"Deli Boys": Pakistani-American brothers learn a secret about their Dad. With a lot of gay characters and some bonus Pakistani d*cks

 

This is just to get your attention.

Deli Boys (2025), a new comedy on Hulu, features two Pakistani-American brothers, studious, hardworking Mir (Asif Ali, left) and irresponsible cokehead Raj (Saagar Shaikh), who find out a secret about their father's business activities after his death.  

I doubt that a tv series written by and starring Pakistani-American guys will have any gay characters, but there's bound to be some beefcake.

Scene 1: I was right.  The brothers chase a guy in his underwear, with a bag over his head, and a bulge in his shorts, out of the deli.

Three days earlier: Baba Dar records a commercial for his investors.  He came to American in 1979 with three dollars in his pocket; he worked at a deli, and lived above the store with nine other guys, with six shirts between us  (we see a photo; four of the guys are indeed shirtless).  Today DarCo owns 40 delis around the Philadelphia area, plus Caca brand Achar (a Pakistani relish).  Next he wants to buy some golf courses.

Scene 2: Cokehead Raj in bed with the Shaman Prairie (yes, that's her name) and a clump of around ten people, mostly women but two other guys.   I'm going to guess that he is straight but curved around the edges. 

 They get up and smoke hashish, and then she applies leaches to his back, a sort of New Age thing.

Meanwhile, Drexel Grad Mir tells his father that he learned a lot about business from him, even more than at Drexel University (which he is very proud of), so he's ready for the top spot in the organization. The Girlfriend comes in and tells him that he's ready to give the speech to his father.  

Next he works out, straining with a triceps pushdown.  

Trainer: "I haven't even put the pin in yet."  Dude is weak, har har. 

The Trainer is played by Calvin Thomas (not the queer theorist, the model).

Scene 3: The guys head to the golf course.  They are arguing over who deserves to become president of DarCo when Dad Baba retires.  He shows up to play golf. 

He is upbraiding them for being immature when a golf ball hits him in the head!  He drops dead.  His Caddy, Matthew, screams

Scene 4: As the brothers put a sheet over their dead Dad, Lucky Auntie bursts in.  She was Dad's business partner for thirty years. 

They ask, "Are you going to take care of us now?"  An odd question for grown men in their 30s, but she agrees.

On to the funeral.  The brothers can't do the Muslim prayers right, embarrassing everyone.  

The Caddy ends with "Amen!", har har, and bursts into tears.  Was he, like, Dad's boyfriend?

At the reception afterwards, Ahmad Uncle (Brian George) and Lucky Auntie spar with each other.  Each thinks that the other is out to undermine them and seize control of the company.

I recall Brian George as Babu on Seinfeld, the one with the gigantic waggling finger, but he has 325 acting credits listed on the IMDB. 

Scene 5: While each brother is petitioning to the DarCo board about why each should be named CEO, the feds raid and start making arrests.  They were investigating Dad for fraud, inside trading, tax evasion, and so on, but he had powerful friends.  Now that he is dead, they are able to act.  Lucky Auntie is led off in handcuffs.

More after the break

Reacher, Episode 3.1: The man-mountain bonds with a gay college boy with a drug dealer dad, and there are plot twists and d*cks

I see that Reacher is in its third season on Amazon Prime. "When retired Military Police Officer Jack Reacher is arrested for a murder he did not commit, he finds himself in the middle of a deadly conspiracy full of dirty cops, shady businessmen, and scheming politicians."

What's the big deal?  "Crime he did not commit" has been a cliche since "The Fugitive" in 1963, and every single movie and tv show has dirty cops.  No way would I consider watching something so trite and......

...um...

...boring....um....

I mean, I can't wait to start watching.  I'm reviewing Episode 3.1, "Persuader"

Recap: Reacher (Alan Ritchson) travels from town to town, helping people with their problems, mostly requiring him to shoot machine guns, kick guys in the balls, and throw them off balconies into trash piles, then take a Trailways bus somewhere else.

Scene 1: Establishing shots of Havenhurst University in Abbotsville, Maine.  Not real places, but they could mean Bowdoin College, the safety school for lots of valedictorians.  Reacher pulls up to the Vinyl Vault downtown, grimaces, and brings his record collection in to sell.

While he's bickering with the shopkeeper, Steve (David Daniel Stewart) drives up in his pick-up truck.  Suspicious, Reacher watches as he deliberately plows into the car, pushes it into a telephone pole, kills the driver, and drags the whimpering college student Richard Beck (Johnny Berthold, below) from the back seat into his truck.

Reacher intervenes and shoots out the tires.  Steve opens fire, but Reacher shoots him in the arm and retrieves the whimpering Richard, loads him into his van, shoots a cop ("I didn't know -- I thought he was pulling a gun"), and zooms away, with more cops in hot pursuit.  The campus police?  Can they even make arrests?

Scene 2: A well choreographed chase, with a lot of sudden turns and smashed cars -- the staging must have cost a fortune.  They stop so Reacher can steal a new car.   He tells Richard to call for a ride; "tell them you're in shock and can't remember what I looked like." 

But Richard wants more help; the kidnappers could still be around.  "No.  I'm a drifter who used an unlicensed gun to kill a cop.  I gotta disappear."

"At least take me home. My dad's rich, and can help you disappear."

"Nope."

"Please?" Offer to let him screw you.

"Well, ok." 

Back story: Richard was kidnapped before, five years ago.  Dad wouldn't pay the ransom until the kidnappers cut off his ear. 

Scene 3: Establishing shot of Richard's huge Federal-style mansion, on a rocky coast.  Wait -- I swear I hear the "Dark Shadows" theme. Is this Collinwood?  Is Richard like the grandson of Barnabas Collins?

Richard tells Paulie, the hot security guard (Olivier Richters, the Dutch Giant), that it's ok, Reacher is a friend, but Paulie doesn't believe him.  Well, he could be a kidnapper.   

Reacher doesn't want to submit to a search or get his gun confiscated, but Richard bats his eyes and says "Pretty please?  For me?"  

More after the break

Shane Harper: the "Good Luck Charlie" and "God's Not Dead" guy shows his dick surprisingly often

 I wanted to research Shane Harper, the extremely well-hung drug dealer  Junior on Hightown (2020-21).  He's distraught over his girlfriend's death, so he makes some homophobic comments to two leather daddies, hoping that they will kill him.  They just beat him up; he dies of a drug overdose later.

Shane only has six photos on his Instagram, and two on his X, including this one: he getting a spray-on tan,  with the caption: "this is probably the only nude photo I'll ever post."

Don't believe him.  He posts a lot of nude photos.

So who is this guy?

According to the IMDB, he was born in San Diego, and began dancing, singing, and acting in community productions at the age of nine.   He played dancers in Re-Animated, High School Musical 2, Dance Revolution, and Dancing on Sunset.

Then he bounced arund the Disney Channel for a few years, guest starring in Zoey 101 and  Wizards of Waverly Place, and starring in Good Luck, Charlie as Teddy's boyfriend (Teddy is a girl; so is Charlie)

He released an album in 2011,  so I check out the heterosexism: the number of songs that shout "girl! girl! girl!," thus proclaiming that every relationship is heterosexual and invalidating the desires and relationships of LGBT fans.

Not much heterosexism.   But then look what happens:

God's Not Dead, 2014, starrs right-wing nutjob Kevin Sorbo as an evil college professor who forces his students to submit signed statements affirming that "God is dead."  This is utterly ridiculous. College professors don't force students to accept any point of view. They aren't allowed to.

Besides, The Death of God  (1961) was a book complaining that modern society had lost its sense of transcendence, the magical in everyday life.  The author didn't mean that the actual Supreme Being was dead.  And it was 50 years ago.  Why are fundamentalists still upset about it?

Shane plays the student who bravely challenges the evil prof and ends up proving that God is, in fact, still alive.

He returns in God's Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness (2018), in which a Christian pastor is tormented, and his church burned down, by an army of atheists and liberals.  No philosophy professors?  

OMG, that is jaw-droppingly idiotic. 

In a 2011 interview, Shane states that he only takes "wholesome" and "uplifting" roles. For instance, he would be ok with playing a gay guy, as long as the movie establishes that being gay is wrong, and has him give up the lifestyle.  

That was over a decade ago. Let's see what Shane has been up to lately.

Besides posting nude photos, I mean.

More after the break.

Agent Elvis: McConaughey as the King, Cavalero as a drug dealer with a bulge, and Gary Coleman as a dick with a dick

 Agent Elvis (2023) features Elvis Presley (Matthew McConaughey) interacting with some of the real people and events of the 1960s, like Timothy Leary, Howard Hughes, and the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, but as a secret agent, working for the mysterious Commander (Don Cheadle).  Episode 1.3 has a Tony Cavalero sighting.

While filming A Change of Habit (1969), Elvis hears about the Moon Landing, and, upset that he's not going, decides to take out his frustration on some drug dealers.   His assistant Bobby Ray (Johnny Knoxville) tells him that Flyboy (Tony Cavalero), who hangs out in the studio parking lot, selling maps to movie stars' homes, actually sells cocaine.   His handler tells him that they still have scenes to shoot, but he rushes down to the parking lot.

Why is Flyboy dressed as a pimp to sell cocaine?  He explains that drug dealing and pimping have an intersecting clientele. 

Who is his cocaine supplier?  Flyboy doesn't want to say, because "snitches get stitches," so Elvis steals his clothes, ties him up in the back seat of his car, and sics his ape companion, Scatter, on him.  Faced with having his head bit off, Flyboy tells him.  

With Flyboy trapped in the trunk, Elvis enters a sleazy apartment building.  His handler appears again, ordering him to get back to the studio to film the remaining scenes. Besides, taking down drug dealers won't get him on the Moon Mission: "No matter what you do, it's not going to turn you into an astronaut." 

Elvis doesn't listen: he beats up the drug wholesaler and his henchmen, but Scatter kills them before they can tell him about the big cocaine shipment coming in.

More after the break

"Reefer Madness,": Marijuana hysteria, demonic bulges, a dinner date with Satan, and Christian Campbell's cock

 

I've shown many classes the 1936 film Reefer Madness.  It was originally released as Tell Your Children, a cautionary tale about the dangers of marijuana.

There's a strong gay subtext: drug dealer Ralph (Dave O'Brien) sees high schooler Jimmy (Warren McCollum), murmurs "Nice!", and practically licks his lips in anticipation.  

Wrangling an introduction, he says "Nice to meet youuuuuu!" with a lascivious leer, then invites Jimmy to the soda shop, where he will try to get him hooked on the psychosis-inducing weed in a parallel to how gay men were accused of recruiting boys.

After Jimmy is tricked into taking a puff of "the evil weed," he is plagued by instant addiction, psychotic rambling, uncontrollable sexual desire (the most horrifying to audiences of the day ), drunk driving, and finally murder.  It seems laughably sensationalistic today, but in fact Harry J. Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1963, devoted his entire career to feeding the flames of the panic.  As late as the 1950s, marijuana was considered more dangerous than heroin. 

The movie was placed on the exploitation circuit, officially meant to educate viewers about the "dangers" of the practice, but really drawing crowds interested in gawking at the degradation. In the 1970s it was discovered by the hippie art-house crowd, who would watch while high for an ironic twist.  

In 1998, Reefer Madness: The Musical appeared off-Broadway, eliminating the redundant characters and upping the camp.  Christian Campbell (left) played Jimmy, lured from his "wholesome" heterosexual chastity by drug dealer Jack (Robert Torti, top photo) and cohort Ralph (John Kassir).  

In addition to the gay subtext, there was a lot of beefcake, with the super-muscular Jimmy stripped down to his underwear and a chorus of semi-nude male and female devils.

Film beefcake, bulges, and frontals after the break