If — as HereTV founder Paul Colichman says on the gay cable station’s website — the gay vampire serial The Lair was intended to “reclaim the horror genre for gay audiences,” it might have been helpful if the writers, director, or anyone involved with the show had ever watched a horror movie before making it.
Actually, anyone who’s seen Interview with the Vampire or Buffy knows that the reclaiming-the-horror-genre -for-gay-audiences ship has already sailed and had gay sex at every port.
What’s more, where gay vampires should be sexy, dangerous, and at least a little fabulous, The Lair instead gives us bland vampires whose greatest ambition appears to be running an underground sex club where guys wearing leather straps have softcore orgies.
Yawn.
Is leather really the freakiest thing the writers could come up with?
The Lair’s plot centres around gay journalist David Moretti as he looks into a string of strange gay murders and is tipped off about a gay club called — you guessed it — The Lair, that might have been connected to the case. There, he finds a lot of soft-core sex, but nothing interesting, until head vampire Peter Stickles mistakenly takes Moretti to be the reincarnation of the vampire who created him.
Why do the vampires run a gay sex club? Boredom? To lure in victims? Isn’t that a bit obvious? And wouldn’t it be more appropriate — and make more sense — for their victims to be straight men?
How many vampires are there? What else do they do? How often do they kill? Why should I care? Since the vampires never appear to actually do anything, the stakes are incredibly low.
I’ll be charitable with the poor cinematography and softcore-level dialogue, but in order for this show to work, it really needs to either be a lot more camp or a lot more scary.
Preferably both.
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