Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds Movie Review

Two years ago when I reviewed Eating Out, I wrote, "You almost want a sequel just to see how hot and heavy it gets when all the characters are finally matched up with their appropriate partners." Well, I got my wish... sort of. Eating Out 2 is obviously a sequel, but it does away with much of the cast of the first film and resets the action for another go-round. Any life lessons learned the last time have quickly evaporated.

Once again we meet Kyle (Jim Verraros), an insecure young gay man who, like all his friends, seems to be spending a few too many years at college pursuing hot couplings rather than a degree. His best friend Tiffani (Rebekah Kochan) is also back, and this hoochie mama with the potty mouth and sex obsession is still looking for her next hookup. Also back for more is Gwen (Emily Brooke Hands), a self-proclaimed "fag hag," all of whose boyfriends turn out to be gay.

Dumped by his latest boyfriend Marc (Brett Chuckerman), Kyle sets his sights on the new guy in town, Troy (Marco Dapper), a buff farm boy with an aw-shucks hick accent who makes extra cash as a nude model for art classes. But is he gay? Kyle, Tiffani, and Gwen all start sniffing around trying to get Troy to swing one way or the other, but he's so worried about his gay tendencies that he decides to join the college's ex-gay society in hopes of purging his impulses. The very fey Kyle decides to play it straight, act like an ex-gay, and join Troy at the meetings in order to get closer to him... and his bulging pecs.

Kyle's phony decision to go straight sets off a string of confused and confusing hookups as each of the horny (and basically amoral) twentysomethings jockeys for position. All along the way, the screenplay gets most of its chuckles from bitchy zingers and off-the-wall metaphors along the lines of "more tense than Star Jones in a training bra." Rimshot!

Eventually the soft-core sex scenes -- most of which, it must be said, are played for laughs rather than heat -- peter out, and there's just enough time left for important life lessons about being honest with yourself and respecting others' feelings. Those may be valuable sentiments, but a more useful film would have taken us to the gym and showed us how all those actors have built such impressive bodies. Acting classes? Maybe. Bench presses? Definitely.

Watch me do my one-armed vertical push-ups.