Flexing with Monty [2010 DVDRip]
Director: John Albo
Writer: John Albo (written by)
Genre: Comedy | Drama | Horror | Mystery
Plot: Monty is a
bodybuilder. His gym is the very heart of his existence. He is
aggressively male, outrageously narcissistic and a bigot...
"Flexing
With Monty" has had a curious history -- shooting commenced in 1994,
then was complicated by budgetary woes and the deaths of a leading actor
and producer before assembly wrapped quite recently. Writer-director
John Albo's first (and to date only) feature is a definite curiosity,
though its muddled allegory and lack of a clear point grow quickly
tiresome. Heavy on talk and thin on plot, the stagy piece seems designed
mostly as a showcase for the physique of ex-boxer Trevor Goddard.
Simultaneous with its DVD release, the pic is pursuing midnight
screenings.
Monty (Goddard, who later won some fame as a villain
in the 1995 "Mortal Kombat" movie and an ongoing role on TV's "JAG,"
before dying of an apparently accidental drug overdose in 2003) and
little bro Bertin (Rudi Davis) live together, their parents long dead.
Though Monty is a phys-ed teacher, and brainiac "weakling" Bertin a
biology grad student (though Davis is scarcely less ripped), the pic
never leaves their soundstage-like lair, which consists primarily of one
big room in which big bro endlessly exercises and poses amid gym
equipment that includes a sort of man-sized hamster wheel.
Other
than bickering -- Monty from the viewpoint of the testosterone-induced
bully, Bertin from a sensitive "intellectual" one -- almost nothing
happens. Albo stokes the homoerotic frisson between them, though any
enjoyment auds might get from that is spoiled by an offensive sequence
in which Monty, as an ostensible hustler, visits a drug-addled gay man
(Mitch Hara). A female prostitute (Michelle Zeitlin) gets warmer
treatment, while Sally Kirkland shows up as a nun with a hidden
identity(not that this bars her from considerable silicone-enhanced
nudity). Some of this is supposed to be funny, but it's all pretty
sophomoric.