Ryan Phillippe knows his audience. 

In 2014’s Catch Hell, his sole writing-directing credit, Phillippe plays Reagan Pierce, a liberally exaggerated version of himself. Down on his luck, the emotionally beleaguered Pierce accepts a lesser acting job in a Louisianian bayou town. Unfortunately, on the first day of filming, he is intercepted by two local men. Kidnapping him, they hustle him into a swamp ridden shack where they begin torturous games. Trying to break him mentally while simultaneously destroying his reputation via online shenanigans, the duo soon escalate matters into Straw Dogs territory.

As the shackled Pierce is continually bloodied, degraded and beaten, the audience (rightly) assumes that retribution will eventually be in order. Thus, we have the male equivalent of the rape-revenge film here. This becomes especially obvious once it is revealed that Junior (Stephen Louis Grush), one of his dimwitted captors, has sexual feelings for Pierce. Of course, this budding attraction first arose when Junior watched Pierce in action in a sexually charged teen drama, referencing Phillippe’s own work in Cruel Intentions. As my opening statement attests, this plot point proves that the actor is very aware of how much his portrayal of Sebastian Valmont effected his gay fans in their youth. 

Interestingly, these circumstances put Phillippe’s character in the same position as Camille Keaton in I Spit on Your Grave and Matilda Lutz in Revenge (among countless others). As the increasingly frenzied Junior tries to rape Pierce, Phillipe and Grush are exposed, both emotionally and physically, entering into vulnerable positions usually reserved just for female starlets. 

This attribute supplies Catch Hell with a sort of significance, making it a cultural oddity with some spark behind it. Occasionally feeling draggy and drawn out, there are enough scenes of essential weirdness here, particularly a bizarre film within a film during the closing credits, to make this of interest to cinema buffs. At the very least, the copious views of the backsides of Phillippe & Grush in the project’s most notorious scene will give those who like that sort of thing plenty of penetrative thought.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

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