dante's beefcake

Well that was... interesting...

Since today is $1 day at my video store, I headed in this morning and picked up all four DVD's of Dante's Cove (two per season). I remember reading about it here and there online when it first debuted in the States... supposedly gay love story meets supernatural themes...

And since I've now watched nearly 7 hours of "The Cove" today, I'm a little... well... stuffed, satiated... all those "full" words.

I think I'm going to babble about them in season... since there are actually quite a few differences between Season 1 and Season 2...

Season 1... Good lord it was lame... actually, to be honest, the whole thing was a little lame... but either Season 1 was worse... or by the time I got to Season 2 I was immune.

There's was just so much really questionable acting... and overwritten scripts... and little slivers of plot intersperced with long, slow (and occasionally hot) soft porn sex scenes. And from memory, only one visible penis shot... right at the beginning... and oh my, oh my, oh my was it a whopper.... but then it was all strategically placed arms and legs and candles and pillows and turning your back on the person you've just had sex with to put on your underwear so that the camera can't see your doodle... something that continued a lot in Season 2 for the "regular" cast actually.

But there was a lot of hot makeout action... so, you know, that makes up a bit.

I was a little preturbed by parts of the first season too... you had plot... then boy on boy sex... then plot... boy on boy sex... etc... then suddenly, girl on girl sex. So at any one point you've just possibly alientated half of your demographic. It did look like they mostly learned not to do that in Season 2 though, since I think there's only one girl on girl sex scene.

There was also a lot of reusing previous footage. I mean, I get that... it's a teevee show, so you're going to cut some corners here and there... and if you're having a flashback and it's not really supposed to show anything specific, then, sure, why not delve into your own archives and reuse some stuff... but occasionally it just looks lazy.

One thing did strike me as interesting though... you have this evil character who's plotting and scheming against our young lover heroes... but he's actually a bottom rather than a top... whereas you would kind of expect the power-mad villian to be a top... or at least I think I would... so it was a nice was to throw off the expectations.

Unfortunately, when you have TWO evil villians who are plotting and scheming against each other, and both of whom are plotting and scheming against our hero characters (although more in the second season than the first), then you really don't know who go cheer for and who to hate... you just kind of end up hating both of them and hoping that neither of them get anywhere... which is a little flawed in my eyes... you have to have at least ONE superpowered character you can cheer for against the "bad guy".

So Season 1 ends on something of a cliffhanger (as far as these things go)... and then I jump straight into Season 2.

I'm not sure how much time had passed in the real world between them filming and showing the two seasons, but as soon as I started Season 2 it was obvious that somebody backed a truckload of cash up to the production offices between seasons and was just throwing money at them hand over fist...

The production values shot through the roof... suddenly the very obvious sets had been replaced by real locations and the hotel at the centre of the series had gone from a place that you could imagine a bunch of people living in together, to something out of a resort brochure. And we also suddenly had a bunch more locations, including a total makeover for the bar one of the characters works in.

And suddenly a bunch of the background cast had vanished, one got replaced completely (by a better actor, although possibly a slightly less attractive one), and suddenly Thea Gill (Linz from Queer as Folk) shows up as a "guest star".

Actually, having a "real" actress in the show kind of showed how much some of the others were eating the scenery hand over fist... she made a lot of the admittedly silly sounding dialogue actually sound halfway credible. Although I think everybody pulled their proverbial acting socks up a little... not all the time... but mostly. And really, there's only so good you can sound talking about "Libra solstices", "Tresum", "Aspirants" and "Avatars"...

I was also initially suprised to see that the first season DVDs are rated MA15+, whereas the second was R18+... because initially I was thinking there was a LOT more sex scenes in the first season... but as the Season 2 went on I realised that a) there were a TON more male full frontal shots (read "mostly" flacid penis) and whereas the sex in Season 1 was more "relationship" sex, Season 2 was all about the "recreational" sex (but at least they didn't just throw in a sex scene every other scene for no good reason like Season 1)... but I'll almost guarantee it's the amount of doodle on screen that earned it the R.

Possibly because I watched it all in one hit... but after a while it all seemed far too melodramatic and just plain silly really... and while I think the writing in the first season was weaker than the second, I think the second got "sillier". Or it might have been that they were trying to cover too much storyline... it was a little chaotic for a while there...

But it's a little hard to be objective sometimes when one minute you're rolling your eyes at the cheesy dialogue and questionable acting, and the next you're having to adjust your jeans because the scene suddenly got all naked and sexy...

Season 3 is currently in production in the States, so goodness only knows what that's going to hold... or how long it will be before it's out on DVD and makes it's way all the way over here.

It's a bit like fairy floss (no pun intended)... you know it's bad for you, you know it's going to stop being sweet and delicious and just stick all over everywhere and annoy you... but you keep eating it anyway... I'm not sad I watched it, it was entertaining and somewhat hot and sexy, but it's never going to win an Emmy, much less an Oscar...

yani's rating: 6 perky pecs out of 10