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Michael Gunther, Parker Posey, Alexis Arquette, Raoul O'Connell, Jaie Laplante ... see more see more... , Craig Chester , Michael Waite , James Lyons , Alyssa Wendt

A man pursues his sexual obsessions to their darkest and most dangerous extremes in this gay-themed drama based on a novel by Dennis Cooper. Dennis (Michael Gunther) is a gay man, who as a teenager de... read more read more...veloped a perverse attraction to violent pornography and simulated snuff photographs, which he describes in great detail in a series of letters to his former lover Julian (Jaie Laplante). As Dennis grows older, his fascination with the darker side of the sexual underground grows more intense, and in time he meets Henry (Craig Chester), a masochist who posed for some of the pictures that sparked his interest in S&M. When Dennis learns that Henry was murdered, he weaves the incident into an elaborate fantasy, in which Dennis suffers a painful death in a dungeon of erotic torture. In time, Dennis graduates from violent fantasies to sadistic interludes with a male prostitute (Michael Stock) and eventually plans a series of sexually-oriented murders, concluding with an episode in which Dennis and two collaborators (Parker Posey and James Lyons) drug a young punk (Alexis Arquette) into unconsciousness. After having group sex, Dennis and his cohorts murder the punk. As one might expect, Frisk proved to be highly controversial and received a sharply divided reaction in its screening as the closing night attraction at the 1996 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; some hailed it as a disturbing and iconoclastic masterpiece, while roughly half the audience angrily stormed out of the theater before the film's conclusion. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

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45% liked it

293 ratings

Unrated, 1 hr. 23 min.

Directed by: Todd Verow

Release Date: March 22, 1996

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DVD Release Date: April 5, 2005

Stats: 29 reviews

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Critic Reviews

Emanuel Levy
June 10, 2006
Emanuel Levy, EmanuelLevy.Com

Aiming to explore the extremities of racial and sexual fetishism in the gay world, Frisk exhibits a huge gap between its provocative intent and weak execution level. Full Review

Brian Juergens
April 1, 2005
Brian Juergens, Freeze Dried Movies

Self-loathing has never looked so amateurish...

Dennis Harvey
March 26, 2009
Dennis Harvey, Variety

Click to read the article Full Review

Kevin Thomas
February 14, 2001
Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

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Mick LaSalle
January 1, 2000
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

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Stephen Holden
January 1, 2000
Stephen Holden, New York Times

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Michael Szymanski
September 21, 2005
Michael Szymanski, International Press Academy

No review available.

Marjorie Baumgarten
January 1, 2000
Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle

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January 26, 2006
Time Out

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Shlomo Schwartzberg
June 5, 2002
Shlomo Schwartzberg, Boxoffice Magazine

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