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Anyone here familiar with The Golden Turkey Awards? It's a 1980 book that Michael Medved and his brother Harry co-wrote back when Michael was known mostly as a bad-movie buff and had not yet become a religious culture warrior. The very first page of this book declares ...
A Challenge To The Reader:... and I have long wondered if the hoax film in question might be Him, the alleged 1974 gay-porn film about Jesus and/or a present-day man who obsesses over him sexually. This is how it is described on page 165, where it is listed as one of the nominees for "The Most Unerotic Concept in Pornography":
Over 425 actual films are described in this book, but one is a complete hoax. Can you find it?
This innovative film, designed exclusively for gay audiences, goes into excruciating detail concerning the erotic career of Jesus Christ. The ads for the film show the face of The Savior (with a cross glistening in one eye) while the headline inquires "Are You Curious About HIS Sexual Life?" Filmmaker Ed D. Louie satisfies that curiosity by showing us that the Son of Man was a voracious homosexual. (After all, why did he spend all that time hanging around with the Apostles?) The central character of the film is actually a young gay male in contemporary America whose sexual obsession with Jesus helps him to understand the "hidden meaning" of the Gospels.And then, on page 168, when it is declared the winner in its category, the Medveds write:
For sheer tastelessness, this film has no equals. In one scene, our homosexual hero goes to his local priest to confess his erotic fixation on Jesus Christ. The priest sits in the confessional, listening to the young man breathlessly elaborating his perverted fantasies, while taking advantage of the situation to reach under his cassock and masturbate grotesquely on camera. This charming episode surely marks one of the absolute low points in the history of American cinema. Those pathetic few who might want to see Him ought to come to the theater dressed in plain, brown paper wrappers, that hopefully cover their eyes along with the rest of their faces.Now, like I say, I have often wondered whether Him might be the hoax film in question, but since it's the one that won the 'Golden Turkey Award' in its category, I kind of assumed it wasn't; that is, I assumed that only one of the also-rans would be the hoax film. The possibility that this film actually existed was given a boost when I came across a reference to it in Roy Kinnard & Tim Davis's Divine Images: A History of Jesus on the Screen, which lists all the Jesus films made up to 1992 and has this to say at the end of the intro on page 18:
Dramatic films that contain only fleeting glimpses of Jesus, but do not otherwise concern themselves with the subject, are also excluded; among them, The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Sparrows (1926). Otherwise unrelated films that use brief appearances by Christ or Christ-like figures merely for shock or satirical effect are not examined; this category includes such diverse titles as L'Age D'Or (1930), Gas-s-s-s (1970), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Devils (1971), Savage Messiah (1972), The Trial of Billy Jack (1974), and The Visitor (1980). Sub-professional, amateur productions like The Sin of Jesus (1961) and Multiple Maniacs (1970) also are excluded. So are animated films such as The Star of Bethlehem (both 1921 and 1969 versions) and pornography like Him (1974) and I Saw Jesus Die (1976).But today I chanced upon this comment at the Snopes urban legend site:
We've been unable to turn up anything to confirm this purported film's existence, however -- we've never found a copy of it, anyone who has seen it, or a review of it, nor have we located any other reference to the film or "filmmaker Ed D. Louie" anywhere other than this one entry in the Golden Turkey Awards book.And this reminded me of how it had always seemed a little suspicious that Him did have one of the shorter write-ups in the Medveds' book, and that it was one of only three award "winners" that did not even have a photo (the others being Rat Fink a Boo Boo and Attack of the Mushroom People -- both of which have IMDB entries, BTW, which Him does not). And I suppose it's possible that Kinnard & Davis's only source of info re: Him, which they evidently felt no desire to track down, was the Medveds' book. Running a Google search for more info, I came across a site that states even more definitively:
Michael Medved, a well-known film reviewer, wrote a book with his brother that was published in 1980 called the "Golden Turkey Awards." It reviewed bad films. Medved claimed that it was a review of over 425 actual films, but that he had included one hoax and asked readers to spot it. The hoax was a review of a non-existent 1974 film called "Him" which supposedly portrayed Jesus as a homosexual. The film never existed.I have no idea if this is something that Medved himself has confirmed in more recent years or if this is a conclusion that the site in question reached for itself.
In any case, I would be interested to know what Medved has to say about this now. I was only 11 or 12 when I got this book as a birthday present from someone in my Sunday School class, and just reading those paragraphs excerpted above bothered me a fair bit at the time. (To this day, I cannot hear the word "cassock" without thinking back to the first time I saw it in this book.) If it turns out Medved was planting those thoughts in minds like mine just as part of some stupid hoax, then I think he's got some 'splaining to do -- especially if he is now promoting himself as some sort of defender of pious Judeo-Christian sensibilities.
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I'm just wondering if he has addressed this anywhere since becoming so overtly religious.
