Swallowed
Benjamin has a plan; it’s not a good plan, but it’s all he’s got, to get out of the small Maine town where he has grown up and move to Los Angeles and use his good looks and his particular set of skills to establish himself as a big name the adult film industry, gay porn in particular always looking for fresh meat. Enjoying their bittersweet last night out partying, Benji’s best friend Dom also has a plan, and like Benji’s, it is not very good.
Wishing to say goodbye with a substantial gift of cash to help Benji get established, his cousin Dee has set him up with a contact, Alice, for whom Dom will act as a drug mule across the border for a big payoff, except the package is not drugs, it is parasites whose bite has hallucinogenic properties, he is not to be a mule but an incubator, and Alice is not the kind of girl who takes no for an answer when Dom tries to back out of the arrangement.
An occasionally inappropriately hilarious yet grotesque body horror of bad decisions, unwanted intimacy and painful confessions, Swallowed is written and directed by Jamie Marks is Dead’s Carter Smith, starring Monster’s Cooper Koch as Benjamin and Jose Colon as the well-meaning but misguided Dom, stripped of dignity, clothing and pretence as their last night together spirals irreparably out of control.
A rest-room altercation with Michael Shawn Curtis’ “Randy Redneck” leaving Dom with a rupture and their vehicle with flat tyres, Alice (The Neon Demon’s Jena Malone) is forced to render aid, not because it is the right thing to do but to protect her investment, cold and focused as she drives them to the backwoods shack of her equally displeased boss, fortunately for the desperate boys the two goals coinciding, at least initially.
Played by A Nightmare on Elm Street’s iconic scream queen Mark Patton, Rich is a surprise, more dangerous than the coldly predictable Alice, immediately enchanted with Benji’s beauty and acting the eccentric yet hospitable host but never taking his hand off the gun, calling the shots and making demands which Benji tries to twist to his advantage to escape, Patton exuding anger, charm, desire and even paternal kindness as Rich switches from menacing camp to outright monster to embittered soul pining for the sunshine of his youth, jealous of the life Benji is going to have, if he lives.
A power game of manipulation and flirtation, of violations and moments of surprising tenderness and vulnerability as Dom realises his opportunity for honesty and full disclosure with Benjamin is coming to an end, Swallowed will not be to everyone’s tastes and will not appeal to the prudish, at times slow moving and undeniably graphic and specific in the mechanics of the entry and exit of the parasites, Benjamin forced to cast off squeamishness and wash away his sins and the past if he is to become the man whose body and smile will dazzle.
Swallowed is available on the Arrow platform now
