Humpday

Humpday is one of those movies you get surprised by sometimes. My wife almost randomly added it to our Netflix queue, and as we were searching through our Instant Watch section one day we also kinda haphazardly picked it because it was short and sounded funny.

The premise is that two college friends, Ben and Andrew, who've gone their separate ways since school meet up again and when high and drunk decide to make a porno movie with each other and enter it into Seattle's famous "Humpday" festival of independent porn. They say that since they're two straight guys making a porno, it'll be more artistic than any other gay porn out there, because it's "beyond gay". How exactly it's supposed to be artistic just because they're straight is not something they can really articulate, but even when they sober up they stick to their plan. The comedy comes from misunderstandings with what Ben tells his wife Anna that he and Andrew are up to (although she's much smarter than he is and finds out, which adds to the comedy), and the boys' increasing determination/reluctance to carry out their plan. The movie keeps escalating the situation, and I had a feeling it wasn't gonna be the type of movie to shy away from the possibly gay content. As it turns out, in the final hilarious sequence, it's not the movie that's afraid of the gay content, it may be Ben and Andrew.

The movie is very low budget. At a time when Hollywood blockbusters are regularly costing $200 million, Humpday was made for less than $500,000. It has no stars, nearly no money, and we came across it almost by accident, but it was a terrific surprise to my wife and I how much we enjoyed it, and since it was so low budget and underseen, we sorta felt like we were making a discovery that not many others had made. And that's always a great feeling.