Hornbill Films Lenses Erotic Thriller

CHICAGO - Hornbill Films began shooting last weekend on a new softcore feature, Our Man in Hong Kong. The James Bond-esque thriller stars Johnny Carvajal as Jake, a disenfranchised Special Forces officer who has been recruited by the Secret Service to find and eliminate the seductive Black Dahlia, a deadly enemy agent who kills with a very personal "secret weapon."

Shot on location in Chicago, Washington D.C. and Hong Kong, the feature is scheduled for a summer release.

Director Toby Ross said he was intrigued by the concept from the beginning.

"There is a whole grey zone that stretches between independent films - or even Hollywood films - on one side and porno on the other," he told GAYVN.com. "This is the ‘Antarctica' of the film world, a very empty world, and we [at Hornbill Films] intend to inhabit it. My experience is that it is much harder to tell a story that is sexual without explicit sex than [it is to produce] a XXX cum-dripping saga. In Our Man in Hong Kong we created a sexual spy thriller in which butch men relate to each other sexually, in  loveless, physical ways embedded in the story.

"Although it is a James Bond-like thriller, the characters are constantly looking for a homoerotic adventure as they roam in the spy world. We have assembled a very masculine and believable cast that can carry this kind of idea without being unintentionally funny, since to me sexuality is one big grey zone where we all - straights, gays and bisexuals - have to live and relate to each other. Some are to the right, some to the left and millions of us are in between. That's the idea behind some of [Hornbill's] product, as in our last [erotic production], Straight Boys Gay Boys. We are not looking for awards. We are looking to entertain."