Standing Up to Bullies: a Tedious Route

Allesandro De Gaetano’s “Butch Camp” isn’t very butch, and it’s lousy as camp. It is a terrifically tedious, talky business about a prissy, pedantic Chicago bank credit manager (Paul Denniston) who signs up for a course designed to toughen up effeminate gays so they can stand up to bullies, straight and otherwise.

The course is run by a shrill, unfunny dominatrix-type (Judy Tenuta) with a vaguely German accent. Self-assertion classes for gays sounds like an intriguing idea, but Tenuta mainly just piles more humiliation onto those who already feel humiliated.

If Tenuta’s Samantha Rottweiler is a minus, so is Denniston’s Matt Grabowski. One of Sam’s assignments is that her pupils must hang out in a sports bar, and when Matt does, he attracts both Jordan Roberts’ Janet and Janet’s boyfriend Rod (Jason Terisi).

Denniston is frenetic and game, but it totally defies credibility that Matt would attract Janet, let alone macho Rod. The problem is that Matt is so thoroughly self-absorbed in his misery in being a picked-on lonely gay man that it’s impossible to imagine him attracting anyone. (His only friend is a bitchy chorus boy with a really off-putting view of women.)

There’s no chemistry between Matt and Janet and even less between him and Rod, despite a sensitive, unself-conscious performance by Terisi. What little edge the film has comes from Rod’s constantly confounding the stereotype Matt holds of him as a blue-collar Italian American. However, when it comes to movies about gays and hunky Italian American guys, “Kiss Me, Guido” is the better bet.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: much crude language, much sexual innuendo and sexual situations.

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‘Butch Camp’

Paul Denniston: Matt Grabowski

Judy Tenuta: Samantha Rottweiler

Jason Terisi: Rod Cazzone

Jordan Roberts: Janet

Bil Ingraham: Danny

A Billingsgate Productions release. Writer-director Allesandro De Gaetano. Producers Timothy E. Sabo and Steven Gellman. Executive producer Gary Metzger. Cinematographer C. Brett Webster. Editors Amy Harvey and Jeanne Bonansinga. Music Conrad Pope. Production designer Rick Paul. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Cineplex Beverly Center, La Cienega at Beverly Boulevard, (310) 652-7760, and the University 6, 4245 Campus Drive, Irvine, (714) 854-8811.