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Gay clichés are hotter than ever these days, as witness Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. These are demeaning stereotypes, unlike the demonizing image of the gay thrill-killer established back in the ’20s by the Leopold & Loeb murder. That was embodied again by Michael Alig, the notorious New York City "club kid" and party promoter in the early ’90s who murdered his friend and drug dealer, Angel Menendez, sawed off his legs, put him in a box, and set him floating down the river. For months Alig bragged about the crime, even confessing it on TV, until he was finally arrested. Starting from the blackly comic and surreal memoir Disco Bloodbath, which was written by Alig’s close friend James St. James, filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato trivialize the story (they had previously made a documentary with the same title in 1999) in this "dramatization," a misconceived fusion of Sid and Nancy and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Grotesquely miscast as Alig, Macaulay Culkin prances and twitters in a hideous imitation of a screaming queen, and Seth Green is no better as St. James, adding an irritating giggle to his embarrassing camp repertoire. The film grows darker as Alig’s fortunes decline and his drug intake increases, but the directors’ relentless, self-conscious superficiality ensures that we’ll get no glimpse into his soul or lack thereof. The costumes by Michael Wilkinson and Kabuki are a scream, but otherwise this is definitely not fabulous. (98 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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