Review: King Cobra
Sunday, Oct. 16
5 p.m.
GALA’s Tivoli Theatre
Originally, this year’s festival was set to close with Check It, a new documentary about D.C. African-American gay and transgender youth who form their own gang to protect one another from bullying. For whatever reason, the film’s distributors yanked Check It at the last minute. Festival co-director Kimberley Bush scrambled to find a replacement, and boy, did she ever snag a hot item: King Cobra, the James Franco-produced dramatization of the rise of porn star Brent Corrigan and the 2007 murder of the man who launched his career, Cobra Video’s Bryan Kocis.
Justin Kelly’s biopic breaks no filmmaking ground, but it’s a deftly made, highly burnished Hollywood product, focusing mainly on Corrigan (real name Sean Paul Lockhart) and his business/sexual relationship with the Cobra owner, bizarrely rechristened as Stephen in the movie. Based on the book “Cobra Killer: Gay Porn, Murder, and the Manhunt to Bring the Killers to Justice,” the film plays fairly fast and loose with the facts in an effort to streamline the narrative, but Kelly exhibits himself to be a strong director who handles the subject matter with straightforward frankness. The sex scenes aren’t meant to titillate but to illuminate each character’s internal struggle with themselves, and the film dwells less on the mechanics behind making porn and more on the underlying greed that drives the business.
Kelly is fortunate to have an A-list cast at his disposal, including Christian Slater who, as Stephen, subtly reveals the turmoil of an aging gay man who came out too late and remains stunted in his attraction to younger men. (The real Kocis may have had pedophilic tendencies, but those are glossed over by Kelly, who rearranges timelines to suit his narrative needs.) It would have been easy to play Stephen as a garden-variety sleaze, but Slater brings a restless agony to the character — while not entirely omitting his seamier, prurient side. Last year, Slater reemerged as a knock-out force on the magnificent USA series Mr. Robot, so it’s great to see him back acting up a storm. He’s been missed.
Alicia Silverstone and Molly Ringwald make brief but effective appearances as Corrigan’s clueless mother and Stephen’s overbearing sister, who tries to match up her older bachelor brother with women and can’t understand why he refuses the bait. James Franco and Keegan Allen bring ferocious intensity to Joe and Harlow, romantically entangled escorts who produced low-end porn under the moniker Viper Boyz. Franco turns the cray-cray up to eleven, but it works well in context with his character, a jealousy prone, debt-riddled, emotionally stunted sociopath. “I used to get booked,” he bemoans to Harlow, whom he pimps out regularly. “Now they only want you.” Harlow is no less psychotic. “Baby, it is so cool that you would rather kill me than let someone else have me,” he purrs to beloved. This may also be the only film you’ll ever hear a bottoming Franco shout, “Fuck that ass! Fuck that ass!”
The key to King Cobra lies in the performance of Garrett Clayton as Corrigan. While one might not say it’s courageous to feign a blowjob in a movie about the porn industry, it’s a game changer for a former Disney Channel star. The boyish Clayton, sculpted and lean, not only looks the part physically, but brings gravity and depth to a character that could have easily descended into caricature. He plays Corrigan as a full human being, vulnerable yet calculating, driven yet self-delusional.
King Cobra feels as though it was made specifically for gay men — it’s hard to imagine the straight community being remotely interested in the subject matter — and therein lies its greatest weakness. For all his attempts at plumbing the depths and darknesses of what motivates people to create porn, Kelly merely treads the surface. Mind you, it’s a shimmery, glossy, pretty-boy surface, but when the movie goes into darker, potentially disturbing territory, he pulls away. It’s as if going too far might harm what is clearly an up and coming Hollywood directing career. King Cobra is just fine if you take it for what it is: extra-pulpy pulp. Much like porn, it draws you briefly into its world, only to become forgettable the instant it’s served its purpose.
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