‘King Cobra’ Review: James Franco Dives Deep Into Gay Porn and Murder
“King Cobra” is as in-your-face explicit a gay movie as has ever been made with recognizable male actors, including producer James Franco, who predictably takes the lion’s share of the most physical sex scenes, and Christian Slater.
Corrigan rises to fame online, which is shown to us in a sexily discreet montage that leaves a lot to the imagination; among those taking notice are Joe (Franco) and his younger lover Harlow (Keegan Allen, “Pretty Little Liars”), who are doing their own lower-rent porn movies.
Franco and Allen kiss and grope each other on screen with intense abandon in their sex scenes, and this intensity is both erotic and also an uneasy signal that their characters are too close to the emotional edge.
In the sequence where Brent turns the camera on Stephen and the older man admits to a lonely and repressed adolescence, Slater hits just the right pitiful note as he says, “Please just make me feel wanted” before coercing Brent into having sex with him.
The sex here is emotionally charged and revealing because Stephen can’t see (or doesn’t want to see) how uncomfortable Brent is with this exchange, but the camera does capture what Brent is feeling, resulting in a rare sex scene that expresses what’s going on with the characters better than any dialogue could.
When Corrigan takes a business meeting with Joe and Harlow in a Japanese restaurant, Kelly wisely lets their initial talk play out in a long take where the camera steadily inches closer to them, an effective stylistic change that lets us know something is about to give or break.
Once we’re off-balance, Kelly films the stabbing death of Stephen in a super-controlled way that separates both characters into totally separate filmic spaces, a near-Hitchcockian montage where we never see the knife enter Stephen’s body but just hear its impact.
The surprising thing about “King Cobra” is that it winds up being a sex-positive movie that’s sympathetic to Corrigan while also poking some gentle, loving fun at him and committed to fully exploring the sadder fates of the three other men who came to their doom in his sunny presence.