen Holden

'Hard': Daily Diversions of a Gay Serial Killer

Hard," a strident, grisly thriller about a gay serial killer in Los Angeles who plays fiendish cat-and-mouse games with a closeted gay cop assigned to his case, isn't exactly the Jeffrey Dahmer story, although there are some obvious similarities.

The killer, Jack (Malcolm Moorman), a handsome super-macho type who preys on young hustlers, drifters and hitchhikers, doesn't store his victims' body parts in a refrigerator in anticipation of tasty cannibalistic treats.
The few victims who aren't garroted and castrated after being tortured and sodomized are transported to the cavernous basement of an abandoned theater where they are bound, gagged and strung up like slabs of meat to await further torture and possible execution.

The movie, directed by John Huckert, might be described as a crude, independently produced corrective to "Cruising," William Friedkin's ludicrous homosexual horror film of 1980. "Hard" isn't ludicrous, just unrelentingly grim and depressing. Almost as villainous as the serial killer in the world of "Hard" are the Los Angeles police officers the movie portrays as rabid homophobes.

The film's main character, Raymond (Noel Palomaria), is a freshman homicide detective who is deep in the closet when the story begins. While investigating the slaying and mutilation of a gay man, Raymond visits a bar patronized by the victim and encounters Jack, who, intuiting Raymond's homosexuality, aggressively pursues him, eventually breaking down his defenses. The two go home to Raymond's for sex. But when the detective awakens in the morning, he finds himself handcuffed to the bed. Instead of releasing Raymond, Jack makes off with his police badge and taunts him to come find him. When the detective's straight, hard-boiled police partner, Ellis (Charles Lanyer), shows up, Raymond's secret is out. Ellis is the only male officer to stand by Raymond, who is taunted and beaten up by two fellow cops.

A subplot follows Jack's seduction of a married man (Michael Waite). Moving into the man's house as a supposed guest, Jack menaces his host's young son and arranges for the boy's mother to catch him in flagrante with her husband.

"Hard" is a nasty piece of work whose sadism and visual fixation on bluish, blood-stained corpses recalls David Fincher's "Seven," although this washed-out-looking movie lacks the elegant visual style of that revolting film.
The acting and screenplay are wildly uneven, several of the plot contrivances are problematic and the soundtrack is blurry. But Moorman's Jack is a chillingly convincing psychopath, one who is as skillful at seduction as he is at homicide. <top>

PANIK MAGAZINE
Dougmore

Not For The Politically Correct
I was blown away at a recent screening of Hard, a dark psychological thriller that kept my heart racing to the very end. Filmmakers John Matkowsky, Noel Palomaria and John Huckert have a simple story line and a sophisticated twist that kept me actually wondering what was going to happen next, something that I haven’t seen in a long time. They offer no apologies for the delivery of a controversial film that deals with serial killers, sexuality and the social stigma of those elements combined with the strange world of law enforcement. Their in-your-face style of filmmaking does not cower to the politically correct whims of Hollywood. This is incredibly refreshing in a time where many filmmakers are forced to compromise their talents in a desperate attempt to break even financially. Matkowsky, Palomaria and Huckert have made a film they wanted to make, which was more tangible due to the fact that it is an independent film. In fact, it might have been impossible to make a film like this in the studio system (after all, the studios aren’t exactly known for taking chances.) HARD was a big risk. There were problems getting the film processed, apparently due to the strong homosexual content. I find strange that I can turn on Showtime after midnight and quite often see two women having sex, but suddenly photo labs get squirmish when processing two men doing the same thing. I guess the so-called-liberals of Hollywood aren’t without their own hypocrisies.

The story sounds familiar: a cop trying to catch a killer. HARD takes the story line and develops it into something truly shocking and unexpected as the killer plays a cat and mouse game throughout various locations in LA with the hunky lead detective (Noel Palomaria). The film was made on a shoestring budget, and big studios should take note of what creative people can do without a huge expense. It has been playing the film festival circuit and my sources tell me that it has been selling out at most (if not all) the screenings. HARD is fascinating in that it is unconventional, has interesting characters with depth, delivers high energy performances from a virtually unknown cast, has beautiful photography and editing with images that are as powerful as the sound track (among the sound track contributors include Marilyn Manson, and the film and the songs compliment one another perfectly). I appreciated this film due to the story telling abilities of its makers, not because it is controversial. Ironically, the aspects of the film which seem to disturb people the most (such as the open depiction of male homosexuality) is something that is chic among art house films that deal with women’s sexuality. I found the film incredibly unique due to the fact that it didn’t portray gay men as effeminate weaklings that are too pathetic to take care of themselves. My guess is that’s what disturbed audiences, far more than the violence or sexual content. <top>

FRONTIERS MAGAZINE
Lydia Marcus

A nail-biting, tense thriller about a gay serial killer who’s victims are mostly young hustlers, “Hard,” in it’s best moments evokes the creepiness and terror of “Silence of the Lambs.” Set in present day Los Angeles, the story follows a man known only as Jack (Malcolm Moorman) - no one knows where he comes from or what his history is - but that doesn’t hurt his romantic life one iota. When he’s not off torturing and killing young men, he’s carrying on a secret affair with Andy, a married man and father who has no idea his boyfriend’s a sociopathic killer. A newly appointed homicide detective, Raymond Vates (Noel Palomaria), is assigned to the case, but his own duality of being a gay man and deeply closeted cop, makes trailing this serial killer a little too close to home. The film gets even more complex when Jack, clearly bored with his own killing, ups the ante and starts pursuing Vates both romantically and as an opponent in a game of deadly cat and mouse. The script covers a lot of topics including gaybashing within the police department, the disposability of street hustlers, the complexity of gay sexuality (including internalized self-hatred and the issue of kissing), and how crimes against gays still go largely unrecognized. Moorman clearly had a blast playing Jack, and he gleefully represents his character’s intense sexuality and sick violent side. “Hard” is the film that the often laughable “Cruising” tried to be but never was, and in light of a real gay serial Andrew Cunanan’s murderous spree of not that long ago, this film is as timely as ever. <top>

KALX RADIO, BERKELEY
Anthony Bonet

THE “HARD” ROAD
Hard marks the 35mm feature film debut of director John Huckert and his collaborators, cinematographer and co-writer John Matkowsky and co-producer and star Noel Palomaria. Hard is truly an independent film, being made as it was on a bare bones budget which was raised by maxing out untold credit cards. Tired of Steven Spielberg filming all their script ideas before they could make them into films, Huckert and Matkowsky decided to write a script that Spielberg wouldn’t touch in a million years--a closeted gay cop pursuing a gay serial killer.
As improbable as it sounds, the film actually manages quite well on it’s limited resources. While owing an obvious debt to William Friedkin’s Cruising, Hard takes the concept to it’s logical extension--exploring the duplicity of the closeted cop, Raymond Vates, and contrasting it with the charismatic openness of Jack, the gay serial killer.

Hard is not about being gay--nor is it’s message that it’s “okay to be gay”--the sexuality of the charaters adds dimension to the story which is the focus of the film. Everywhere, Jack runs into people who aren’t altogether honest about who they are-- “straight” husbands having gay affairs on the sly, “gay for pay” hustlers who are ambivalent about their own sexuality. As horrible as he is, Jack never pretends to be anything else. His strength is, ironically, his honesty.

This is the dynamic that fuels the central tension in the film. Vates is a “lifer” in the police force and regards his choice to stay in the closet as a prudent one. Circumstances will force him out, inevitably, and he finds himself at a moral disadvantage with the killer who taunts Vates with a knowing deftness.
While some of the problems of a low budget show in the finished product, the good news is that Hard looks like a much more expensive film than it was. The tension is palpable at every turn, the crime scenes look authentically grisly, the locations are realistic and it’s only in hindsight that you realise that there are few, if any, special effects. There is hardly any on-screen violence.

Like When a Stranger Calls, the filmmakers spend their time making their killer a real threat--so much so that his presence infuses almost every scene--there is tension but not gratuitous blood and gore.
Also to its credit, the film is frank about the sexuality--although never graphic, the sexuality of the characters in the film is never in question. The film doesn’t rely on the “peck on the cheek” sexlessness that is currently the vogue in gay characters in Hollywood.

The film impressed me at this [The San Francisco International] Lesbian and Gay Film Festival for two reasons--one, it looks great. It’s very well photographed--attention was paid to lighting and mood as well as camera angles that conveyed something about each character’s state of mind. For example, there is an excellent scene in a gay bar where Vates is first confronted by Jack which holds a tense two-shot for it’s duration. Also impressive was the sex scene with Vates and Jack. Cut in an uneven, jarring rhythm, the scene shows the two lovers literally wrestling for dominance. This spectacle is strangely unsexy--conveying as it does, the lovelessness of the encounter and highlighting the real agenda; which is power and manipulation. The other reason it impressed me is that the sexuallity is not the message of the film. Rather it focuses on the larger isues of honesty and self-reliance.

Huckert seems a very capable director, making clever allusions to other genre films--specifically Cruising and Silence of the Lambs-- there are even superficial similarities to the inside-the-police-department films like Serpico. Huckert and his collaborators have set out to make a film about identity, an issue which transends the simple politics of most “gay” cinema. To that end, they give their story a deliberate pace--patient as it slowly unfolds-- revealing layers of loneliness in the policeman which, unacknowledged, work against him.
The performances are all believable and sometimes quite good. Noel Palomaria carries the role of Vates with admirable restraint. If there are moments when Vates seems stiff and inexpressive, then they are appropriate for the character. Malcolm Moorman is quite satisfying as the serial killer--seeming improbably comfortable on camera.

Huckert, Matkowsky & Palomaria are brave souls, indeed. By telling a personal story and not preaching trite politics, the filmmakers end up making a far more potent political statement--being gay ain’t nothing--being HONEST is hard. <top>

MANHATTAN SPIRIT
Ed Koch

'Hard' is a scary small budget gem

This movie was made for $87,000 and shot in five weeks, but it took four years to get to the screen. It was also financed using five credit cards. How do I know all of this? While sitting in my seat at the Cinema Village theater waiting for the screen to light up, Mr. Huckert, a young man in his 30s came over, introduced himself as the director and told me. Huckert also thanked me for coming and said that he hoped I would like the film. I did. I hope he is as successful as Robert Rodriguez who, after making "El Mariachi" for at least as I recall about $7,000, went on to do multi-million-dollar films. Unfortunately, none of Rodriguez's subsequent films ever in my judgment equaled his first film, which gave him his initial burst of fame. The script, written by Huckert and others, involves Raymond Vates (Noel Palomaria), a young detective in California who is assigned to the homicide division. We soon learn that Raymond is a closet homosexual, and that there is a serial killer, Jack (Malcolm Moorman), who preys on homosexuals. Ray and his straight partner, Ellis (Charles Lanyer), are assigned to the case. "Hard" would have surely cost millions of dollars if done in Hollywood. Apparently there are several young and talented independent film makers who have been able to get things done cheaply when seasoned producers and others can't. <top>

Chicago READER
Jack Helbig

John Huckert’s taut police thriller received some press when two LA film labs, Deluxe Hollywood and Technicolor refused to print it because it featured “men kissing” and “guys together.” It does include an extended sex scene between the two main characters, a closeted police detective and the rough-hewn drifter who’s secretly cutting a swath through the gay community, but it’s hardly graphic and nothing compared to the film’s steadily escalating violence. Of course, Hollywood has always preferred killing to kissing. More disturbing is the way Huckert and cinematographer John Matkowsky twist the conventions of a worn-out genre to reveal the depth of homophobia surrounding the cop: tracking a killer whospecializes in young gay men, he has as much to fear from his gay bashing colleagues as from the psycho roaming the streets. Huckert, making his feature debut, is able to evoke the formulas of the genre even as he deconstructs it. <top>

VulcanAmerica.com
I Know What You Did In The Dungeon Last Summer....

Young gay men are being torture-murdered in Los Angeles. Apathetic Cops describe these serial murders of strip hustlers as 3Misdemeanor Killings.2 The killer's self loathing attracts him to the gay, good looking, and deeply closeted homicide detective assigned to the case. When the darkly seductive murderer chances on the detective in a local leather bar, he decides to draw him into his underworld. With all the hype cranking around low budget scare fests like (the allegedly scary) The Blair Witch Project, I'd recommend trying to seek out the suspense thriller HARD. Made by (as the producer John Huckert and director John Matkowsky have been quoted) maxing out the credit cards of 27 friends on a revolving basis, HARD has its own strange story to tell. Brutally violent (it's been turned away from several gay art festivals), HARD made news when DeLuxe and Technicolor refused to cut prints because of: The Body Count? The graphically gross killings? Flying Body parts and blood?

Nope. A heavy, erotic man to man sex scene and a shot of two men kissing. Given the climate of school kids with guns and disgruntled day traders, it's always nice to know where Corporation Hollywood feels its real responsibilities to the youth of America lay. As for me, I've been avoiding Gay films now for about two years, basically because I'm bored silly by precocious coming of age teen outings or these narcissistic clever-clever big fag films - all shot on shoe string budgets and looking every pinched penny of it. But a friend talked me into this one and I am glad he did. Not only is HARD a stunning looking movie, it doesn't play coy with its gayness, doesn't suddenly go sugary or pretentious, and certainly doesn't fall prey to gay movie cliches. It made several patrons at the screening I attended walk out when they realized that this movie was as in your face as it was getting. Trust me on this...you won't walk away from HARD without a major opinion of it. HARD is the real Cruising, it's the movie 8mm aspired to, and you'll probably not get to see it unless an arthouse in your city decides a gritty police drama that depicts homophobia on every level, shows that not every gay man has a heart of gold minus a sex drive, and the only decisions/consequences involving coming out aren't whether to act in the school musical or direct it, is worth risking the wrath of the political correctness mafia. Me, I've seen HARD once. Seen The Blair Witch Project, too. One of these low budget indie flicks was genuinely scary. Guess which one I'd take a friend to for a
second viewing? <top>

TEXAS TRIANGLE-Austin TX.
Arthur B. Cohan III

Hard is Hard Not to Like

It is not hard to understand why people would have a negative reaction after viewing John Huckert's and John Matkowsky's very disturbing authentic look at a serial killer and the detectives who pursue him in their realistic feature HARD.

`To tell you the truth, we wanted to do something that Stephen Spielberg wouldn't make," admitted Huckert. "We had a script for a project called Twister and one for Amistad long before Spielberg came out with his," defeatedly claimed Huckert.
In looking for the write topic to write about, Markowsky suggested a scenario that he had written about in a current story that he was working on. Among the seven different storylines, one scenario was one of a gay cop who was struggling with coming out of the closet. Developing the idea further, the two agreed upon adding a serial killer who was also gay.

"Unredeemable," was how Chastity Bono described the flick. "It amazes me how many people attack me (especially in the press)," comments Huckert. My reply is, it figures. Yes, the gay community may not need negative images portrayed in movies. On the cusp of such renown serial killer types as Jeffrey Dahmer and Andrew Cunanin, you have to ask yourself should we not strive for realism just because we don't want "negative images".

"If you have a button to be pushed, this film will push it," acknowledged Huckert. I agree. With subject matters including but not limited to: sexual assault of a child, cruelty to animals (which is the only scene that made me really cringe-although the film simply implies it), assault, rape, harassment, abandonment, torture, and even safe sex messages.

Hard takes it audiences on an adventure into the realities behind a serial killer named Jack (Malcom Moorman) who is on a killing spree of young hustler types of "lost souls". "I am their savior," declares Jack (who in one brief moment you understand and may feel empathetic toward his motivation of his monstrous acts).
HARD received much press before it's release due to the fact that Huckert was turned down by two major film labs in his attempts to get his film processed. "We wanted to go with DELUXE labs because they had worked on such films as SEVEN. The problem was that the first two reels delivered to the labs was reel three and five, which contained the only scene in the movie that shows two men engaged in a kiss and a brief shot in which Jack is having sex with Andy (Michael Waite), one of his unexpecting victims. "They thought the film was pornographic. They didn't even see the whole movie, because there is genitalia throughout and they said things like, ' to your credit there was o genitalia.' The biggest problem they had was, two men kissing." recalled Huckert.

Perhaps one of the most interesting production facts is that Noel Palmoaria (Raymond Vates) who exposes himself throughout the film, really struggled with being nude so much, "but he really believed in the project," confessed Huckert. I would have never figured that he had a difficulty with that issue. It definitely does not come out on film.

What does come out is his striking portrayal of the closeted rookie detective who is forced to come out of the closet due to the serial killings and his brief encounter with Jack. Vates is forsaken and isolated by all, save his reluctant partner Ellis (Charles Lanyer) who loses his first partner in an opening graphic scene of an epileptic prostitute who bites his penis bitten off during one of her seizures.

In striving for authenticity, Huckert and Matkowsky were able to solicit the cooperation of a Homicide Detective and an LAPD officer who were on-set to give the crime scenes and procedures that air. An interesting real life connection to the movie is that the unexpected police officer that Vates sleeps with in the beginning of the movie is actually portrayed by Mitchell Grobeson. Grobeson was the first openly gay LAPD police sergeant who was fired due to his sexuality. "He really experienced the treatment that is depicted in the movie," stated Huckert.
The film's closeness to reality makes this film disturbing. Many people will go to this film for a variety of personnel reasons. You may go because it is a "gay movie", you may go because it showcases allot of frontal male nudity, you may go because you want to see for yourself whether it is real or not.
Reviewer's Rating- A+ <top>

METRO WEEKLY-Washington DC
CRITIC’S PICK **** (4 stars)
Craig Seymour

HARD is a dark, sexy-sleazy-scary thriller that’s slow to start but simmers to a boil as it follows Raymond, a closeted Latino homicide cop on the trail of a gay serial killer. As Raymond works his homicide beat by day and works-it to the beat at gay clubs by night, he has no clue that he’s putting himself dead in the path of the very killer he’s chasing, a man who preys on closeted gay men, hitchhikers, and hustlers.

Tensely directed by local boy John Huckert, the film has a clean slick look and possesses moments of intense, graphic violence that are sometimes erotic in the most utterly repulsive way (the film owes a grisly gross-out debt to SEVEN). Tensely directed by local boy John Huckert, the film has a clean slick look and possesses moments of intense, graphic violence that are sometimes erotic in the most utterly repulsive way (the film owes a grisly gross-out debt to SEeTensely directed by local boy John Huckert, the film has a clean slick look and possesses moments of intense, graphic violence that are sometimes erotic in the most utterly repulsive way (the film owes a grisly gross-out debt to SEVEN).

One of HARD’s greatest strengths is the acting, which ranges from competent to completely and sometimes creepily convincing. Especially good is Malcom Moorman, whose alluring, sex-crazed sicko surprises at every turn and invests new meaning in the term “killer kiss.” Another surprise is that the actors look like real people and not the plucked and polished pretty boys who people the worlds of most gay flicks.

THE SANTA BARBARA INDEPENDENT
Ted Mills

John Huckert’s Hard is a different kettle of controversial fish entirely. It’s story of a gay serial killer is to crusing and male prostitution what SILENCE OF THE LAMBS was to women’s vulnerability at night. Which is to say that within the confines of the serial killer genre, it skirts enough with realism to make any viewer uneasy after leaving the theater. A closeted gay rookie detective, Ray (NOEL PALOMARIA), joins a largely homophobic squadroom and immediately finds himself investigating the gruesome murders of various young drifters.
From the beginning we know the killer to be Jack (MALCOLM MOORMAN), a bearded hunk of a psycho who picks up young men in bars, then brutally tortures and murders them after sex. Unbeknownst to Ray, the two spend the night together - Jack abstains from his usual killing and instead challenges the detective to catch him. In the wake of the Matthew Shepard murder, HARD may be hard to take for some viewers (director Huckert usually sits in the lobby and counts how many viewers walk out), but the situations it addresses, especially the ease with which Jack acquires his victims, are frighteningly real. HARD is the most daring screening of the festival. <top>

indieWIRE.com
Aaron Krach

"Hard" to Get a Print Made in LA

Getting a print made on a deferred payment plan is a standard survival technique for independent filmmakers. For John Huckert, the director of "Hard", a sort of gay "Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer," it was almost the end of his film. Two labs refused to work on his film because theythought that two men kissing was pornographic. So when "Hard" finally opened last Friday in New York, Huckert breathed a deep sigh of relief.
The trouble started in early 1998. Huckert maxed out 67 credit cards to gethis film in the can. As soon as he finished editing, he worked out adeal with Deluxe Hollywood to make a print. "We wanted to go with Deluxe because they worked on the movie, "Seven." We wanted that same dark look. We found the same printer of that film and he was going to supervise ourprint. They gave us $10,000 in credit so we wouldn't have to pay for 45 days, which gave us more time to raise money," explains Huckert.

The problems arose when they delivered reels 3 and 5 to the lab. Those two reels just happened to open with a scenes involving sex or nudity. Within a matter of days, Deluxe called Huckert and started asking for character references. "They thought the film was pornographic. They didn't even see the whole movie, because there is genitalia throughout and they said things like, 'To your credit there was no genitalia.' The biggest problem they had was, two men kissing.

"I was livid at first, but I was tryin g to be very nice and try to work through it. Finally they said, 'We're not going to print your film, because we have women who work here.' Then they wouldn't give us the film back. They wanted us to pay for the work they had done on it."

Without money to pay them, Huckert did the next best thing. He called the press. "The next thing we knew, they called and told us to come pick up the print." But they weren't out of the woods yet. The next choice of labs, Technicolor, refused to take the film, if Deluxe had already refused it. Finally, Foto-Kem watched a tape of the film and agreed to work on it. "They didn't see anything wrong with it," adds Huckert.

Now almost a year later, Huckert still has all the credit card debt, but at least his film is finished. HARD opened in New York last Friday to decent and good reviews. The film is being distributed by Jour de Fete Films and opens in Los Angeles next Friday. <top>

THE HARD COP
Mark J. Huisman/Uptown Publications

Films from Swoon to Silence of the Lambs and Cruising to Basic Instinct have elicited strong protests from the cinema police for their "negative" portrayals of persons and matters queer. Those "media activists" will no doubt train their big mouths on Hard, even though it's really a brave, groundbreaking piece of queer cinema that does true justice to what has become an oft-abused marketing phrase.

Mixing genres from coming out drama to murder mystery with surprising success, Hard is the story of a closeted gay rookie detective named Raymond Vates (Noel Palomaria), whose first case turns out to involve a gay serial killer. When Vates actually meets the murderer, Jack (Malcolm Moorman), in bar while questioning potential witnesses, the killer lures the unsuspecting Vates to a construction site, seduces him and, eventually, frames him for his next kill. So begins what Jack calls "a test of wills to see who is really the best man."
That test depends on maintaining control, which in turn determines whether or not one stays alive or not. Jack clearly has the upper hand here - from his casual murders to the manipulative relationship he strikes up with a married man named Andy (Michael Waite), who Jack intends to use as an alibi. Vates, however, who cannot seem to control anything, his ex-wife, a hot-to-trot female colleague, his co-workers' fag jokes or even possession of his own police badge. ("What's harder Ray?" a friend asks in one scene. "Keeping the cops from finding out you're gay or keeping the gays from finding out you're a cop?")

I was more than shocked by how the sex in Hard often surpasses the violence (which is more often implied than depicted). If staying alive here depends on being in control, having great sex depends equally on losing control: Vates has sex with a man who turns out to be another cop; Jack and Andy pound away while his wife and child are in the very next room, Jack's white-hot, husky voice teasing "Drain me dry!"

The sex scene between Jack and Vates is among the most tensile I have ever seen, involving leather, a handgun, a pair of handcuffs and a George Michael song. But as sooner as those famous lyrics face - "I'd like to see you naked baby…Why do you do this to me?" - Jack goes into true character, taunts taunting the very man who would be his captor. "How does it feel to lose control?" Jack sneers. Everything about Hard - its taut narrative, penchant for suspense and top (and bottom) notch performances - might just tempt you to find out. <top>

NEWS ARTS REVIEWER
MARY KUNZ

"Hard" is not for everyone.

It involves blood, sadistic killings, torture and a devious, chilling murderer who sodomizes his victims and does away with them in terrible ways. Although the audience isn't actually shown these things happening, there are grisly tableaux and a bleak, violent atmosphere. Get beyond all this - most people won't be able to, and shouldn't be expected to - and "Hard" is a strong movie, boldly exploring issues not generally talked about. Gay police officers, for instance, and the harassment they face on the force. The plight of young male hustlers, dismissed by authorities as disposable. (There's a lot of male nudity, too, in addition to the other iffy content.)
"Hard" (the title comes from a line from "Paradise Lost") is about a gay cop who finds himself playing cat-and-mouse with a gay serial killer, who preys frequently on young male prostitutes. It's an independent movie - really independent, made by two guys in California, John Huckert and John Matkowsky, who maxed out dozens of credit cards to pay the $87,000 it cost to film it. Surprisingly, it moves fast, avoiding that late-night-TV look. Filming's good; acting's excellent. It's only the movie's content that will keep most people from seeing it. I'm not sure how big this film's audience can possibly be. "Hard" wastes no time letting us know what we're in for. To its credit, every scene and line of dialogue can be seen as relevant to the plot in one way or another. About eight minutes into the film, it hits us with a shocking crime scene involving a murdered cop. The dead cop's partner, Tom Ellis (Charles Lanyer of "Die Hard II") is reteamed with a rookie detective, Raymond Vates (Noel Palomaria, a screen novice). Right away, they're drawn into a string of sex killings: young men found killed and mutilated.
Footage of the cops alternates with footage of the killer, a man named Jack who stalks and kills his prey with terrifying detachment. Played by a clearly talented newcomer, Malcolm Moorman, Jack has the handsome charm and easy banter that seems to distinguish the scariest villains. "Ever been in trouble? Been arrested?" is one question he might toss, casually at a new acquaintance. The movie has a bald reality. We see men kissing, having sex. There are naked corpses, violated in unspeakable ways. Cops trade nasty, bigoted barbs in the locker room.

Jack takes a trailer-park lover, Andy (Michael Waite), and moves into his house, locking horns immediately with Andy's blowsy wife ("How long's he gonna stay here?" she snaps) and called "Uncle Jack" by the couple's 10-year-old son, who's nervous, and with good reason. Eyes darting this way and that, Moorman can look creepy simply sitting on a couch.

Perhaps that's because however horrifying what we see is, what we don't see is worse. Very little, if any, graphic violence actually appears on film. The camera may show a naked man hanging by his hands, but then it pans to Jack's eyes. So terrified are we by that time that the moviemakers expect, correctly, our imaginations to do the rest.

When Vates meets the killer in a gay bar, the psychological drama intensifies. Vates, initially repulsed, finds himself drawn into an entanglement with dire consequences. When his badge turns up in the mouth of a dead man, he has to decide: give away his homosexuality (which, in his career, is professional suicide) or face murder charges himself. It's like a hideous, fluorescent-lit soap opera.

So sympathetic is the movie to Vates' dilemma that the audience can't help but side with this gentle, intelligent man. The support and empathy between Vates and his colleague, Tom, emerges with grace and clarity. In the end, "Hard" is more a movie about life than about death. <top>

IF MAGAZINE INDIE TOP 10.
Alex Ben Block

GAY SERIAL KILLER FLICK HITS NY HARD

HARD takes third place this week on the iF INDIE TOP 10. It is a grisly crime thriller about a gay serial killer, and the twisted games he plays with the not yet out of the closet gay cop who pursues him. The making of HARD is one of those textbook indie stories: A movie made on a shoestring, charged on plastic, shot over months and years. It's written by friends, equipment borrowed and scraps of film stock are used and all of this is done by fledgling filmmakers looking for a break.

It was co-written and directed by John Huckert, and produced by MPH Productions, which is a partnership of Huckert, John Matkowsky and Noel Palomaria. They had done two short films together, and then decided to make the movie that became HARD.

This story looks like it might have something even more rare among the indies -- a happy ending. The film's distributor, JDF and Rialto Films' Mike Thomas, says HARD premiered in Gotham last week on one screen as an experiment. Now that it has gotten a decent review from The New York Times, and shown it can do some business, it will have additional life -- beginning with an engagement in Los Angeles later this Spring. <top>

BLOCK REPORT
Alex Ben Block

FIRST TIME FILMMAKER JOHN HUCKERT HAS MADE THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL MOVIE OF THE SUMMER – A GAY PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER -- BUT WHY HAS HOLLYWOOD SHUT THEIR DOORS INSTEAD OF TURNED HIM INTO THE NEXT INDIE DARLING?

Some of the politicians in Washington, D.C. who want to take on Hollywood over the content of movies might be surprised to know that there are still some taboos left in the film business. Things even Hollywood won’t – or can’t – show. If you don’t believe it, ask John Huckert, the 37-year-old director of HARD, a grisly cop thriller about a gay serial killer which was produced with sweat equity and 67 credit cards.
It seemed that after years of struggle, Huckert and producing partners John Matkowsky and Noel Palomaria (who operate in L.A. as MPH Productions) had finally done it. They had fulfilled the dream of so many drawn to Hollywood like moths to the flame; they had made an indie film on a shoestring, which excited both critics and audiences.

In his review last week Los Angeles Times veteran film critic Kevin Thomas marveled that HARD only cost $87,000 to produce and said it proves that “imagination and craftsmanship can still count for more than money.”
Thomas called HARD “an ambitious and successful first effort, a taut, chilling police procedural that plays the plight of a closeted gay cop against the rampaging of a savage serial killer... HARD is hard to take in some of its imagery, but it’s not irresponsible; it emphasizes the consequence of violence over the acts themselves.”
Huckert is a 37-year-old first time feature filmmaker from Washington, D.C. who came to LaLa Land to pursue his dreams. He had attended film school at the University of Maryland, until he was kicked out for “borrowing” school cameras and other equipment to make a film. “But I did get the movie made,” says Huckert.
Since then Huckert has written (alone or with others) nearly two dozen screenplays. A few have been optioned. None had been made until HARD. His previous career highlight was in the mid-1980’s with ERNIE AND ROSE, a half-hour black and white short comedy about two senior citizens in a suicide pact. It won more than 30 awards at festivals, including the National Educational Film Festival.

Fast forward into the 90s. After making two short films the MPH partners wanted to make a movie which would really get noticed. That project eventually became the 102-minute suspense thriller HARD.
They decided to go for a realistic genre picture, and began doing research on police, criminals and serial killers. “The theme which always interested me is when the inability to love openly leads to perversion,” says Huckert. “In our movie every body lies about their life. The only person who tells the truth is the killer.”
HARD took more than four years from beginning to now. It took two months to write, and went though six months of pre-production. It had a five-week shoot and a cast of 56 (who worked for free). It takes place on over 40 different locations. The partners and their friends did everything themselves at no cost to the film, with one exception – the sound. “The earmark of a low budget film is bad sound,” says Huckert. “We didn’t want anybody to say ‘Oh, it’s low budget’ because of the sound.”

While there isn’t a great deal of actual violence in the film, there are extremely realistic depictions of crime scenes. Huckert says policeman often tell him that the film is very realistic. “People love it or hate it,” says Thomas. Those who hate it include some in the gay community who believe HARD perpetuates the image of serial killers as being gay men. Huckert says he was told by activist Chasity Bono that his film was politically incorrect. It was criticized for not having an appropriate gay role model. The L.A. Times review called the film “a gay man’s nightmare” and compared it to the real life case of Jeffrey Dahmer.
Although it was one of the most talked about films at last year’s high profile gay film festival OUTFEST the best known gay newspaper, THE ADVOCATE, refused to make any mention of the film’s L.A. opening. Huckert says a top ADVOCATE editor found the film offensive.

That hasn’t stopped gays from coming out to see the film in its platform openings in New York two months ago, and currently in Southern California. Mike Thomas, head of L.A. based specialty distributor Jour De Fete, says that during the run in New York, he estimates at least three quarters of the tickets sold to gay men.
“It’s really a hybrid of a gay film and a psychological thriller,” says Thomas. “It’s very hard edged. It’s quite disturbing and lurid. Within the gay market, there’s never been a film like this before.”

When MPH began to screen the film they discovered there was little enthusiasm. Despite its power and realism, and a look which goes way beyond what it costs, Huckert and friends found the doors to Hollywood slammed in their face. Some will say the reason major studios and all the larger indie distributors passed was because of the content. It is true that there are few films about gays which get widespread distribution with some exceptions. It was OK for Julia Roberts to have a gay pal in MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING.

Huckert notes that it is also OK if they are drag queens who are funny and clever and dressed in colorful clothes, as in THE BIRDCAGE. “If we had been killing women this thing would have sold as soon as we hit the (film) can,” says Huckert. “The subject matter scared away all the mainstream distributors. The guy from October Films saw it and the next day they dumped HAPPINESS.“ An executive at October insists that was just a coincidence. He says they knew they could never take the film out because their parent company is a member of the film industry’s major trade organization.

HAPPINESS, like HARD, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association of America. If it were rated, it would likely get an NC-17 rating. While the gay sex is incidental to the film, there is a love scene involving two men, including passionate kissing. “It seems there’s a clear double standard going on,” says Huckert. “If we had female nudity, it would be rated ‘R.’ With male nudity it is an automatic NC-17.”

For the distributors a film which would get an NC-17 is virtually impossible to release. They are restricted both by industry practices and prohibitions by some theater owners. There are also restrictions on advertising an NC-17 film in many major newspapers, making it almost impossible to market. The indies get around the NC-17 restriction by not rating the movie at all. The major studios, including their specialized distribution divisions, are contractually required as MPAA members to rate all of their theatrical releases. That means they can’t handle HARD or any other film which would get the restrictive rating.

So it becomes understandable why HARD will never get distribution from an MPAA member company – the majors or their subsidiaries. Yet imagine where that leaves the MPH team. They are taking flack from the gay establishment, and are locked out by the Hollywood establishment. They have come smack up against a taboo which both sides want to enforce. They are pulling in an audience, but having a hard time holding screen time in the nation’s specialized theaters in the middle of a very busy summer.

Oddly, the real life for HARD will probably come with its home video release, where both the gay and straight audience will discover it. That may not be enough to make all of Huckert and his friend’s dreams come true. But it may be enough to pay off those 67 credit cards yet.

Alex Ben Block is Editor-in-Chief of SHOW NEWS NOW, and former Editior of the HOLLYWOOD REPORTER. <top>

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