THE 24TH DAY
Directed & Written by: Tony Piccirillo.
Produced by: Nick Stagliano.
Director of Photography: J. Alan Hostetter.
Edited by: Aaron Mackoff.
Music by: Kevin Manthei.
Released by: Screen Media Films.
Country of Origin: USA. 97 min. Rated: R.
With: James Marsden & Scott Speedman.

Twenty-four days after testing HIV-positive, straight man Tom (Speedman) kidnaps a gay man with whom he once had sex. Tom ties Dan (Marsden) up and threatens to kill him if a test he himself administers on Dan comes back positive. Begun as a scene writer/director Tony Piccirillo wrote for an acting class in the 1990s, the action is contained, like a play, to an apartment, with silent flashbacks to gay bars and Tom's marriage.

It's hard to say what's worse about The 24th Day. Is it the plot, or the seemingly endless dialogue between the men about Hollywood trivia? (Dan engages Tom in the trivia, hoping to coax Tom into letting him go.) Or is it the moralizing dialogue about responsibility and truth? Given the material, the actors manage not to embarrass themselves too much. And there’s no point, really, in debating the issue here. Suffice it to say, the script could have profited from a psychology 101 class or the Clinton/Lewinsky brouhaha - the lesson being that when it comes to sex, people lie, tell half-truths and make up the rules as they go along. The 24th Day is written - overwritten, actually - as though that were a surprise.

Steven Cordova is contributing editor to Film-Forward.com and a poet, whose chapbook, Slow Dissolve, is available from Momotombo Press. He is among those on the May 2004 cover of POZ magazine
May 12, 2004