* (out of four)
If you like homophobia and voiceover you'll love 'F*ckload of Scotch Tape,' Chicago filmmaker Julian Grant's sleazy rip-off of "Brick" and the genre that inspired it. In "Tape," Benji (Graham Jenkins) tempts gay men and beats them up in pursuit of a friend who steals $50,000 from him, eventually, of course, sparking a relationship with a stripper. The only novel idea here is Benji periodically singing along to brooding folk songs, which does nothing to endear or develop an anti-hero that hopefully wasn't this unlikable in Jed Ayres' graphic novel. Grant overstylizes whenever possible and makes Benji narrate everything, including what we can see for ourselves (Example: "Chuck wasn't home," he says inside a clearly empty house). He's constantly spouting faux-hard-boiled comments like, "It's a shit-class world, and I'm a world-class shit" and "Vampires don't have souls, and neither do I." Neither does the movie, plodding noir imitation at its most unpleasant.
See it: 8 p.m. Oct. 18, 9:30 p.m. Oct. 20 ($11-$14), 1 p.m. Oct. 23 ($5)