SAN FRANCISCO—Adding another title to the NakedSword catalog, the self-styled “Netflix of Gay Porn” is now offering consumers the indie short film Sauna the Dead: A Fairy Tale. NakedSword Film Works now has over 18 shorts and features in its library.
Sauna the Dead offers a fresh take on the gay bathhouse experience. It’s a familiar scene for anyone who’s ever been to a bathhouse very late at night or early in the morning: just a few people hanging around, and those who are still there are looking for that last chance at getting lucky. It can be a little creepy, with everyone more hungry, thirsty, eager to strike without any regard for humanity. Almost as if they were zombies …
A British production that blurs the line between indie film and pornography, Sauna the Dead imagines what would happen if you were stuck in a bathhouse, late at night, when a zombie outbreak occurs. It’s a hilarious, horrific and surprisingly heartfelt tale full of twists and turns that ultimately asks us to be kinder to each other in our sexual spaces.
Director Tom Frederic also stars as the horny Jacob, who visits a local gay sauna in London. When he’s walking around, he finds the other visitors less than appealing and turns down guy after guy. But after an outbreak starts turning people into zombies, Jacob must team up with one of the men he's rejected and find a way to escape before it's too late.
Sauna the Dead combines two very different types of horror tales—the classic Night of the Living Dead-style zombie movie and A Christmas Carol—to create a brilliant, scary and sexy exploration of the often predatory nature of cruising. The movie reminds viewers that their sexual prey are real people and not just pieces of meatSauna the Dead: A Fairy Tale premiered at the 2016 BFI Flare LGBT Film Festival in London before making its U.S. debut at Frameline in San Francisco, which is where NSFW curator Adam Baran first caught wind of it.
Baran says of the short, “This is one of the smartest, funniest, and most ingenious queer shorts I’ve seen in years. It depicts an experience any hardened cruiser can relate to—the equally scary and silly nature of cruising in sex spaces like bathhouses and sex clubs, and by extension sex apps—while also suggesting that perhaps changing our behavior and being nicer could literally save our lives. It’s a thrilling horror comedy, a fabulous ‘fairy tale’ and a brilliant morality play all rolled into one. Plus, Mr. Frederic, the film’s director and star, is a seriously sexy fellow.”
This commentary on gay culture is now playing on NakedSword.com.
